After doing your homework, there will be two pretty clear contenders for your money: Stripe and PayPal . Offering comparable features, choosing between the two feels like choosing between apples…and more apples. That’s where this article comes in.

Today we are going to compare these two payment gateways and get to the bottom of the Stripe vs PayPal debate.

What are Stripe and PayPal doing?

Stripe (founded in 2011) and PayPal (founded in 1998) are payment gateways that act as intermediaries between merchants and the appropriate credit card networks/financial institutions to authorize and accept payments.

The complexity of these relationships can get quite complicated. A simple way to view a payment gateway is to be an envoy that routes information between merchants and banks.

See how Kinsta stacks up against the competition.

Here is a visual breakdown of where payment gateways are located in the eCommerce web.

A payment gateway isn’t the only way to accept payments online, but it’s one of the easiest options to get started.

In other words, in most scenarios, it can help you get out of PCI compliance . And if you decide to go the gateway route, you’re going to come across Stripe and Paypal again and again. There are many other payment gateways like Authorize.net, 2Checkout, Braintree (owned by Paypal), but Stripe and PayPal are by far two of the easiest to use .

For good reason, too: they have a long-standing hold on the market. According to data from Datanyze , PayPal is used by 64% of the market. Stripe comes second with around 20%. In September 2018, Stripe was worth $20 billion ! 😮

It should be noted that in the graph above, Square is also becoming a strong competitor in the market. Although it takes only 2% of the market, its market share is growing rapidly.

However, their service is generally not considered a payment gateway, but rather an end-to-end payment processing system, and therefore outside the scope of this article.

With that caveat, what are payment gateways for? First and foremost, online stores use payment gateways. Under Armor is an example of a store that uses both Stripe and PayPal.