Hacker News Reader

Comment by boucher | Hacker News Reader

ActiveMerchant's entire purpose is about abstracting all the different payment gateways into one API. If you know for sure you're going to use Stripe, or if you want to use Stripe specific features (of which there are quite a lot worth using) ActiveMerchant is less valuable to you.

It's also worth noting that ActiveMerchant hails from a time long before Stripe or even Braintree, and so it supports gateways that are quite a bit more complex. (disclosure: I wrote the ActiveMerchant Stripe support).

View on HN

Yes. Now that I look over the ActiveMerchant docs again, I have a few observations/questions:

- With AM, you have to accept the credit card details (even if you don't store them), and then send them on the the payment gateway. Even with AM's Stripe implementation, it's your Rails app sending the info to Stripe. There is no Javascript sending the details straight from the user's browser. (Or am I mistaken about that?) So you have a higher PCI burden than if you used Stripe in the normal way.

- AM doesn't provide any persistence, just an API to the payment gateway, so you would still have to roll you own tables/models for payment success/failure.

- I don't see support in AM for subscriptions.

Looking at AM again now, perhaps my previous comment was too harsh, although that's how I remember it when I checked it out long ago. Even now, I'm tempted to say that Payola's landing page already has better documentation than AM.

ActiveMerchant is just an abstraction layer around various gateways. It's goal was never to provide a full-stack solution, but to simply making working with numerous gateways easier because you have a common interface for working between all of them.

As for subscriptions, that's a feature that could be added but many of the Gateways that ActiveMerchant supports don't have subscriptions baked into them (compared to say Stripe).

You could of course have your application store the credit card information and manage the charges yourself using ActiveMerchant, but that opens a bunch of PCI compliance and such.

If you just need to accept money and aren't already bound to a specific merchant account, then plain ole Stripe or Payola are a better option.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com