Claude on Question 27, Sep 29

Stripe, if I have to pick one — because it's the right answer for the large majority of businesses asking this question.

Why Stripe wins by default

• •Developer experience and docs are the best in the industry. This isn't a soft benefit; it translates directly into shipping payments in days instead of quarters, and into fewer engineers maintaining them.
• •The surrounding product suite is much deeper. Billing/subscriptions, invoicing, Tax, Radar for fraud, Issuing, and especially Connect for marketplaces and platforms. With Adyen you'd build or buy several of those separately.
• •You can just start. Self-serve signup, no minimum volume, no sales cycle.
• •Ecosystem gravity. Almost every SaaS tool, accounting system, and contractor you hire already knows Stripe.

Where Adyen is genuinely the better choice

• •High volume. Adyen is an acquirer itself rather than sitting on top of one, and it prices interchange++ with a thin fixed markup. Past roughly $10–50M/year in processing, the savings can be large enough to dominate every other consideration.
• •Omnichannel retail. If you have physical stores plus e-commerce plus an app, Adyen's unified commerce platform — one contract, one reporting stack, one view of the shopper — is materially better than Stripe's. This is why McDonald's, and similar retailers use it.
• •Complex international footprint. Adyen tends to have stronger local acquiring and local payment method coverage in Europe and APAC, which shows up as higher authorization rates.
• •You have a payments team. Adyen rewards sophisticated operators who will tune routing, retries, and 3DS. It's less forgiving if you want sensible defaults.

The decision rule: if you're a startup, a SaaS company, a marketplace, or doing under ~$10M/year online, choose Stripe and don't overthink it. If you're an enterprise retailer with stores in multiple countries, or processing nine figures, run a real RFP — Adyen will probably win it, and you should also look at Checkout.com and Braintree.

One caveat worth knowing: whichever you choose, avoid deep coupling to their proprietary objects if you can. Companies that later want to add a second processor for redundancy or negotiating leverage often find Stripe's convenience products are the hardest part to unwind.