Send payouts with Stripe

Now that payment processors like Stripe and Balanced are providing very similar services, what serves to differentiate them? As each of these companies release features, they become closer and closer to converging to the exact same product. I'm seeing the same fees, the same abilities to payout, the same ability to act as a marketplace, with only a few very minor differences. Why should someone pick Stripe over Balanced, or vice versa?

"Stripe is not a bank or a money services business (“MSB”) and Stripe does not offer banking or MSB services as defined by the United States Department of Treasury."

Balanced has always inhabited a nebulous void of blatant-copying-with-one-novel-new-feature territory for me.

It's clear they just copied (with permission? consent?) the public interface of Stripe. They tried to copy the documentation format (layout, style, presentation) too, but it came off kinda poorly (margins, people. margins). They have public test cards/accounts, but they fail to test correctly because they get "used" and can't have multiple actions performed against them. Then, there's the whole ID thing. Why the fuzzy heck would you use ugly, long, probably-going-to-run-off-my-screen URIs as IDs instead of short IDs? They advise you to never construct your own API endpoint URIs from shorter IDs, except that's exactly what they do all throughout their documentation.

But, Balanced lets you pay out next day and Stripe holds your funds for 7 days before allowing payment. So, Balanced wins on time-to-pay speed (and they have same-day transfers to Wells Fargo). Though, with Stripe I assume you could eventually have enough of a float in your account to pay out next-day under your own prior funds.

From my complete outsider point of view it feels like Balanced is full of slightly subpar copy ninjas. (obviously just on their API, documentation, and front-end presentation. Their backend could be amazing or it could be meter high jenga code.)

Disclaimer/Validator: I've written a tiny unofficial client for each each product/company. https://github.com/mattsta/stripe-erlang and https://github.com/mattsta/balanced-erlang

I think you should pick based on your primary use case, i.e. whether you are a merchant (stripe) or a marketplace (balanced).

IMO in a couple of years the offerings from these two companies will be so close that this distinction won't matter, but for now they are converging in from different directions so you should choose appropriately.

(I feel this is a lot like Box vs. Dropbox. One started from the team/enterprise side, and the other from the personal/consumer side, but now Box offers free 5GB for personal use, Dropbox offers dropbox for teams etc. A couple of years back, it mattered which one you picked depending on your use case, but these days not so much.)

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