You can look at this comparison in a few ways. We share a lot of the same investors: Both YC, SV Angel, a16z, etc. They've gotten a lot more funding than we have, and so have a bigger team.
You get paid faster with Balanced: we have _same day_ payouts to Wells Fargo customers, and _next day_ payouts to any other bank. Stripe is seven days.
Feature wise, we provide a lot of the same things, but Balanced has more. We support ACH debits AND credits, for example, and Stripe only supports credits. We're soon adding push-to-card as well. We have escrow, and let you choose how long to hold funds in it.
Speaking of escrow, in general, we have lots of extra features for marketplaces, since that's our bread and butter. Stripe now has a marketplace product, Connect, but it basically requires all of your sellers to sign up for Stripe. Our customers tell us that white label is important, and so Balanced is 100% white labeled. We individually underwrite all sellers, and we give you full control over your descriptor, on a per-transaction basis.
Our fee structure is 100% transparent, and the same for everyone. You can negotiate with Stripe on your rates, ours are just published publicly: https://www.balancedpayments.com/pricing
In general, Balanced is striving to be as open and transparent as possible: new feature discussion is done in the open, on GitHub. As I just mentioned, our pricing is transparent. We're working with Gittip and several other companies to start the Open Company Initiative[1] to help promote general open-ness. Loving that internal transparency from Stripe with their emails. [2]
To say some more good things about Stripe, they have launched in a few places internationally, and we are still US only. We can accept foreign credit cards, but merchants need to be in the US.[3] Hoping to fix that, regulations are hard.
Stripe has a loyal fanbase for a reason: they do a great job. I really appreciate the clarity of their docs, for example. Patrick, I know you're as much of an HN junkie as I am: congrats on the raise. Let's all keep dragging the payments industry kicking and screaming into the future. ;)
Here's some links from others, comparing the two of us:
* http://blog.localon.com/2013/11/21/why-we-switched-from-stri...
* http://blog.apixchange.com/2013/10/why-api-xchange-uses-bala...
* http://www.quora.com/Balanced/How-does-Balanced-compare-agai...
* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14289347/stripe-vs-balanc...
As always, you can reach me here on at steve@balancedpayments.com to talk about any of this more.
1: http://opencompany.biz , though we just chipped in for .org: https://github.com/opencompany/www.opencompany.org/issues/59