Claude on Question 28, Sep 14

Stripe — for most businesses asking this question.

The reason is that the population of people who ask "Adyen or Stripe?" skews heavily toward startups, SaaS, marketplaces, and mid-market online businesses, and for that group Stripe wins on almost every axis that matters:

• •Self-serve onboarding. You can be taking payments in an afternoon. Adyen is sales-led, with a real underwriting process and historically a volume floor.
• •Developer experience and docs. Stripe's are genuinely best-in-class; Adyen's are workable but noticeably more enterprise-flavored and less forgiving.
• •Adjacent products. Billing/subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Radar for fraud, Tax, Issuing, Terminal — all reasonably well integrated. Adyen covers much of this too, but you'll build more yourself.
• •Ecosystem. More third-party integrations, more engineers who've already used it, more Stack Overflow answers at 2am.

Switch to Adyen when the economics flip. Adyen is a direct acquirer with interchange++ pricing, so the cost curve is much better at scale — Stripe's headline ~2.9% + 30¢ is expensive once you're processing serious volume, and negotiating it down only goes so far. Roughly, Adyen starts making sense when:

• •You're processing somewhere north of ~$50–100M/year (the exact crossover depends on your card mix, geography, and what deal each will cut you).
• •You're doing omnichannel retail across multiple countries — Adyen's unified online + in-person + local acquiring story is stronger, and local acquiring meaningfully improves authorization rates in Europe and Asia.
• •You have a payments team that can absorb a heavier integration in exchange for control and basis points.

That's why Adyen's logo wall is Uber, Spotify, McDonald's, H&M — and Stripe's is thousands of companies you've heard of once.

One caveat: pricing and volume thresholds at both companies shift, and Stripe has gotten more aggressive on enterprise deals, so if you're near the crossover, get quotes from both rather than trusting my numbers.