

Ask HN: Can anyone compare Stripe & Samurai? - maxbrown

Both seem to be new and exciting alternatives to the existing online payment solutions.<p>I'm able to do the basic comparison - Samurai is still Gateway/Merch account unlike Stripe, but seems to be 0.6% less per transaction and possibly offer more features because of the Gateway?<p>Is anyone able to offer a more detailed comparison of the two? Thanks in advance!
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JoshTriplett
Looking at the pricing offers one obvious answer: Samurai charges 2.3% plus
$0.30, plus another $0.15 for American Express, and also charges $25/month.
Stripe charges 2.9% plus $0.30, but charges no monthly fee and doesn't vary
the price by card type.

As far as I can tell, Samurai doesn't seem to have automatic subscription
handling, or if they do they don't seem to say anything about it on their
features page. On the other hand, Samurai does offer the option of integrating
with other merchant accounts in addition to their own, which you might care
about.

Based on pricing alone, if you do more than about $4166/month in business, or
you want to go to the effort of passing different transactions to different
merchant accounts, you might save money with Samurai; otherwise you'll pay
less with Stripe. Apart from that, Stripe appears to have some features that
Samurai doesn't.

Personally, unless something changes between now and launch, I suspect we'll
probably go with Stripe for Apters (<http://apters.com>), for simplicity of
subscription handling if nothing else.

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colin8chSE
They both have nice API's and are both only available for US based businesses,
but otherwise, its kind of comparing apples to oranges.

There's a recent post in Quora comparing the two that does a great job of
breaking it down. [http://www.quora.com/For-payment-processing-how-do-Stripe-
an...](http://www.quora.com/For-payment-processing-how-do-Stripe-and-Samurai-
FeeFighters-compare)

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CameronHickey
I don't think it makes sense to compare these products directly. Samurai is a
gateway only -- you still need a merchant account which is a lengthy process,
while Stripe lets you start accepting payments immediately. That distinction
implies they are for different use-cases. Samurai is useful if you want a
simpler integration than Authorize.net and Strip if you have nothing, and want
to get up and running immediately.

The simplest example of the difference is the sign-up process, Samurai
_requires_ you to enter a company name before you can start using the service
-- Stripe doesn't even need an email address.

Another key difference is that (from what I can tell) Stripe handles all PCI
compliance, whereas Samurai still requires you to handle some aspects.

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maxbrown
Clickables: <http://www.stripe.com/> <https://samurai.feefighters.com/>

