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I don't mean to hate but why would anyone chose Stripe over Braintree? It seems the same to me + Paypal which is HUGE.
by blahi 10y ago
I don't mean to hate but why would anyone chose Stripe over Braintree? It seems the same to me + Paypal which is HUGE.
- ggregoire 10y agoOne reason could be that Braintree is less known than Stripe? In my case: I've never heard of Braintree before this discussion and I was going to implement Stripe for my SaaS without even looking at the existing competitors.
- spitfire 10y agoIt's funny, IIRC the founder of braintree was quite active on HN as Braintree started to become successful.
- _kyran 10y agoBraintree seem to be advertising aggressively. I've been surprised to see a lot of phone boxes in Melbourne, Australia that are covered with Braintree ads promising better payments integrations.
- rublev 10y agoWhat problems does Braintree solve that Stripe doesn't?
- johneth 10y agoSeamless Paypal integration. Paypal is very popular across Europe (and the world), and many prefer to use it over credit and/or debit cards (these payment methods aren't universally popular).
- brianwawok 10y agoSome people don't WANT PayPal. I had a bad experience with an eBay /PayPal charge back scam 5 years ago. I.e. freezing of my entire account and no human to find to unfreeze it. I will never accept PayPal for the rest of my life.
- johneth 10y agoIt's not mutually exclusive. It's just an extra option (much like Stripe allows you to select Card or Bitcoin, for example).
- brianwawok 10y agoAh. But at that point, not seeing the Braintree draw over stripe. They seem more or less similar, with Stripe maybe being a bit easier to set up.
- droopyEyelids 10y agoyeah, braintree only has a potential benefit over stripe once you're forced to start caring about conversions & breakages (countries that expect to use PayPal, old people who trust the brand, etc)
- tyingq 10y agoThey seem to be very similar to me. Both Stripe and Braintree are priced at 2.9% + $0.30/transaction. If you're doing any notable amount of volume, you can do much better...closer to 2%. PaypalPro used to automatically give you lower rates, down to 2.2% + $0.30, at volumes well below what Stripe requires to "contact sales" and get a discount. Last year, they eliminated that, and went to the 2.9% + $0.30. It seems you have to get your own merchant account, and use something like authorize.net now to get decent pricing.
- tarr11 10y agoInteresting, what volume do you need to get to 2.2%?
- tyingq 10y agoIt was $10k/month to get 2.2%, but as mentioned, Paypal Pro discontinued the automatic discounts. It's all 2.9% now. Here's a screenshot of what it used to be: http://i.imgur.com/QQ7LVot.png http://i.imgur.com/QQ7LVot.png Still useful, though, as it gives a good indicator of how low you might get if you get your own merchant account.
- tarr11 10y agoThanks, helpful. What volume did you need to get 2% on Stripe?
- tyingq 10y agoThey did not promise any specific rate. The wording is gone now, but it used to say: "Processing more than $80,000 per month? Send us an email at sales@stripe.com"[1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140228105853/https://stripe.com/us/pricing https://web.archive.org/web/20140228105853/https://stripe.co...
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- ritchiea 10y agoWhen I started using Stripe the thing for me was ease of use, it was quick and painless to add to an app, the APIs made sense and were incredibly well documented. They also had a reputation for great customer service (though I've heard this has waned as they grew). I honestly didn't consider Braintree at the time but it was clear from the moment I started researching Stripe that they understood the pain points of payments and were making a product to alleviate them.
- droopyEyelids 10y agoThis is interesting. I've been fed up with Braintree because you can only reach their technical support on the phone during American business hours, and if you want after-hours help you have to send an email
- user5994461 10y agoI thought the competitor was Adyen.
- Kiro 10y agoWhen I had to make the choice it was simple - with Braintree you needed your own card acquiring agreement (with the bank), with Stripe you didn't. I don't know if this still applies though.
- soulchild37 10y agoBecause Stripe is not available in my country I am forced to use Braintree. I am waiting Stripe to come in while building my app at the moment.
- callmeed 10y agoI've used both extensively and in our mobile apps, we've switched back and forth. Stripe is noticeably easier to implement on mobile (including Apple Pay). Maybe not an order of magnitude easier but close. Part of the reason is that Stripe's documentation is much better. I'm not saying that's a deal-breaker–and I do think Braintree does have an advantage in some areas–but I'm just attempting to answer your question. Braintree/PayPal really needs to hire a serious UX/frontend team to clean up their docs and dashboards (monospaced font srsly?).
- dubcanada 10y agoI think Braintree's document are really nice looking. I really like the look of monospace font at larger font sizes. There is also a ton of designers that use monospace font for more developer related things.
- zaroth 10y agoIn the spectrum of evaluating the quality of documention, I never would have thought that fontface would be the first mention.
- dubcanada 10y agoNot sure about in USA. But in Canada to get a Braintree account is a giant process that takes several weeks and required submitting a ton of stuff, and you need too meet their minimum transaction volume in order to qualify. That's why I use Stripe.
- brilliantcode 10y agoYeah, I'm confused as to why Braintree would ignore us. That's why I'm using Stripe. One gripe about Stripe is the support emails are really slow, but I can't complain and Paypal is missing as well but I've situations where somebody paid for my software using stolen Paypal account and I had to reverse it.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sandstrom 10y agoI've implemented both in a typical SaaS app. Braintree first, because it was the only option, and then Stripe because we were eager to get away from Braintree. In short, Braintree was very painful to implement and run, while Stripe has been both easier to implement and operate. Even with the sunk-cost of a working Braintree implementation it was an easy choice to switch to Stripe.
- thraway2016 10y agoThrowaway for obvious reasons. We do approx $5MM of annual business through Stripe. #1 reason is lock-in and momentum. Stripe has, bar none, the WORST support of any company in existence. And they don't care to ever change that, having made noise about it for years, but expending precisely zero effort on that front. We would love to move. But we stay, because we utilize Stripe's card tokenization in order to "store" repeat customers' payment information without having to deal with PCI-DSS compliance processes. If we moved, all existing customers "stored" payment information would, by necessity, go away.
- lentil 10y ago> If we moved, all existing customers "stored" payment information would, by necessity, go away. Not necessarily. You should be able transfer the stored card data to another provider. Many (although not all) payment processors seem to allow this. https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-if-i-decide-to-leave-stripe-can-i-export-card-data
- thraway2016 10y agoOh wow, thank you so much for this.
- colinbartlett 10y agoI've moved a few businesses off of Stripe and never had any problem. They do it with PGP keys and go directly to the new provider so I never touch any info. Worked great.
- kennethologist 10y agoYou moved them from Stripe to where and why? I'm about to launch a product in a few months and trying to decide which company to go with. So far Stripe seems to be most favorable for the development team. But maybe there are some business things that make Stripe less desirable. Thanks for any insight.
- Artemis2 10y ago
- nickpsecurity 10y agoI was a big fan of Braintree. It got acquired by Paypal. They cause their users pain quite often since they're a dominant company that doesn't have to care: https://lifehacker.com/5821634/why-you-should-ditch-paypal-and-use-these-other-services-to-send-people-money https://lifehacker.com/5821634/why-you-should-ditch-paypal-a... That puts Braintree into liability category as Paypal's influence on them increases. Leaves Stripe as safer bet for now if they don't pull stuff like that on customers regularly. If Stripe IPO's, they might turn into villains as well. However, there will be another startup or mid-sized company differentiating on quality of service by then. I'll recommend that one. Note: If Stripe management is reading, I suggest that they continue to pull less crap than Paypal with better service as a continuing differentiator from this point on. It should always work. Braintree also succeeded that way when competing with payment processors.
- dubeye 10y agoStripe in the UK is 1.4% + 20p which is less than half price. So I was surprised and intrigued to read these comments. Is this an intro offer I wonder?
- lachyg 10y ago(I work at Stripe.) No, those rates are not an intro offer. Interchange, the largest cost in processing credit card transactions, is much cheaper in the U.K. than it is in the U.S., thus we can price lower.