Claude on Question 28, Sep 30

Stripe — if I have to pick one with no context about you.

Why Stripe wins as the default:

• •You can start today. Self-serve signup, best-in-class docs and APIs, and you'll have payments working in an afternoon. Adyen still expects a sales conversation and generally wants meaningful volume before it's interested.
• •Product breadth. Subscriptions/billing, tax calculation and remittance, marketplace payouts (Connect), fraud tooling, invoicing, card issuing. If you're a SaaS or a platform, Stripe covers things you'd otherwise buy from three vendors.
• •Ecosystem. Nearly every SaaS tool, accounting system, and no-code platform has a Stripe integration. Hiring someone who already knows Stripe is easy.

Where I'd flip to Adyen:

• •You're processing large volume (roughly eight figures a year and up). Adyen's interchange++ pricing gets materially cheaper than Stripe's blended ~2.9% + 30¢, and at scale a few dozen basis points is real money.
• •You're omnichannel retail — physical stores plus online. Adyen's unified commerce stack (single platform for terminals, ecommerce, and reporting) is genuinely best in class, which is why Nike, McDonald's, and H&M use it.
• •You're truly global and care about authorization rates. Adyen holds acquiring licenses across many regions and connects directly to the card schemes, so local acquiring and smart routing tend to squeeze out higher approval rates. At scale, a 1% auth-rate improvement dwarfs any pricing difference.

The short version: Stripe optimizes for speed of building; Adyen optimizes for cost and performance at scale. Most companies asking this question aren't yet at the scale where Adyen's advantages pay for the added integration effort — so start with Stripe, and revisit when your processing fees become a line item your CFO complains about.

One caveat worth knowing regardless of choice: both are full-stack processors, and migrating later is real work (card vaults can be transferred between PCI-compliant providers, but re-integration isn't trivial). If you already know you're heading toward high-volume physical retail, it's reasonable to go straight to Adyen and skip the migration.