Show HN: List of Stripe Alternatives
Seems like every time there's a negative Stripe story on here, the inevitable question, "any alternatives?" gets asked. Hell, I was tempted to ask myself. Instead, I decided to search hn.algolia.com to see for myself what others have recommended in the past.
Might as well share the list with y'all, make it meta.
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2Checkout | https://www.2checkout.com
Adyen | https://www.adyen.com
Amazon Pay | https://pay.amazon.com
Authorize.net | https://www.authorize.net
Balance | https://www.getbalance.com
Braintree | https://www.braintreepayments.com
ChargeBee | https://www.chargebee.com
Chargify | https://www.chargify.com
Checkout.com | https://www.checkout.com
DigitalRiver | https://www.digitalriver.com
Dwolla | https://www.dwolla.com
FastSpring | https://fastspring.com
GoCardless | https://gocardless.com
MangoPay | https://www.mangopay.com
Mollie | https://www.mollie.com
Opayo (previously SagePay) | https://www.opayo.co.uk
Paddle | https://www.paddle.com
Payoneer | https://www.payoneer.com
PayPal | https://www.paypal.com
Qonto | https://qonto.com/en
Spreedly | https://www.spreedly.com
Square | https://squareup.com
Verifone | https://www.verifone.com/en/us
White | https://whitepayments.com
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Observations from my data collection:
Sassy appears to have been acquired by FastSpring. Balanced Payments apparently went under but I found another payment service called "Balance" instead. Paymill is defunct but their Github org has a bunch of code. No idea what happened to Spryng Payments but Spryng still exists.
It's also worth mentioning that a true "Stripe alternative" simply does not exist. No one does everything they do and I'm pretty sure most services are lacking in the developer documentation department. Still, having options is always great.
2Checkout, DigitalRiver, FastSpring, Paddle and Payoneer used to be reasonably popular in "old-school" shareware circles.
These aren't payment processors. They all come from pre-Stripe times and they are so-called "registration services".
These are effectively resellers, providing "full service" that includes order processing, customer callbacks (fraud detection), distribution of activation codes, first line of support for licensing inquiries, etc. -- all the things that used to be complicated in the era when people ordered by phone, fax and email, paid with cheques and the software was licensed fully offline using either procedurally-generated codes or codes hardcoded into executables.
They all are still stuck there - rigid, clunky, buggy and, above all, unnecessary expensive.
These aren't Stripe alternatives. These are dinosaurs desperately clinging to life.
Paddle has a pretty legit API from my experience. Agree on the other ones for sure.
Cannot speak for the others, but paddle also does handle all tax related issues for you. That can quickly get pretty complicated if you have international customers.
I have no relationship to Paddle but they deserve defending, as they’re absolutely not a “dinosaur clinging to life” and are in fact a very valuable player given the changing regulatory and tax landscape across the world.
The phrase to use to describe Paddle is “merchant of record” and it’s more valuable today than it was a few years ago, and it’s more valuable than Stripe in certain circumstances. There are many scenarios in which a business selling digital services would have a rational reason to choose Paddle over Stripe today.
Paddle may have started out as you describe but that’s not what they are today. Personally, I’d argue they’ve done a better job innovating in their niche than Stripe has.
Second this about paddle. They seem to handle the international tax feature a lot earlier than most. Having a merchant of record is handy.
The extra fee for international sales is less in the beginning than hiring accountants or having a keels presence in other countries and the overhead associated with that.
Functionality like this more easily lets you sell globally from the start, and optimize later when beneficial.
With a future likelier to include digital taxes, it’s reasonable to focus on product and customer.
Some of these are viable payment processors, but if you're trying to run anything vaguely like a market, it's hard to replace Stripe. I've tried.
In detail, something that handles both credit card payments from users and ACH payouts to users, possibly with some substitutions like debit instead of credit or wire instead of ACH. Ideally allowing user-to-user payments without having to float the money yourself. Stripe is handling some big regulatory hurdles for you, like KYC.
Great list, thank you.
One option is to always have more than one payment processor activated.
Splitting payments across providers early on doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
There are libraries focused in billing and payment management and leaving the payment processing only to stripe, etc. These libraries that can handle multiple payment providers and help reduce dependency on the a single payment provider for payment management functionality.
It’s always felt like a risk.
One stand alone library that I’m looking at is https://killbill.io/
If there are alternatives to this that folks have experience with - it would be great if you could share
Hey, there's Stigg (http://stigg.io/) and its like an abstraction layer on top of billing for SaaS. I think it counts as an alternative to killbill in some way.
Thank you, didn’t know this existed
Lemon Squeezy [1] is another great option. I use it on my site RemoteFriendly. They are take 5% and handle all the tax, fraud stuff for you as a merchant of record.
[1] https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/
Is there an inclusion criteria for this list? You listed PayPal as an alternative. I cannot imagine recommending Paypal to someone complaining about Stripe- arguably there are more complaints on HN about Paypal than Stripe!
> I decided to search hn.algolia.com to see for myself what others have recommended in the past.
While this is a good list of companies that operate roughly in the same space as Stripe, a more useful one for the intended audience would be finding replacements for the specific Stripe services/APIs they are using. It's not as simple as saying "just switch from Stripe to PayPal/Square". Most of these companies specialize in a specific problem with very little overlap with the rest. Stripe doesn't have a real 1:1 competitor.
We're back to patchwork quilting the services we need...this is the sixth day of 2023. I wonder what enterprising HN reader is gonna take up the mantle to embark on building a true alternative.
I use these guys (based in Australia): https://pinpayments.com/
Excellent support, and no bullshit. It really as simple as creating an account, installing the plugin on my website then collecting payments.
Ah, they seem to only serve Australia and New Zealand.
scrolls to footer
Oh, their parent company is Checkout.com!
checkout.com is bad?
Nope, they're one of the alternatives in the OP.
Stripe is the only processor I’m aware of that is self-service and you can be accepting payments within minutes.
But that comes with a major downside, you don’t actually get a merchant account.
If having a merchant account is important to you, Adyen is pretty great.
Oh, forgot to mention that 2Checkout and Verifone are the same product but still have different sites for some reason. Or at the very least, Verifone owns 2Checkout.
I investigated a bit about this and found Square promising because it allows creating a link to allow customers engage in a subscription, which is super helpful to not code such a flow when validating a product.
I don't know whether Paddle supports this but a customer is super happy with them, it was also super simple to integrate from the developer side.
Thanks for the list.
SumUp | https://sumup.com/
I don't think PoS fits the bill...
It has an API for online payments: https://developer.sumup.com/docs/online-payments/introductio...
Oh neat! It wasn't surfaced on their homepage.
- Visa | https://developer.visa.com
- Masterpass by Mastercard | https://masterpass.com
From Visa's site:
> Visa Checkout does not accept direct merchant connections. You will need to work with a partner to integrate Visa Checkout into your solution. You can find Partners to integrate with Visa Checkout here.
Masterpass looks like it operates similarly.
Personally, I'm looking into Checkout and Mollie (hope they're not UK-only) and will use OpenNode as my crypto payment provider.
Any of those support crypto and credit card? I added Coinbase commerce to my site as an option but unfortunately it doesnt support Monero.
Why would Coinbase or any other exchange ever support Monero? It's only usecase is illegitimate payments, the risk isn't worth Coinbase adding it.
In fact, please don't consider using crypto at all, it has no usecase other than speculation and you are likely to lose money due to volatility.
Consider bank transfer instead.
> Consider bank transfer instead.
That stuff is a nightmare. I've dealt with both USD and cryptocurrency payouts and can see why some legitimate businesses would prefer the latter.
Skrill (not on the list, but seems to be in the same space as PayPal) has some crypto features. No idea about the details, since I just saw it mentioned on the website, but didn't go further.
You should just use something like OpenNode and accept Bitcoin.
- https://www.opennode.com
I'm specifically looking for a payment provider handling SaaS subscriptions (monthly/annually).
Any recommendations?
We're excited to see how the open-source Lago (https://www.getlago.com/) develops. Does anyone here have experience working with it?
AFAICT they don't process payments.
Who are "we"?
TIL about Amazon Pay.
Snipcart
Not really a Stripe alternative - but if you run out of alternatives, there's always Bitcoin. That is, if you want to accept payments without using any third-party service.
I wish more people implemented Bitcoin (Lightning) payments on their websites. I always pay with Bitcoin when there's an option; simply because it's easier and faster, compared to typing in my CC info and 2FAing it with my bank app. Bitcoin requires just scanning a QR code with a mobile wallet.
BTCPay Server[0] is the most popular (I think) self-hosted software for accepting Bitcoin payments. It's also available as a hosted version.
[0] https://btcpayserver.org
Most of our customers want to pay by credit card, so no.
For some people this might imply a certain opinion from the business that may turn them off. It’s a little like if the cashier at the store is wearing a MAGA hat. Certainly not that extreme for most, but it would make me think twice about if this is a company that I want to buy from.
For small websites, it may just be an easy and practical technological solution, sparing the need to integrate with third-party services or platforms. I'm not sure why you see it as a negative, but for the merchant it's just another payment gateway. Also, in some countries these payment services might not be so readily available, and Bitcoin might be the only solution for accepting payments globally.
Also, I think it's quite a small group of people who associate Bitcoin with something negative. Some people might relate it to drugs, but that is really based only on the early days of bitcoin use and hasn't been the main use case for years. For 99% of people it's an investment, and some of these also use it for payments whenever it's possible.
We've accepted Bitcoin as payment on our website for years. Not a single customer has chosen that option.