I'm able to do the basic comparison - Samurai is still Gateway/Merch account unlike Stripe, but seems to be 0.6% less per transaction and possibly offer more features because of the Gateway?
Is anyone able to offer a more detailed comparison of the two? Thanks in advance!
As far as I can tell, Samurai doesn't seem to have automatic subscription handling, or if they do they don't seem to say anything about it on their features page. On the other hand, Samurai does offer the option of integrating with other merchant accounts in addition to their own, which you might care about.
Based on pricing alone, if you do more than about $4166/month in business, or you want to go to the effort of passing different transactions to different merchant accounts, you might save money with Samurai; otherwise you'll pay less with Stripe. Apart from that, Stripe appears to have some features that Samurai doesn't.
Personally, unless something changes between now and launch, I suspect we'll probably go with Stripe for Apters (http://apters.com), for simplicity of subscription handling if nothing else.
There's a recent post in Quora comparing the two that does a great job of breaking it down. http://www.quora.com/For-payment-processing-how-do-Stripe-an...
The simplest example of the difference is the sign-up process, Samurai requires you to enter a company name before you can start using the service -- Stripe doesn't even need an email address.
Another key difference is that (from what I can tell) Stripe handles all PCI compliance, whereas Samurai still requires you to handle some aspects.