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22 Comments

Stripe or Braintree or ... ?

I am implementing a payment processor for my Django app and I am wondering what are the community experiences with Stripe and Braintree?
(I know this is a Stripe website, still I expect a high level of freedom of expression from the community).

So far, signing up to Stripe was incredibly quick, while I can't say the same about Braintree (I'm still in the process of verification). But besides that, I have no other instruments to judge.

I will be processing payments mostly from people in Europe, in which credit cards may not be the best solution. Both companies offer a wealth of local options apparently.

I haven't really been able to judge how straightforward it is to implement Stripe or Braintree into a Django application. I've just crossed some open-source project using Braintree and seemed uncomplicated.

#tech-questions

  1. 11

    I have a lot of experience with both. Stripe is amazing. No issues, except the lack of more country support.

    Braintree does have a lengthy approval process mostly because they actually do the processing. Paypal bought Braintree because Braintree implemented Paypal better than PayPal did.

    To answer your question, I would not use Braintree. Specifically, here's why:

    • a subscription that's trialing has a status of active. Determining if its trialing requires doing date comparisons
    • API does not support percentage based coupons. They only support whole dollar amounts, like $5.00. Also, API does not support CRUD ops (you can't create, update or delete coupons)
    • API does not support upgrades with different billing intervals.
    • API does not support reactivations
    • API does not support creating, updating, or deleting plans
    • Adding add-ons requires updating, or deleting add-ons, and requires determining if add-ons are present. This makes things like applying a credit complex as compared to Stripe (applying a negative line item for an invoice with one call)

    Stripe is going to be your best bet for MVP. If you need to operate in more countries than Stripe provides, you may check out 2Checkout.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the detailed answer!
      The only reason I considered Braintree was because they (obviously) support Paypal and that is my own payment method of choice. Stripe has covered most European countries nowadays, which is a big plus for me.
      I think I'll just go the Stripe-way then.

      1. 3

        No problem. Yeah PayPal as a payment option comes up weekly with the apps I manage. I'm in the mindset that I refuse to implement or work with PayPal on newer apps because of the indifferences in API's. I spend too much time as it is troubleshooting BT specific quirks.

        I suppose you could justify this by going with a place like Chargify, or Chargebee, but at scale you'd be paying an arm and a leg for those services.

        A question to you, as someone who personally prefers to pay with PayPal, because I'm truly curious: if you stumbled across a product and the only way to pay was via CC, would you skip over the product because you could not pay with PayPal?

        1. 4

          Damn @nphaskins know's his stuff. Impressive. +1 to everything he said.

          Also, I'll answer your question about PP vs. just CC. I've personally tested it and when I don't display an option to pay via PayPal in addition to CC, I lose at least 20% of my sales.

        2. 1

          I only have a prepaid credit card. Therefore, I try to use it as little as possible, just for some essentials. This means that it depends how badly I need what I am looking for. I even pay plane tickets with Paypal. So yes, if I would be checking out a product just out of curiosity, I would probably skip it if I can't pay it with Paypal. Of course, there are also some local alternatives (i live in The Netherlands) that allow me to pay with debit card.

    1. 1

      I've seen quite a lot of advertisements from them... However, they seem to offer less support for python than braintree or stripe. And couldn't find any django implementation to see how they work.
      Moreover, I couldn't find any information on SCA

  2. 2

    Stripe is super easy, haven't used braintree

  3. 2

    Been using Stripe for years. Really great tooling, straightforward and well understood by developers.

    I was curious to try Braintree at one point but also got stuck in the signup / verification process which was unnecessarily long, ran into some show-stopper and ditched it.

    Have known a few people that used Braintree though that did like it though.

    1. 1

      Thanks!
      Yeah, I've found several people with the same experiences, and the ones who managed to have an account with them are happy... So I guess I'll just stay with Stripe...

  4. 1

    I use Stripe and for people who want paypal I get them to send me enough for the yearly plan just via email-based paypal and I do it automatically. Works fine at my scale! (~300 paying customers)

    1. 1

      I was considering exactly the same approach. For small scale this seems a quick solution. Thanks!

  5. 1

    Not sure what your app does but have you thought about accepting crypto payments? There are companies who offer both crypto and Paypal together but with the crypto payments, the transactions fees are miniscule compared to what most payment providers charge.

    1. 1

      Do you have experience with any? Would you give a any links?

  6. 1

    I'm a huge fan of stripe. They happen to support this which is great, but they also made payment processing pretty painless for devs - remembering the "time before stripe" they transformed the industry. Nothing against Braintree and some of the other providers - I believe they've gotten a lot better, but for my use case (conferences for engineering leaders - at ctoconnection.com) I can't imagine moving away from stripe!

  7. 1

    While braintree itself might not be the best option, for tech things I've sold people use paypal about 50% of the time. When it was broken for a bit on my site people wouldn't purchase or I had to do a paypal transfer.
    So I definitely plan to use something like chargebee.

    1. 1

      Great insight!
      However, Chargebee is very expensive once you go out of the free first 50k. Unless you are making 50k/month, they may eat a huge chunk plus fees...

      May be worth for an MVP to decide which payment methods are worth or not, have to check how easy it is to integrate...

  8. 1

    I have used the API for both, but only used Stripe for collecting payments. Having used the API for both, it seems as though Stripe has a better API to reason with and use.

  9. 1

    I personally have really not enjoyed working with Braintree as compared to Stripe. I've developed one web app that processes subscription payments with Braintree (including semi-complicated discount, location based taxes, and pro-rating features) and it just seems to almost always be behind Stripe in ease of use and useful features.

    On the flip side I've used Stripe for maybe 2 dozen client apps now, as well as my own and it has been great to work with. From single payments, to subscriptions, to marketplaces using Stripe Connect, I would recommend it over Braintree 99% of the time. The 1% would be if you absolutely have to have paypal support.

    1. 1

      Let's do the lean thing and verify the assumption. Stripe supports payment methods other than credit card, so it may be that Paypal is not that important after all...

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