Claude on Question 28, Sep 28

Stripe, if I have to pick one blind.

The reason is that most people asking this question are somewhere below the threshold where Adyen makes sense. Stripe you can sign up for yourself and be charging cards the same day. Adyen doesn't really do self-serve — you talk to a salesperson, and historically they've wanted to see something like €100k+/month in volume before they're interested. That alone decides it for a lot of businesses.

Beyond access, Stripe's advantage is breadth of product: Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Tax, Radar, Terminal. The APIs and docs are genuinely best-in-class, and the hiring pool of people who've used it is enormous. For SaaS and subscription businesses especially, Stripe Billing has no real Adyen equivalent — with Adyen you'd typically bolt on Chargebee or Recurly.

Where Adyen clearly wins, and I'd switch my answer:

• •High volume. Adyen prices at interchange++ with a small fixed per-transaction fee. Compared to Stripe's blended 2.9% + 30¢, the savings at scale are large enough to fund an integration team. This is why Uber, Spotify, and eBay are on Adyen.
• •Omnichannel retail. One platform for in-store terminals and online, with unified reporting. Adyen was built for this; it's Stripe's weaker flank.
• •Global, especially Europe and APAC. Adyen holds acquiring licenses directly in most of its markets, which tends to mean better local authorization rates and deeper local payment method coverage (iDEAL, Boleto, Alipay, etc.).
• •You want a direct acquirer rather than an aggregator, for control or account-stability reasons.

Rough heuristic: under roughly $10–20M/year in card volume, Stripe. Well above that, with international or physical-retail exposure, get Adyen on the phone.