Stripe vs. Paymill
As you might know 9elements is specialized in building digital products.
One of the tasks that comes with almost every product is payments - after all you want to earn some money. When it comes to payments there are plenty of options out there and choosing the right payment provider can be a tough job. For many the hurdle is not only technical but also economical. You might have to deal with credit card clearance contracts directly or you have to do a security audit to ensure that your service is PCI compliant.
In this blog post I want to compare Stripe and its German clone counterpart Paymill. Both services make it dead simple to integrate payments into your project. Both of these services are extremely developer friendly - no business hassle involved, just nice Rest APIs!
A little bit on the background: Stripe is a US based service that was launched in 2011. They marched out to disrupt the current defacto services like PayPal or Google Wallet. Paymill was launched by German clone-incubator Rocket Internet in 2012 and when we initially created Salon.io there was no other option since Stripe wasn’t available in Germany. Usually I’m not comfy using copycats but the guys at Paymill did a pretty good job to create an awesome product. They covered all the important features of Stripe and they added some good UI improvements, too. Stripe is open for many countries and currencies now and it’s time to review our technical choice. We used Stripe in a new project which will be released soon so we know both services - here are our learnings:
Subscriptions
Subscriptions are possible in both payment solutions. But to be honest the usage feels a bit more natural in Stripe. If you create a subscription an invoice object is also generated. An invoice in Stripe is not the same as the e-mail or PDF that goes out to the customer, it’s the data structure that can be used to generate this e-mail or PDF. Every time a payment recurs another invoice object is created and your application is informed via a webhook. Webhooks are URLs that are called if an event in Stripe occurs. A bigger advantage is that a lot of corner cases can be handled automatically. For example if a customer upgrades a plan from Silver to Gold you might want to give the customer a prorata discount for the new subscription. These things can be easily managed using the settings. At Paymill you have to take care of these things by yourself and set them up manually.
Coupons
Coupons are completely missing at Paymill. The options in Stripe are quite versatile since you can choose between redeem dimensions or time dimensions (once, multi month, forever). Since these coupons are API first class citizens you can leverage them as a marketing workhorse and don’t have to worry about all the calculations in your app.
Eco System
Both services are providing solid libraries and gems for every major programming platform like Rails or Node.js. Since Stripe got a bigger momentum a nice eco system has evolved around it. Especially for Rails there are battlefield proved engines that just work. We’ve evaluated Koudoku which is a fully fledged Rails Engine that handles Plans & Subscriptions - but eventually we find a bit too much (it even helped generating the views). Eventually we went with Stripe Event that just handles Stripe’s webhooks but it does what it is supposed to do and it’s quite lightweight. The Paymill ecosystem is not as substantial because for standard Rails projects there is no such a thing like Paymill Events - you have to deal with webhooks yourself. Side-note: There are ready to-use integrations for ecommerce projects that are using shop systems like Spree or Magento. We haven’t tested those but they look quite solid.
When to use Stripe
If you need to market your product quickly, I’d definitely advise you to use Stripe since the Eco System and the momentum of innovations it is ahead of the competition.
When to use Paymill
If you’re in a country where Stripe is simply not available, like in Northern Europe or Turkey or if you want to process non credit card payments like the german ELV or the EU SEPA payments, Paymill is an option.
Tips (apply to both)
While developing you might want to test your stuff. Testing Stripe events like recurring payments can be really painful since you have to actually wait until a payment occurs again. Testing the webhooks in a live environment can be a tedious task. Luckily there is a handy service called Ultrahook that helps you to proxy callbacks to your local developing machine. If you have further questions then ping us on Twitter or write us an email.
