Stripe vs Adyen

Stripe and Adyen are prominent players when it comes to accepting payments, but both cater to a different audience. Despite being the newer company, US-based Stripe garnered a lot of early funding due to its appeal to developers and SMEs.

Adyen takes an enterprise approach. It appeals to larger businesses looking for scalable, bespoke solutions while keeping prices down. While Stripe has received more funding and has greater brand recognition, Adyen is experiencing accelerating net revenue growth and has comparable payment volumes.

You may also be interested in our review of Stripe for UK small businesses and other popular payment gateways for UK SMEs.

Similarities Between Stripe and Adyen

Both Stripe and Adyen are payment processors that can serve local and international transactions. Ecommerce integration is also possible with both platforms, making them direct competitors for online payments. As you would expect with two reputable finance companies, both have advanced fraud detection and cybersecurity.

Stripe and Adyen share a lot in common with their API-forward, no setup-fee approach to payment processing.

• Stripe is the easier platform to use for SMEs, both in pricing clarity and low-code solutions.

• Adyen scales better, making it powerful for omnichannel focus in a global market. It also has a European focus.

• Both are similar-sized companies but Stripe has more brand recognition.

What Are The Main Differences?

USPs of Stripe

• Developer and Beginner-Friendly: Stripe is extremely developer-friendly with its state-of-the-art API documentation and consideration towards users of varying technical expertise. Adyen’s API is also powerful, but it’s enterprise-focused.

• Agility: Stripe is more popular among smaller firms and sole traders due to its adaptability and fast onboarding.

• Transparency: The more time spent on Adyen’s website, the greater the appreciation grows for Stripe’s clarity. Stripe’s approach to fees is much more transparent and structured.

• Authorisation Rates: They use machine learning to improve authorisation rates and reduce lost revenue to cards being declined.

USPs of Adyen

• Global, Omnichannel Focus: Adyen’s sophisticated solutions make it possible to receive payments in various countries, through various mediums, and in multi-currency support.

• Enterprise: What Adyen lacks in low-code solutions, it makes up for in its flexible API and powerful analytics.

• Scalability: Adyen may scale better as a company grows, as well as keep costs down as volume rises

Stripe vs Adyen Fees & Costs

Adyen vs PayPal Fee Comparison

As per the table above, Adyen prices have more caveats  and this varying fee structure makes it harder to forecast initially although Adyen does have a useful calculator tool to help.

Ultimately, Adyen’s focus is on taking a modest commission and markup for themselves, with the bulk of the costs coming from interchange and scheme fees. These change depending on provider, medium, and location, but this can be a good thing as they’re dynamic.

When processing 1,000 payments at £10 each, the fees for Adyen are:

• Adyen Fees: £160

• Interchange Fees: £20

• Scheme Fees: £16.17

• Total Adyen Fees: £196.17

When processing the same amount for Stripe, the fees are:

• Stripe Percentage Fee (1.50% of £10,000): £150

• Stripe Fixed Markup (20p for 1,000 transactions): £200

• Total Stripe Fees: £350

For in-person fees (where everything else is the same as above), the total Adyen fee is £188.47 (£8 cheaper than online), while the Stripe fee is £240 (£110 cheaper than online).

Adyen is cheaper than Stripe’s standard fees but Stripe does offer discounts for high card volume businesses.

It’s also worth considering that Adyen’s fixed fee (10p) is half that of Stripe’s (20p). When selling cheap products, it’s the fixed fee that really eats into your margins. For transactions under £13.34, the 20p fixed rate is larger than the 1.50% commission.

Target Market & Market Share of Stripe and Adyen

Being a Dutch company and offering seamless European payments, Adyen may be expected to closely compete with Stripe on its home turf. But, this couldn’t be further from the case when looking at the number of websites using Adyen. Stripe has around three times more websites using their platform in The Netherlands than Adyen and around 80 times more in the US.

Here’s a Statista breakdown of Stripe and Adyen usage across different countries in Aug 2023:

However, total payments processed is a different story entirely, as both companies are neck-and-neck heading to the $1 trillion mark if Stripe’s claims are to be believed. This highlights the difference in use case: Adyen has far fewer companies using it, but they’re larger companies on average.

Another surprising fact is that Taiwan and China are the third and fourth largest markets for Adyen, which couldn’t be further from the case for US-centric Stripe.

And, while Adyen is doing well in Europe, the US remains its largest market, showing that Adyen is truly global in its expansion, while Stripe is more US-dependent.

Which Is Easier To Set Up?

Stripe has a positive reputation when it comes to its simple sign-up process. Its checkout infrastructure and user-friendly UX make it fast to create an account and begin customising payment solutions. Acting as a payment aggregator, it often just takes a few minutes before Stripe can start accepting payments for you. This online accounting verifying process is automated.

With Adyen, you need to speak to a member of the team who will tailor advice and assess your business and requirements. You then receive a test account while you apply for a live account. In some ways, this personalised service could be considered easier. But in reality, most smaller merchants would prefer the rapid onboarding of Stripe.

When it comes to setting up a customised checkout experience and reporting on analytics, they both have out-of-the-box solutions. Stripe may have the edge with its clever documentation and visual guides.

Which Has The Best Checkout User Experience?

Stripe is a widely recognised payment processor, and this can work to your advantage when starting out. There are various checkout options:

• Stripe-Hosted Link: Rapid set-up and likely to be trusted by customers

• Stripe Checkout: Offers limited low-code customisation and branding

• Stripe Elements: Developers can design highly custom payment forms with lots of control over UI and UX

With Adyen, there is a way to request payment via a link. Despite the company being a behemoth, it could be seen as less trustworthy than Stripe. If you use Adyen to its fullest potential, you can achieve a highly customised checkout experience — it has the potential for one-click payments that are unified across devices. However, Adyen also has out-of-the-box solutions with various pre-built UI components.

Ultimately, they both perform very well here for tech-savvy developers, as a seamless experience can be achieved with branding. Plus, both can offer subscriptions, direct debits, Buy Now, Pay Later, along with saving details for later and language localisation.

Supported Currencies & Payment Methods

Both Adyen and Stripe offer a broad range of payment methods. You can accept the following payments with both platforms:

• All Major Credit, Debit, and Business Cards

• Buy Now, Pay Later

• Local Payment Methods

• Direct Debits

• In-Person Payments (Including NFC)

• Manually Keyed-In Payments

• Vouchers & Gift Cards

• Shareable Link & QR Payments

Both companies also accept a similar number of payment methods, from AMEX to WeChat Pay. However, international card payments at Stripe rise to 2.5% + 20p (EEA) and 3.25% + 20p (international). On the other hand, Adyen doesn’t charge more because a card is international — it sticks with the same fee structure. Interchange and scheme fees may increase slightly, but it typically remains cheaper than Stripe.

Stripe supports payments in an impressive 135+ currencies and has 18 currencies for settlement. Adyen only supports 37 currencies, but it does so from almost 100 countries (more than Stripe). And, while Dynamic Currency Conversion is possible on a POS sale, there are 23 settlement currencies for UK merchants accepting foreign currency payments.

Stripe’s currency conversion fees are high, while Adyen’s are ambiguous. However, due to multi-currency account capability, neither provider forces an instant conversion, leaving the door open for merchants to payout into third-party FX specialist solutions.

Quality of Customer Support

When trying to get in touch with Adyen, you’re first presented with a contact page that doesn’t have any contact information. You’re encouraged to click through to the Support page, where again, there is no contact information. Instead, there are some FAQs and ‘How To’ courses.

Upon further inspection, there is a “submit a request” link, but it requires a log-in. This is a big turn-off for your customers, who may have issues but will not have a merchant account.

Adyen has many negative reviews from merchants surrounding its customer support, claiming the sales team often doesn’t get back to new customers, email support has long delays, and friction exists between the tech and finance support teams.

Stripe has many negative reviews too, and both companies are a mixed bag across different user review sites. Finding Stripe’s contact information is objectively easier and both instant chat and phone support are available 24/7.

Overall, it’s surprising that an enterprise-focused solution like Adyen having issues with support, given they have far fewer clients and each one is higher in value.

Final Thoughts

Stripe and Adyen serve different purposes. Stripe is more accessible regarding its account sign-up, customer support, pricing, and API documentation. In most ways, it’s the easier platform to use and it can achieve good customisation out of the box. It has it all… But it’s expensive.

Adyen still has some advantages over Stripe, namely its ability to scale with large transaction volumes whilst keeping the cost down. It performs well for in-person sales and international cards, as well as having a large-scale omnichannel focus.

Ultimately, many smaller businesses are happy to pay the higher fees for Stripe’s convenience and support. But, unlike with Adyen, you may quickly outgrow their use case. For more information, please fill in our short form to see how Stripe and Adyen stack up against their competitors.