Ask HN: Stripe or Braintree?

Any stance on choosing which in your SaaS / e-commerce?

At face value Stripe's API is about a billion times better (at least it was a year ago when I looked into using both).

I ultimately went with Stripe because I couldn't stand Braintree's API. So even with getting $50,000 at 0% revenue sharing and having PayPal support I still went with Stripe.

My condition was a bit different than yours tho. Most of my market had credit cards and it was an expensive item ($200). Part of PayPal's value is it's great for impulse purchases, so for an e-commerce site I recommend you integrate with them just because it will provide you more revenue in the end.

Totally agree with this. Braintree will save you a little money but their documentation is horrible; some of the worst I've ever seen. Their email tech support can be responsive and somewhat good but I feel like I have to email them about every little thing cause I can't find the answer in their disconnected documentation.

Need more information.

What is your price point?

Do you need to be able to manually bill? (i.e. for Enterprise and contract managed sales rather than self-serve... the difference being: invoicing, purchase orders)

Is this all subscription stuff, or are you doing one-off?

Does your market care about PayPal or is it all credit card?

You could probably boil it down to: If you care about PayPal then go Braintree, otherwise go Stripe.

But it's not as easy as that, something one can only learn through experience is which gateway will bill more transactions for exactly the same users and subscriptions? And yes, there will be a difference as banks treat different requestors differently, having different fraud profiles, etc.

It's so incredibly complex a question, that it needs vastly more information to answer.

But if you're early days, and cannot answer the questions fully, then just decide whether you think you care about PayPal and if not go Stripe to simplify everything.

Oh, and whatever you do... abstract away the payments and subscription stuff. Everyone changes their payments provider at some point, just put it all in one neat place so you can reduce the footprint of it for the time being.

Also Braintree's registration process was crazy when it came time to move past their sandbox and accept real payments.

They wanted so much personal information including my full social security # (not just the last 4), copy of my driver's license and a copy of a recent utility bill.

Then on top of that I got questioned because I don't have any credit (I purposely made a life choice not to use credit cards), so they demanded 3 months of my most recent bank statements.

It took days of this, combined with struggling with their documentation until I just gave up and went with Stripe. Never looked back since.

Stripe's registration process was painless and automated. They also requested the bare minimum to accept payments directly to my bank account. It was a flawless experience.