
Ask HN: Stripe or Braintree? - david90
Any stance on choosing which in your SaaS &#x2F; e-commerce?
======
davismwfl
You can search HN and find this question many times.

My 2 cents, I don't trust any company owned by Paypal as Paypal has a very
strange, aggressive and non-transparent and inflexible process to holding
funds from businesses, charities etc (even after providing all the extra
"evidence" they ask for).

Stripe has a lot of advantages, API being a huge one. I have heard of a few
people that complain about delays in responses from them, but at least for me
I have never had that. In fairness too, 99% of the time the answers I have
needed are in their documentation.

If I were you, no matter who you choose to integrate, I'd encapsulate it
behind your own payment "service" so that even if you have to switch or you
need to add more then one (highly recommended), then you can. Some will argue
this is overkill, but I have done a lot of payment integrations, with specific
banks, First Data and Stripe, Paypal etc. Having it encapsulated means a
little more design but a lot less breakage and lets you minimize risk if a
vendor decides to shut you down or freeze funds etc.

IMO if you are accepting payments you should already have encapsulated your
payment vendor, as a real risk to business continuity exists if they decide to
freeze your ability to charge or like Paypal freeze funds during charge back
windows etc.

~~~
asadlionpk
Dumb question, wouldn't rolling a wrapper over existing payment service also
require me to store credit cards myself somewhere so I can easily switch
integration later? If so, isn't that risky.

~~~
mgkimsal
gentle plug - spreedly is a service that handles this for you. one of the guys
in our coworking space uses this for his service, and it allows his customers
to be able to swap processors relatively easily, as spreedly acts as a middle-
man secure vault to hold that info away from any one particular service.

there may be other services that do something similar, but if you're concerned
about switching services, and don't want to have all your customers reinput
billing info, spreedly (or similar) would probably be worth investigating.

~~~
brianwawok
So you are spending a few $100 to a few $1000 a month in case you need to
switch payment gateways down the road? I am not getting the business model.

~~~
mgkimsal
Or... you need to support multiple, and they might change?

They support something like 90+ gateways around the world. Not everyone will
necessarily need that flexibility.

But on the topic of switching....

How much is it worth to you to be able to switch without losing any recurring
revenue? If you're OK with a potentially large portion of your recurring
billing going away because you want or need to switch gateways, DIY is fine.

Again, not a direct user (though I've tested their API for a project), but I
have colleagues using it, and for one in particular, the value it brings both
in breadth of processors and potential for switching is extremely valuable to
him (and his clients).

~~~
brianwawok
Ya this is tricky.

You can switch providers in a over time fashion by sending all new people to a
new provider, and maybe sending out an "update your details" to existing
people. If any existing users take action, move them over. If not keep billing
on the old platform.

How often do you honestly need to switch gateways though? Most companies do it
0-1 times in the first 10 years of business I would expect.

------
skylark
I currently work at a medium sized startup which processes ~100 million
dollars / year. We offer both Stripe and PayPal.

The vast majority of our users prefer PayPal (80%+). For one particular
product we had to roll out using Stripe only, the number one customer service
request we had was to provide PayPal as an option. Subscription numbers rose
by over 50% overnight when including it as a choice (literally tens of
thousands of people signed up after the change).

Internationally, PayPal seems like the de facto choice for making online
purchases. In addition, outside of the Bay Area tech bubble, I believe people
in the states are simply more comfortable with using PayPal over Stripe.

While PayPal gets a lot of hate, I'd think long and hard before deciding not
to offer it as a payment processor. It's possible that you're leaving a
significant amount of money on the table.

~~~
Silhouette
Interesting observations, thanks. We've been wondering about a similar thing
for a small business we run that uses Stripe and sometimes gets requests from
potential customers about PayPal.

My biggest concern with the latter is that if you want a vault+token system to
avoid the serious PCI DSS hassles, PayPal seems to keep changing its mind
about what the different options are: every time I've looked for quite a few
years now, it seems like there are always several different things that each
do (a different) 50-75% of what we're looking for, without any way to get the
degree of control you have with some of the other services.

It's not like we have weird, exotic requirements, but we do want the
flexibility to do things like moving a customer from one plan to another if
they upgrade/downgrade, or reducing their payments temporarily or permanently
as a result of a promotional offer, without them having to effectively sign up
again with the payment service every time. Do you have any related issues with
your startup, and if so, would you mind saying a bit about how you handled
them with the different payment services you use?

~~~
silverlight
I think the best thing to do with PayPal if you're doing an ongoing
subscription with different plan levels or addons, is to use Pre-Approved
Payments. This basically allows you to get a PayPal token which you can use
like a Stripe token -- that is, you can tell PayPal "here's this token, I need
to charge it $4.99" and they will do so anytime you ask.

As you might expect, they watch companies using this type of API very closely
so obviously don't use abuse it. But we've been using it from around a year
now with Roll20 an d have had great success with it. It allows our customers
to link their PayPal account to their Roll20 account one time, and then buy
subscriptions or digital one-off content without needing to log into PayPal
again or anything like that, just as if they had a stored credit card on file
with our Stripe integration.

The benefit from the consumer side is that you can log into your PayPal
account at any time, and see exactly when and how much you've been charged
over the life of the relationship, plus end the relationship on the PayPal
side with one click. So it's really a win-win I think.

Note that we also do offer using a regular PayPal checkout flow for one-off
content if you're not a subscriber, but as soon as someone wants to get on a
subscription plan we have them do the pre-approved payments agreement with us.

------
nickjj
At face value Stripe's API is about a billion times better (at least it was a
year ago when I looked into using both).

I ultimately went with Stripe because I couldn't stand Braintree's API. So
even with getting $50,000 at 0% revenue sharing and having PayPal support I
still went with Stripe.

My condition was a bit different than yours tho. Most of my market had credit
cards and it was an expensive item ($200). Part of PayPal's value is it's
great for impulse purchases, so for an e-commerce site I recommend you
integrate with them just because it will provide you more revenue in the end.

~~~
toomanythings4
Totally agree with this. Braintree will save you a little money but their
documentation is horrible; some of the worst I've ever seen. Their email tech
support can be responsive and somewhat good but I feel like I have to email
them about every little thing cause I can't find the answer in their
disconnected documentation.

~~~
nickjj
Also Braintree's registration process was crazy when it came time to move past
their sandbox and accept real payments.

They wanted so much personal information including my full social security #
(not just the last 4), copy of my driver's license and a copy of a recent
utility bill.

Then on top of that I got questioned because I don't have any credit (I
purposely made a life choice not to use credit cards), so they demanded 3
months of my most recent bank statements.

It took days of this, combined with struggling with their documentation until
I just gave up and went with Stripe. Never looked back since.

Stripe's registration process was painless and automated. They also requested
the bare minimum to accept payments directly to my bank account. It was a
flawless experience.

~~~
joosters
_Then on top of that I got questioned because I don 't have any credit (I
purposely made a life choice not to use credit cards), so they demanded 3
months of my most recent bank statements._

That's not Braintree's fault. In fact, that's them being sensible. The problem
is that having no credit records makes you harder to tell apart from a
fraudulent user.

~~~
nickjj
Yeah but Stripe just asked me for my bank account number and last 4 digits of
my social.

There was no background check and having to send over copies of various bills,
statements, license, etc..

I felt like Stripe requested the least amount of info to legally accept
payments where as Braintree requested a million things to build up some type
of profile that they'll benefit from later.

You know, it's like the guy who sends you to a form where you need to fill out
4 pages of crap when in reality all he needs is your name to perform the
service you're requesting.

~~~
ianhawes
Ultimately they're both going to want the same information. If you had started
processing more than, say, $10K per day, Stripe would freeze your account and
demand the same information. The difference being that Braintree wanted that
information upfront and without the stress of frozen funds at risk.

~~~
nickjj
I can't speak from experience but I doubt Stripe would just freeze everything
and demand my full social security number instead of the last 4 they
requested.

If they ask for bank statements and other pieces of info, that's fine. The
user experience is just better with Stripe because they know 99.999999% of
people won't be doing 10k+/day.

------
fujtech
The only thing I will add about braintree vs stripe is that they are both
aggregators that aggressively underwrite using algorithms. This means they are
taking the risks upfront without full due diligence and then when any
unexpected activity occurs (high ticket or high volume), your funds can be
potentially held for a long time.

Other credit card processing companies may not be able to get you signed up in
5 minutes, but they follow a more traditional process of validating your
business and documentation that gives you a more robust foundation for running
transactions without problems.

Both of the vendors above however have extremely user friendly documentation
and platforms and fast onboarding times. I would recommend them for startups.

Disclosure, I work for Fattmerchant, a fintech startup / payment processor.

------
buro9
Need more information.

What is your price point?

Do you need to be able to manually bill? (i.e. for Enterprise and contract
managed sales rather than self-serve... the difference being: invoicing,
purchase orders)

Is this all subscription stuff, or are you doing one-off?

Does your market care about PayPal or is it all credit card?

You could probably boil it down to: If you care about PayPal then go
Braintree, otherwise go Stripe.

But it's not as easy as that, something one can only learn through experience
is which gateway will bill more transactions for exactly the same users and
subscriptions? And yes, there will be a difference as banks treat different
requestors differently, having different fraud profiles, etc.

It's so incredibly complex a question, that it needs vastly more information
to answer.

But if you're early days, and cannot answer the questions fully, then just
decide whether you think you care about PayPal and if not go Stripe to
simplify everything.

Oh, and whatever you do... abstract away the payments and subscription stuff.
Everyone changes their payments provider at some point, just put it all in one
neat place so you can reduce the footprint of it for the time being.

------
Joe8Bit
Be sure to be aware of country support.

HN is very US centric, but if you have plans for wide EU coverage for instance
they can both pose challenges. When I looked recently Stripe was moving at a
far more aggressive pace to comprehensive coverage in the region.

Neither have very good Asian/South American coverage.

However, with Braintree's Paypal integration it makes the above point moot (to
a certain extent anyway).

------
ericcholis
I've used Braintree for about a year in a mid-sized ecommerce situation. Not a
single complaint to be had. I find the API very easy to work with, and the
support to be very responsive. They have a nice drop-in payment form with
built-in support for PayPal.

On the surface level, Stripe seems to offer more in the way of open source and
integrations (POS, Analytics,
etc..[https://stripe.com/docs/integrations](https://stripe.com/docs/integrations))

~~~
hellomoto998
How are Stripe integrations surface?

------
ngrilly
I tried both, starting with Braintree. Even signing the contract was an issue
with Braintree. I eventually went with Stripe, immediately when they launched
their beta in France. The onboarding process was straightforward. The API, the
documentation and the dashboard are great. I would choose Stripe again without
any hesitation.

------
stephenr
Isn't Braintree owned by PayPal now?

I personally wouldn't trust PayPal for anything more than running a kids
lemonade stand - there are far too many horror stories.

~~~
ericcholis
As a business, we've used PayPal since it's inception and Braintree as of last
year. Both have been amazing experiences for us (Except for PayPal.com
usabliity....ugh). Braintree, in particular, doesn't _feel_ like a PayPal
company. Good API documentation, support and website usability.

We've never experienced any of the pains that I've read about PayPal. But,
perhaps, it's due to our long-standing relationship.

~~~
hellomoto998
I interpreted your last sentence as: "We've never had any problems with the
Don, but that's because we've known him longer. Maybe you should make an
effort to show him a little throat and he'll be nice to you."

------
TravisJamison
In Hong Kong Braintree made it so incredibly difficult to get an account
started that we ended up abandoning it. When Stripe finally opened up their HK
beta I tried again and the process to get approved took all of 3 minutes.

------
oggedintocom
Also for AU startups, consider Pin: [https://pin.net.au/](https://pin.net.au/)

No affiliation.

~~~
adamseabrook
We use pin.net.au for [https://meanpath.com](https://meanpath.com) as the
hosted payment pages they offer allow us to capture payment without needing to
do any advanced programming. Their fraud protection is impressive and blocks
90% of the payment attempts we get from people dipping stolen cards.

For [https://www.betterteam.com](https://www.betterteam.com) we chose Stripe
as our developers are more familiar with the API. Braintree do have some
features Stripe does not but the documentation of their API is not as
straightforward as Stripe.

------
davidsawyer
Stripe's documentation and API design are both the gold standards in my mind.
Braintree is good as well, but they fall just a little short of Stripe in
almost all categories.

The most notable shortcoming for me has been Braintree's testing/sandbox
environment. They require different dollar values in order to trigger certain
payment processor errors, and a payment won't fail in their sandbox
environment if you use a bogus nonce. This behavior alone caused me to
mistakenly ship a placeholder nonce to production, and it took us a while to
figure out what was going wrong in production since all purchases worked
perfectly in the sandbox.

tl;dr Braintree has burned me, and Stripe has not.

------
not_a_doctor
I just started using stripe and could not imagine an easier payment platform.
I've used paypal and amazon in the past, and this was an eye-opening
experience from ease of implementation alone. Customer support people are
quick and knowledgable.

but - I have never used Braintree :/

------
piotrkubisa
The biggest issue with Stripe is that it does not handle 3D-secure requests
[1] which protects you against various frauds. Hopefully, they are starting to
implement it for UE, US and also there are many FinTech SaaSes whose uses
machine learning to help you improve protection.

[1] [https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-
support-3d-...](https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-
support-3d-secure-verified-by-visa-mastercard-securecode)

~~~
edwinwee
Hey there, I work at Stripe. We're working to roll out 3D Secure, and it's in
private beta right now for European, U.S., Canadian and Australian accounts.
If you're interested, send me an email at edwin.wee@stripe.com!

------
ziikutv
The thing to realize here is that most of these payment processors have the
same functionality. The key difference most of the time is the
Documentation/Spec and the support provided by the processor.

I have been working on a Braintree solution for my place of employment and
going from Authorize.net/First Data to Braintree was a pleasure! All support
queries I've made to them have been answered in couple of hours. This to me
makes the biggest difference.

------
Gcam
I wrote a comparison for Australian companies recently:

[https://medium.com/@grmcameron/stripe-vs-braintree-for-
your-...](https://medium.com/@grmcameron/stripe-vs-braintree-for-your-
australian-business-9795544b1795#.6p2hqoty2)

1\. Feature Related Main Takeaways:

Stripe vs Braintree feature comparison: Braintree allows payments through
Paypal (This can increase conversion if you believe your customer base feels
more comfortable when using Paypal, a name they will likely recognize, as
their card details are not revealed.) Stripe accepts American Express while
Braintree does not Braintree allows you to bring your own merchant account The
stripe ecosystem is (arguably) more developed (i.e. Atlas)

2\. Cost Related Takeaways:

If you are going to be bringing in under $200k revenue, then Braintree will
likely be the better option in terms of cost considering their first $50k fee-
less revenue. However, if you are to be earning more than $200k, then Stripe
will likely be the better option in terms of cost considering their lower %
fee on transactions. Additionally, the number should be re-calculated based on
your international/domestic split, your estimated no. of charge backs and your
average transaction size.

~~~
huxley
Braintree does process American Express:

[https://www.braintreepayments.com/en-au/payment-
methods/acce...](https://www.braintreepayments.com/en-au/payment-
methods/accept-credit-cards)

------
andreftavares
There's more to the payment world than Stripe vs Braintree :) Actually,
there's more to payments than cards! In many countries, local alternative
payment methods account for more than 50% of e-commerce transactions. Do
Stripe/Braintree support them? No.

Even more, you'll most likely have to integrate with each payment method's
specific API/workflow!

(shameless plug...) I'm co-founder of Switch Payments
([https://switchpayments.com](https://switchpayments.com)) and we believe:

1) You're probably overpaying for credit card processing
([https://medium.com/switch-blog/youre-probably-overpaying-
for...](https://medium.com/switch-blog/youre-probably-overpaying-for-credit-
card-processing-63072f87ae65#.ldsn1o7fb))

2) Integrating with our API is the best way to remove the pain of supporting
current and future payment methods! With one single integration you'll be able
to support not only cards, but also dozens of Alternative Payment Methods from
countries all over the world.

------
Kihashi
I don't own a SaaS or eCommerce company, but I would be wary of a company
owned by PayPal. It might be that the increased availability and PayPal
integration is worth the risk, but it's something I would weigh pretty heavily
against Braintree.

------
duncanawoods
For those selling to the EU from the UK - what subscription payment/accounts
package combination can you recommend for pain free handling of VATMOSS type
complexity?

~~~
pbowyer
All I know is from [https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2014/11/25/how-small-
com...](https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2014/11/25/how-small-companies-
and-freelancers-can-deal-with-the-vatmoss-eu-vat-changes/):

[http://rachelandrew.github.io/eu-vat/third-
parties.html](http://rachelandrew.github.io/eu-vat/third-parties.html)
[https://www.taxamo.com/](https://www.taxamo.com/)
[https://quaderno.io/](https://quaderno.io/)

~~~
duncanawoods
Thanks. Have you implemented any of these yourself?

~~~
pbowyer
No, I've not had need to (yet). Services FTW!

------
Teichopsia
Sorry for going off topic, beginner here. Does anyone know of a solution to
receive payments in LATAM / Central America?

And could someone link a few resources on how to encapsulate the processor?

The ones that I've searched for don't support this side of the world. Even
with PayPal I haven't been able to figure out how to withdraw - or even to
make online purchases. I'm probably doing something wrong but I'm stumped on
all accounts.

------
jblake
I use both. Braintree for SaaS income (monthly, one-off, client contracts),
and Stripe for marketplace payments (Stripe Connect - event ticket sale
service fees). It works well, and helps me reconcile the income easier into
separate clearing accounts that I set up with Xero. I was originally enticed
to Braintree because of the first free $50,000 of processing. I have been very
happy with both.

------
btzll
Besides Stripe and Braintree, I would like to recommend FastSpring. Accepts
credits cards, Paypal, Amazon and others. Supports recurring payments (perfect
for SaaS) and single payments for products. Has great support, and the fees
are very low. I have been using them for more than 2 years, and have had no
issues.

------
Rezo
Also consider what complimentary services you may need: Automated dunning,
receipts / billing history management, sales tax calculations, subscription
analytics, accounting integration, etc. Personally I found that the ecosystem
around Stripe is better, and there's many great options for all of the above.

------
ooooak
i have used both APIs. i would say both get the shit done. but i liked stripe
more. they have better admin interface. plus some what good documentation than
Braintree.

------
amsstartups
I personally would recommend Paymentwall, as it is a more international and
complete solution.

I have tried multiple payment processors, but no one has such a wide coverage.
In addition to card processing, Paymentwall allows you to accept payments made
with bank transfers, prepaid cards, mobile payments, and different ewallets.

I never had any issues with expanding to new markets, and am currently
processing payments from the United States, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and
Middle East.

The API integration was straightforward and simple, and gave me access to all
of their available options at the same time.

So far it is the best payment processor for international payments I have
found.

~~~
smnscu
Sounds a bit disingenuous since you just created that account to post this
comment.

------
chrisgoman
Stripe 100%. If you get over a threshold (say $100,000/mo), they will work
with you on the rate so don't be afraid of the 2.75 + $0.30 will be forever

------
yazr
Also - which of these service are strong in the fraud prevention area ?! Or
integration with third party services for fraud prevention.

------
hootener
I've used both stripe and braintree to build payment processing services that
do hundreds of thousands of dollars in transactions per month.

I can't really tell you which is _better_ because it really does depend on a
lot of variables that may be unique to your business (e.g., where you intend
to operate, the payment methods your target customer base is comfortable using
-- hint: it's not always credit cards and paypal, how you intend to bill).

Since I've got more experience with braintree, though, I can comment on some
aspects of its use specifically -- primarily their drop-in UI, which has
frustrated me at every turn. Their drop-in is probably one of the most
frustrating pieces of technology I've ever integrated into a website. Not
because it's poor, necessarily, but because it only feels about 80% complete.
The user experience is really frustrating at times. Some examples:

* Last I checked, payment method removal wasn't possible in the drop in - you have to integrate their API specifically for that.

* Choosing what payment method you want can be really confusing due to the card number / email address obfuscation they use in the drop in. For example, if you have two paypal accounts, selecting between one of the other is difficult when they're listed as p----@paypal.com and p----@paypal.com. The same thing happens if you use multiple credit cards of the same issuer (two Visas for example). Simply allowing the user to set a card name in the ui (e.g. "Personal Visa" vs "Work Visa") would mitigate this problem.

* It currently isn't possible to set a Coinbase account as the default payment method in the Drop-in. Despite the Drop-in supporting Coinbase fully in every other way. So there's another reason to incorporate the API.

* Lack of other major payment methods. With BrainTree you get Venmo, Coinbase, CC, Apple/Android pay, and Paypal. Depending on your customer base, you could be woefully under-serving them. As my current business grows, we're now looking into incorporating other processors to use alongside braintree to support things like gift cards, ACH transfers, Amazon Payments, etc. This may just be unique to my industry, but I can't stress enough to do your homework ahead of time and understand how your customers expect to pay you.

* I get numerous reports from users of being unable to pay using paypal through the drop-in if they don't have a credit card attached to the paypal account. I've contacted BrainTree numerous times about this and have yet to get a definitive answer as to why this is the case. Additionally, if a credit card is connected to the paypal account, the withdrawal comes from that and not the paypal balance. If you want to frustrate your user base, let them use their paypal account but not their paypal balance...

As I've typed this, I realized it's a pretty ranty indictment of BrainTree. On
the whole it isn't a terrible service. Uptime is good, money goes in, comes
out, and my business keeps on running. It's not a bad service, I just have a
lot of drop-in frustration. I kind of hope I get a reply that says, "The
BrainTree drop-in does all this, you're just using it incorrectly."

------
ifoundthetao
Go NMI or go home.

