If you’re looking for a payment processor for online payments and comparing Stripe vs PayPal, you may be thinking about the following:
- You’re not sure which one is a better fit for your business and want to understand the pros and cons of each provider.
- You want a global processor that you can onboard with quickly so you can grow internationally or optimize your payments abroad.
- You feel like you can only choose either Stripe or Paypal because you don’t have the in-house resources to integrate and maintain multiple processors.
Stripe and PayPal are both industry leaders in payment processing and are trusted by millions worldwide. So, how do you choose between them to find the best option for your business needs?
In this article, we’ll cover the similarities and differences between them. We’ll also suggest a solution that allows you to work with both Stripe and PayPal.
We’ll go over:
- Stripe vs PayPal: Comparison chart
- Stripe: Best for early-stage and small businesses
- PayPal: Best for companies that want minimal setup
- Why merchants often choose between Stripe and PayPal
- Payment orchestration: a solution that allows you to use both
- How Primer’s unified payments infrastructure unlocks your payment options
- How Pelago used Primer to scale across Asia
If you are a business looking to add payment processors without increasing complexity, book a call with Primer to see how we can help.
Stripe vs PayPal: Comparison chart
Stripe: Best for early-stage and small businesses
Stripe started with a focus on e-commerce but rapidly evolved to support a wide range of businesses, both online and in-person. From small businesses seeking to accept credit card payments to scaling startups and global giants like Uber and Amazon, Stripe provides flexible solutions that cater to businesses of all sizes.
In 2023, Stripe processed $1 trillion in payments — that’s around 1% of the world’s GDP.29
Stripe’s fees operate on a blended pricing model compared to PayPal's more variable pricing. This can make it straightforward to work out how much you’re projected to spend on processing payments—particularly if you’re handling international payments, where fees will differ depending on your location.
(Note: Stripe does offer an interchange plus pricing option for enterprise customers, with extremely high payment volume).
Despite its industry-leading documentation and ease of use, you’ll need developers to get full functionality out of Stripe.
PayPal: Best for companies that want minimal setup
PayPal is one of the most recognized names in payments, with over 431 million users and merchants across the globe.28 It offers a range of solutions for businesses that want to manage online payments.
PayPal has a global reach and will work out of the box for business owners who are happy with a PayPal-branded checkout process.
For SMBs, it offers plug-and-play options with quick integration to ecommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Wix.16 For enterprise clients, PayPal is flexible, with a big suite of tools, including global payments in over 100 currencies across more than 200 markets.3
However, PayPal’s fee structure is more variable than Stripe’s, with many rates depending on location, making global payments more complex to forecast.
Why merchants often choose between Stripe and PayPal
If you’re deciding between Stripe and PayPal, you’re not alone—many merchants opt for one over the other to simplify their operations. But why do businesses hesitate to implement both? Here are some common challenges:
- Limited engineering resources: Integrating and maintaining two payment providers requires significant technical effort, especially for smaller teams. Adding multiple providers can feel like a luxury when resources are stretched.
- Operational complexity: Managing separate systems for reporting, reconciliation, and payment tracking can create inefficiencies and lead to errors. Merchants often choose one platform to streamline workflows.
- Cost concerns: Each payment provider has unique fee structures and pricing models. Without a clear strategy, using both could increase transaction costs without delivering a clear return on investment.
- Customer experience: Offering multiple payment options can complicate checkout flows if not implemented thoughtfully, leading some businesses to stick with a single provider to maintain simplicity.
Fortunately, there is a solution that can help you avoid these challenges, and easily integrate both Stripe and PayPal.
Payment orchestration: a solution that allows you to use both
Payment orchestration simplifies the way businesses manage payments by centralizing integrations with multiple payment providers and methods into a single platform. This allows merchants to streamline their payment operations and tailor transaction flows to meet specific business needs.
With payment orchestration, businesses can route payments dynamically across different providers based on custom rules, such as location, transaction size, or provider performance. Think of it as the operational hub for your payment ecosystem.
A payment orchestration platform typically handles several key aspects of the payment process:
- Acceptance: Offers the most relevant payment options to customers, ensuring a frictionless checkout experience.
- Routing: Automatically directs transactions through the most efficient routes, boosting success rates and minimizing processing costs.
- Reconciliation: Consolidates data from all payment providers to simplify accounting and ensure accurate settlement.
- Analytics: Delivers a unified view of payment performance, helping businesses identify trends and optimize their strategies.
Some key benefits of a payment orchestrator include:
- Optimizing costs: Route transactions to the lowest-cost provider and leverage the platform's scale to negotiate better rates with PSPs, improving margins while reducing expenses.
- Increasing speed to market: Connect to new PSPs in hours rather than weeks, eliminating the need for months of engineering work to build and maintain integrations.
- Expanding globally: Offer local payment methods to reach new demographics and reduce cart abandonment by presenting customers’ preferred payment options dynamically at checkout.
- Reducing fraud: Utilize features like 3DS in high-risk payment flows, leveraging strong authentication and pre- and post-payment checks to lower fraud and chargebacks.
- Improving authorization rates: Optimize payment routes to reduce declines and authorize more payments by connecting to PSPs with higher success rates for specific data points, such as issuing banks.
- Streamlining operations: Manage all payments and add new PSPs without engineering resources while centralizing payment data for improved visibility and decision-making.
Want to learn more about how an orchestrator can improve how you handle payments? Read on: What is Payment Orchestration and How Does It Work?
How Primer’s unified payments infrastructure unlocks your payment options
At Primer, we operate as a Unified Payment Infrastructure, with orchestration being one of our strongest use cases. Our platform helps merchants optimize payment processing performance, build faster, and capture untapped revenue.
With Primer, there’s no need to choose between Stripe, PayPal, or other options—you can use many processors all through a single integration, in just a few clicks. This allows you to quickly and efficiently select thebased on your business priorities.
Here’s how Primer can transform your payment systems:
Integrate with multiple PSPs without needing engineering resources
If you’re researching the differences between Stripe and PayPal, you might have limited engineering resources and are hesitant to integrate and maintain multiple processors. Or perhaps you’re a scaling business looking to add an additional processor to add redundancy to your payments.
Given the complexity of integrating with new PSPs, many merchants have to make compromises and choose one over the other, ultimately hampering their payment performance.
With Primer, there’s no need to compromise. We’ve already built integrations with the world’s leading PSPs, including PayPal and Stripe. Once connected to Primer, you can seamlessly access these PSPs with minimal additional engineering effort.
Whatever your use case, Primer will enable you to integrate with PSPs with no code, so you can quickly expand your payments infrastructure.
Adding a new PSP with Primer is simple:
- Go into the Integrations section of Primer’s dashboard
- Click the black box with “+ New integration”
- Select the desired payment provider from the menu
- Add your account details for the payment provider, then add your merchant account
- Choose which payment methods to use with the provider
As soon as you complete these steps, your new PSP is added to your Primer account and ready for you to use. It really is that simple.
This flexibility is exactly why micromobility leader Beam chose Primer to support an expansion to five new countries—New Zealand, Indonesia, Turkey, Australia, and Malaysia—in one year.
“Primer’s solution has removed much of the complexity around payments and enabled us to focus on building a meaningful presence in these new markets,” said Bhavin Shah, VP of Product Management of Beam.
Set up Fallbacks to recapture up to 20% of soft decline payments
Working with multiple PSPs unlocks a world of opportunities to optimize your payment performance.
With Primer Workflows, you can easily create advanced routing logic in just a few clicks, enabling you to direct payments to different processors based on various conditions, such as region, currency, or transaction type.
Additionally, you can implement Fallback strategies to automatically reroute payments to an alternative processor in case of downtime or failure, ensuring seamless transactions and minimizing disruptions.
Primer automatically retries soft decline transactions with your Fallback processor, so customers aren’t aware of any issues and don’t need to re-enter payment information. This can lead to +20% of payments being recaptured when a Fallback is triggered.
Centralize your payment data for better strategic insights
A clear view of all your PSP's performance is essential for optimization. However, if you integrate with multiple PSPs separately, you must access each payment platform separately. This makes getting all your payment data in one place tedious and time-consuming.
In contrast, Primer’s Observability dashboard gives you real-time information on all of your payment processors—all in one easy-to-use dashboard. You can sort and analyze your data with 30+ standard filters (like issuer, Merchant ID, and account type) and create further customized views based on your unique requirements..
You can also set Monitors that alert your team to unusual behavior, such as a spike in payment failures. This allows you to act quickly when a problem occurs.
For Maisons du Monde, Observability enables the company “to monitor performance across all our payment methods and processors in one dashboard,” says Jérémy Lechardeur, who controls Maisons du Monde’s retail technology stack. “This is essential as we optimize our payment performance and monitor our payment flows for any issues.”
Read more: Maisons du Monde selects Primer as its payments infrastructure
How Pelago used Primer to scale across Asia
Pelago is a booking platform connected to Singapore Airlines. It services 150+ countries and aims to connect travelers with experiences abroad.
As it expanded across APAC markets, Pelago needed a solution to integrate with multiple PSPs to give its customers the right payment options across Asia without ballooning complexity.
This was a big challenge. “Market fragmentation means no single processor can offer comprehensive coverage and performance,” explained Altaf Dhamani, Pelago's Chief Product Officer.
After searching for a tool to consolidate its payment stack, it was clear: “The answer was Primer. As an infrastructure layer, it solves our challenge by allowing us to use various payment services without the painful process of directly integrating with them.”
With Primer, Pelago:
- Routes payments through Workflows to choose the right PSPs for the right regions and optimize their performance.
- Uses Fallbacks to improve reliability and recover failed payments.
- Uses Universal Checkout to give customers the right checkout options for their region. “We’re now considering the customer's preferences based on where they’re from, the conversion rate of each payment method, and even the associated costs,” said Dahmani.
- Is improving its checkout experience and lowering the risk of cart abandonment by localizing payment options to offer the most popular payment methods in a given country.
Read the full case study: Pelago creates new horizons for travel and payments with Primer.
Use both Stripe and PayPal with Primer
Both Stripe and PayPal offer reliable global payment products for their customers. But even leading payment providers may not offer the exact combination of services and regions that’s right for your business, especially if you’re rapidly expanding your operations.
Primer ensures you get the payment coverage and options you need without adding unnecessary complexity.
To learn more about how Primer can help you optimize your payments, contact our experts today.
Sources:
- https://stripe.com/gb/payments/features
- https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#apmfixed-fees-transactions
- https://www.paypal.com/uk/enterprise/payment-methods
- https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/subscription-payments
- https://support.stripe.com/questions/understanding-fees-for-refunded-payments
- https://www.paypal.com/uk/cshelp/article/how-do-i-issue-a-refund-help101
- https://www.paypal-trustcenter.com
- https://www.zettle.com/gb/payments/security
- https://www.paypal.com/us/enterprise/payment-processing/accept-pay-later
- https://www.paypal.com/us/brc/article/buy-now-pay-later-merchant-guide
- https://www.paypalobjects.com/marketing/web23/uk/ent/pay-later/pay-later-strategy-for-uk-businesses-v2.pdf
- https://developer.paypal.com/docs/checkout/apm/przelewy24/
- https://www.paypal.com/mu/webapps/mpp/express-checkout
- https://docs.stripe.com/no-code/get-started
- https://docs.stripe.com/payments/checkout
- https://www.paypal.com/uk/business/platforms-and-marketplaces/directory
- https://www.paypal.com/uk/business/accept-payments/checkout
- https://stripe.com/gb/resources/more/chargebacks-101
- https://developer.paypal.com/api/nvp-soap/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/ProfileAndTools/
- https://support.stripe.com/questions/stripe-reports?locale=en-GB
- https://developer.paypal.com/docs/reports/
- https://www.paypal.com/uk/business/pos-system
- https://www.zettle.com/gb/pricing
- https://stripe.com/gb/pricing
- https://developer.paypal.com/support/
- https://www.paypal.com/uk/cshelp/personal
- https://www.paypal.com/uk/enterprise
- https://www.businessofapps.com/data/paypal-statistics/
- https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/43844/stripe-passes-1-trillion-in-payments-volume
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