Best Stripe Alternatives?

Full disclosure: Dev Advocate for Square

Feel free to try out Square, but I'm going to be transparent in that any issue that you might be having with passing tokens from a front-end to your back-end for payment processing isn't necessarily going to be solved by switching processors.

It sounds like someone else mentioned that you might not be supporting Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). Additionally, just because you got a token and created a customer, doesn't necessitate that a transaction would be successful. There are many other factors that can cause a transaction to fail.

Sometimes the transactions fail for fairly vague reasons sent from the bank, so you'll just have a generic declined message. Your best bet is to attempt to root cause the reason for the failures with your processor. You want to find out if this is only for transactions with a particular bank, credit card network, etc...

If you're unable to root cause the failures with your processor, then that might be your actual reason for switching.

[EDIT] Not going to be linking out here, but you're always welcome to talk to engineers on our team in our community chat channel that is linked throughout our developer docs. Only adding this having seen an edit above regarding a desire to talk to an engineer.

Edwin from Stripe here. Sorry you've been having trouble as of late—do you know yet what’s causing those transactions to fail? I'm happy to help troubleshoot if you email edwin@stripe.com.

I may be biased, but I work at a competing processor called Adyen. We process payments for many of the world's leading e-commerce companies (Uber, Netflix, Spotify, FB, MSFT, etc...).

Merchants switching to Adyen from Stripe generally experience increased performance (higher authorization rates, no downtime), and more transparency into what's going on with their transactions. We've put a lot of effort recently into making our APIs and documentation more developer-friendly-- an area where we know Stripe excels.

Feel free to reach out directly if you'd like more info! eric [dot] jacobs [at] adyen [dot] com

> We want to own the entire checkout experience

The less you see, the better. Being PCI DSS compliant (as soon as you see/store sensitive transaction data) is a pain...

If you don't know what's causing the issue, how do you know the problem isn't on your end? Switching providers won't fix that.

Braintree is probably the closest to stripe. I only implemented the sandbox version though.

If stripe says it's the bank's fault though, it probably is. We had issues with a lot of payments failing with "no not honor". It was the same with other providers and did turn out to be the banks

> transactions are falling because some issue when passing the token/customer to stripe

That reads more like an issue in your stack than with stripe. Has this happened since 3d secure rolled out? Perhaps something with the same site cookie changes? Ca bundle out of date if this is backend passing to stripe?

Without knowing why you are having issues, you're running blind.

Too vague of a question, given the different ways a PSP can be regarded as “good”. Some have nicer docs, some have cheaper prices. It’s all in what you need and your volume, margins, return rate, etc.

I’d take a look at something like https://www.spreedly.com/ or https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/ if you want to avoid lock in with Adyen, etc. Something like VGS can work where you don’t store credit card data but also don’t rely on a single PSP for everything.

When you are saying that you want to own the entire checkout experience, what exactly do you mean? Do you want to own everything related to processing credit card payments, including card data storage etc? It would also good to specify where your company is located.

We've had good experiences with Braintree, Adyen, Stripe and multiple other payment services for our customers at Shoperb (www.shoperb.com. It does sound like the problem you are facing may be technical implementation related. Have you done a custom implementation or using what Stripe provides out of the box?

I'm going to build a small online service with only one product and a subscription fee by month. I had to compare the Payment Gateways to know which one fit my needs.

To do this comparison, I made a small spreadsheet which could (maybe, or not) help you. Here it is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12-sWEe-gsoGm0kT5LMcM...

Feel free to add comments if you find any issue.

If you're having problems with Stripe, you're probably going to have more problems elsewhere.

I recommend Shopify's Checkout

Disclaimer: I work for Shopify (But I also use it for my side hustles)

The biggest benefit is that with the Shopify checkout you can support credit cards, Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Crypto and more with ONE integration.

You also get discounts codes and logic out of the box (buy one get one, X percentage off, fixed amount off, etc)

And all you have to do is listen to the order completion web hook and do whatever you want on your side.

You can use the JavaScript SDK to send your users to the checkout. https://shopify.github.io/js-buy-sdk/

Hope that helps!

Ceffio, Payments integration can be a tad bit overwhelming if you are new to payments. But, in my limited experience of about 12 years integrating payments with Authorize.Net, Stripe, Braintree, I can advise that switching mostly won’t fix the issue. There are a lot of edge exceptions in the response payload returned from Stripe (or just about anyone else) that you can must account for.

Also, it is fairly easy to build a PCI compliant stripe checkout experience without having to send customers visually to another stripe.

I can help with a quick look if you want to hit me up. Always happy to help. Rc at 44tables dot com

I have also been looking for an alternative. In my case I often incorporate Stripe for clients projects. Would love a solution which offers a referral commission...

Stripe is also willing to deplatform those they ideologically disagree with. We need better, more neutral, more reliable payment services.

I can recommend against using Zuora and Adyen based on my two years of working on a large scale migration to them.

I use Paddle for https://www.checkbot.io/. The major reason I chose them over Stripe is Paddle deal with country specific tax laws for you (like complicated EU VAT). Paddle take a bigger transaction fee though.

you can chat with devs on IRC if you go to freenode and the #stripe channel. it's proven to be an invaluable resource on some issues.

Don't try to own the checkout experience.

We had the same issue with the token/customer thing. It seems to be an issue with client libraries.

I think GoCardless is another type of payment service that could fit your domain possibly.

Paypal ? Square ?

A lot depends on your use case.

Authorize.net was my go-to before Stripe. PayPal if you like pain.

We use Paddle because they handle taxes for you, unlike Stripe.

I am 99.999% positive you're doing something wrong.

.. the grass is not always greener