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> Adyen only goes after large businesses and has something many others, including Stripe cannot compete with efficiently: (far) lower pricing, higher market coverage.

The reason is: larger businesses will require more payment options than Stripe offers.

India? Adyen got you covered: [1] Philippines? Yup, everything [2], including offline payments in stores [3]. Mobile payments in Africa? No worries [4] And so on and so forth. On their payment site they don't even list all payment methods, there are so many. You search for a country or a payment method, and they show what's available.

Stripe has a very long way to go to realistically compete with Adyen.

[1] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=india

[2] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=the-philippines

[3] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=convenience-stores...

[4] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=mobile-network-ope...

Many many countries have payment methods that only exist in that country, but make up a large percentage of online payments within that country. I’ve personally seen Adyen chosen over Stripe at a few companies that were aggressively expanding internationally for exactly that reason.

Adyen seems to implement every payment method you can think of. And if you don’t want to implement them, their white label payment page is able to dynamically show payment methods based on user location and merchant preferences.

This is seriously lacking in terms of what's available on the market in Japan now.

No support for point payments (like RakutenEdy payment), neither Linepay, Rakupay, Merpay, Paypay and other QR payment providers, nor Suica or Pasmo pay, and this is still just the tip of the iceberg what's available in Japan and missing in Adyen (Nanaco, Waon, dPay, auPay, etc). Just saying, before you drink too much of that kool-aid.

I would assume it's lacking similarly in other markets too.

Yeah, and how many payment providers provide all that and all the rest that Adyen provides?

I'm drinking Adyen kool-aid because I worked for a company that needed payment methods in Japan, and in India, and in Korea, and in Latin America, and in Europe.

Adyen provides all that. Yes, they will not have 100% of local providers, but it's still 100% better than any competition.

GMO PG is famous option for EC but more enterprisey. https://www.gmo-pg.com/en/service/mulpay/

International is actually really important. It's not just that you are currently international, it's do you have any plans to go international ever? Because if so, you might have to rewrite your entire payment stack at that point.

I can't say much but I'll say that Adyen is light years ahead of their competition much more than they let on.

Source: Worked in software for payments processing a couple billions a year.

Can you say a little bit more? I'm intrigued!

Example would be intelligent acquirer routing based off historical information and that individual transaction. Most of what is done in the industry usually refers to this as bin routing.

This is much more known now but not as known 6-10 years ago and guess who was very aggressive at maximizing this before I saw Stripe make a solid effort at this...

They've also got some of the highest quality transaction volume, who is doing a chargeback on Netflix? Nobody. Lot of possibilities down the road when you have access to this kind of volume.

Some realities manifest at different scales. Once you're in the largest tier, the "where is the money" reality affects things.

Large corporations are the larger, wealthier segment.

A big chunk of "startup business strategies" ignore this market. This makes a lot of sense for a startup. You don't really care what the bigger market is as a startup, you care what market is easier to access. Assuming the market is big (eg online payments), the size of the market isn't a limiting factor.

That works in-context. I'f you're trying to build a startup, landing a multi-year contract with a big company is a bad angle for multiple reasons. Not always, but mostly in the generic case. Long sales cycles. Checklist feature demands. Custom features. Besides being hard for most founders, it pushes in the wrong directions. Meanwhile, who cares if you're addressing a $3bn market or a $800bn market. Both of those are big enough for a startup aiming for $8m in revenue. Your problem is sucking and failure, not pyrrhic victories.

Also, if you are successful enough, small markets become big markets. When Google IPO-ed, they competed with yellow pages for mom-n-pop business & such.

OTOH, most of the market is large companies, governments, etc. That's reality, and it means something. Now that VCs fund startups so generously, a common pattern is bootstrapping in a shallow pond... then jumping into the main pond once you have momentum.

EG, Having a "developer cult" mentality, like stripe, at your base will serve you in the long term. Enterprise developers do have influence. It's never what makes a decision, but it can be a favourable wind.

If you are a startup, courting a large customer can compromise the integrity of your project. You have no leverage at all, which means the product will start to look like what they want it to be.

And because you made a deal with them when you had no leverage, the terms will also be awful, and difficult to renegotiate. So you have to go try to increase margins off of smaller customers, all with a product that looks like what the person you aren't making money off of wanted it to look like.

Hypothetically speaking, of course. Because I definitely for sure did not work for a place who tried to go big too soon and ended up with a modest exit.

It's reasonable to look at this from a short-term vs. long-term perspective as well.

Stripe dominates the hobby & startup segments with the hope that those companies will, someday, become very successful. Now, any company at a certain size will be able to switch between payment processors with little cost, but Stripe still has that initial relationship. They certainly have the opportunity to grow business with their current relationships over time, and in some ways more than Adyen can.

Additionally, Stripe will always work to get more payment methods & exist in more countries. It's always some work to do so, but number of payment methods isn't insurmountable, and it's only a matter of time before Stripe & Adyen are difficult to distinguish between their offerings.

Lastly, Stripe has a lot of breadth of products compared to Adyen. Stripe Sigma alone is a huge value add that a regular "insights platform" lacks. There's a lot here to unpack, for sure.

When doing B2B with big corps developers opinion is not of such huge importance, they're not making any calls about closing the deal. Also integration will almost always be a part of the deal, so again devs care less, they'll have someone to come over and help set it up. It's in a big contrast with startups and small teams where it's usually up to devs to choose which payment processor will be used and how, and they'll be the ones expected to integrate it.

Developpers opinion doesn't matter much, but developpment cost and reliability does. If a project takes 6 months vs 3 weeks, it's a completely different game.

Even for big B2B corps, it's the difference between a project you can lead on your own and get credit for it, or something that will go upper in the chain because of all the approvals you need for it.

In a previous life, to get an Adyen contract and dev. environment and then the prod credentials, it took us something like 3 months, and we had a smaller PSP integrated for a different project in the meantime. That meant that for any project we didn't have as much volume, we'd go though faster PSPs instead of reusing the Adyen connection.

My experience is that developer opinions don't matter "today", but today's ICs move up the ladder and matter "tomorrow". Much as how consumer brands work so hard to capture teenagers, because brand loyalty acquired in that period can last for decades.

> Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage)

Actually looks like 43B EUR, so $50B.

> So what is the difference? ... The developer experience for Adyen is decent.

That hasn't been our experience at all. In our case (a few years back, they might've improved in the meantime) Adyen experience was pretty lousy. Not especially bad, but average - considering many payment gateway APIs were as bad.

In contrast, Stripe was (at the same time, and continues to this day) miles ahead, a pure developer delight. Properly documented, with working API wrappers, working examples, correct API responses. It just worked as expected and was easy to understand.

Unfortunately I don't recall specifics with Adyen as it was a while back, but I know we were pretty unhappy with it. To this day I've never looked at it again, while I recommend Stripe to anyone in position to use it.

> It will be fascinating to see what happens as these two companies expand to compete with each other

Very unlikely, as both markets (smb payments and enterprise payments) is unlimited, there is a few chance they will try to compete with each other. On the other hand almost no company is able to be a leader in both the smb and enterprise space, because as you mentioned it, the cultures need to be different, the customer support need to be different, the product need to be different,... More info here : https://blog.luap.info/why-most-saas-companies-cant-be-succe...

==On the other hand almost no company is able to be a leader in both the smb and enterprise space==

Concur, Microsoft Office, GSuite, Tableau, DocuSign, Salesforce, Adobe, Slack and Zoom to name a few.

> both markets (smb payments and enterprise payments) is unlimited

What? There are only so many companies in need of (or open to changing) payment processing software at a given time. When it comes to larger firms, those numbers get smaller. That's the opposite of unlimited.

Well, as a single illustrative data point, retail sales numbers were announced for Canada this morning. Coming out of the pandemic lock-down total sales up 18%, online up 100+% but still only accounts for 8% of total retail. That leaves a lot of greenfield market to go after without ever competing.

I wouldn't be surprised if "so many" turns to be > 1 000 000.

Adyen's pricing seems to be higher and way more confusing than Stripe's.[0][1]

AMEX and Discover's transaction costs are a percent higher on Adyen, and I can't actually tell what Mastercard or Visa will charge since it is obfuscated. The cherry on top is the FAQ at the bottom that describes what interchange++ is but doesn't actually tell you a range of fees that it can be. I guess it's cool to see in detail all the middle men taking a cut of my revenue, but I'm way more concerned about the actual amount that is being taken out ahead of time instead of it being a surprise for every transaction.

[0] https://www.adyen.com/pricing?navItem=northamerica [1] https://stripe.com/pricing

It basically is always cheaper for almost everything than Stripe (except AMEX). Interchange++ is always less than Stripe's equivalent charge (2.9% or lower for European cards) and 12¢ is less than 30¢.

The page I agree is confusing.

Bear in mind, at any meaningful volume, Stripe does IC++ too and it isn't expensive

edit: Looking at their (listed) acquiring and processing fees, Stripe appears to be cheaper

That said, I don't know how Adyen's support is, but sadly Stripe's is honestly absolutely crap. Every single support interaction I've had with them has been incredibly slow and incredibly painful.

I don't understand where Stripe is showing as being cheaper?

Adyen for example for Mastercard: €0,10 + Interchange++ (average total 0.90% - 1.10%)

Stripe advertised in Europe for Mastercard: €0,25 + 1.4% of transaction.

It's not publicly listed, but from experience, their IC++ costs are decent

I'd guess that with the bigger deals they are doing all these things are up for negotiation anyway so they might not need a slick landing page with a simple pricing that a developer can understand in a few minutes.

Why is it remarkable that the company is based in Amsterdam?

I live there. There's a decent but not great startup culture. The services infrastructure is fantastic and there are many massive multinationals based here.

I read this sentence as saying "outside the valley" more than saying that Amsterdam is a particularly surprising place.

I believe that "remarkable" was referring to Adyen getting and seeking little to no publicity compared to Stripe, yet having a higher market valuation, rather than its location in the Netherlands.

Indeed. I think I never heard about Adyen before moving here to the Netherlands (September 2019) to work as a software engineer.

Not only I discovered my company uses it, but plenty of other business I interact on a daily basis (from the market to utility-ish services) do.

Curious, does Stripe have a "Get the kids to take up smoking strategy" or do startups drop Stripe generally once they reach a certain size?

You can make a very good business of consulting people off of Stripe. Developers do love it, and for good reason (as the article points out). But it is expensive. If you are running $1,000,000 in credit card transactions per year at $29 each you will pay almost $40,000 in fees. Get up to $10,000,000 in transactions and you are now at $400,000 (this is basic pricing without volume discount, but they are still more expensive than most other interchanges). Suddenly it makes sense to look at other credit card processing technologies. There are a lot of costs to processing credit cards. But, if you have a CFO at your startup, they'll definitely run the numbers.

I think "Get the kids to take up smoking strategy" is a fairly accurate description of their Atlas program https://stripe.com/atlas

And their slogan "Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet" https://stripe.com/about also alludes to the strategy of helping actually create more online businesses, as opposed to just getting all online businesses to use Stripe.

I think a lot of the big valuation is based on hoping the former is true. Stripe has a few big customers, and some of them are companies like Instacart that are younger than Stripe and have been on the platform since the beginning

One of the startup I worked for in London was using Adyen. That is to say they are not limited to enterprise customers.

We were processing a few millions a year at that time, which is quite small by enterprise standards. No idea how much volume it was years before when the company started using Adyen, I imagine not a lot.

Could you elaborate on how company culture is different?

Seems like Discover and AE are more expensive than Stripe at least for North America:

https://www.adyen.com/pricing?navItem=northamerica