The act of buying and selling products and services have found a home online, and these processes are now being called e-commerce. However, when it comes to the payment portion of these transactions, then one gets two options, Cash On Delivery (CoD), and Online Payment. Usually, in order to prevent any hassles and smooth deliveries, people often go for the latter.
There are several countries that help facilitate and execute the procedure of online payments so that the seller themselves do not need to have the technical expertise or knowledge to create a payment gateway of their own. Two of the biggest players in this industry are Stripe and Authorize.net.
Stripe vs Authorize.net
The main difference between Stripe and Authorize.net is that Stripe is a less expensive and highly customizable payment gateway option, while Authorize.net is a faster and more secure option.
Comparison Table between Stripe and Authorize.net
| Parameters of Comparison | Stripe | Authorize.net |
| Price | Stripe is a less expensive option. | Authorize.net costs more than Stripe. |
| Security | Stripe has lesser security features than Authorize.net. | Authorize.net is the more secure of the two. |
| Speed | Stripe is slower than Authorize.net. | Authorize.net has significantly higher speeds. |
| Customizability | Stripe is highly customizable. | Authorize.net is not as customizable as Stripe. |
| Flexibility | Stripe does not allow third-party merchant accounts. | Authorize.net allows third-party merchant accounts. |
What is Stripe?
Stripe is a financial SaaS company that is based in San Francisco. The term SaaS stands for ‘Software as a Service’ and is used when the software is used as a means to perform any operation and hence service is provided by the company. The most popular service provided by this company is providing payment gateways and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Their primary customer base includes e-commerce websites and similar businesses.
Stripe was created by two entrepreneur Irish brothers, John and Patrick Collison back in 2010. In its starting days, Stripe had acquired Kickoff, which is a chat and task management application. Initially, they started out in Palo Alto but then moved to San Francisco.
The main function of Stripe is to provide APIs that e-commerce web developers or other web developers who are building websites that involve transactions can use. These APIs serve as a payment gateway, which facilitates the transfer of money from the customer to the seller.
Stripe had decided to enhance their security tools and features, and in order to do so, they had released an anti-fraud tool called ‘Radar’ in April 2018 which is a tool to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions.
Again, in 2018 itself, the company made another leap towards expanding its service by making a billing product for online businesses. This is a very popular feature, as this helped businesses that have a subscription-based form of payment to use Stripe’s services as well.
Stripe has played its part in supporting startups too. In 2016, Stripe has launched a service called Atlas. Atlas is basically a service that helps startups register as US Corporations. Since they wanted to try out this product first before actually launching the service to the open market, hence Atlas was initially an invite-only service.
Stripe did not just stick to gateways and APIs. They also progressed further and offered monetary services such as loans and credit cards to users. Also, in October 2020, Stripe had announced a new program called Stripe Climate, which is basically a service that helps businesses fund for the research and capture of atmospheric carbon.
What is Authorize.net?
Authorize.net is a financial company that provides payment gateway services that helps e-commerce websites and online service providers to accept payments through various methods, such as debit card, credit card, online money transfer, etc. Authorize.net was initially founded back in 1996 in Utah, by Jeff Knowles. This company is now a subsidiary of Visa. One of the biggest benefits of Authorize.net is that it lets the users sign into their credit card, and then shop and purchase items from any website they want and directly make payments. This is very convenient with respect to other services, where one has to sign in each time to make a transaction.
Although the company now focuses a lot on security, however earlier it has a history of a few major outages which was probably what led the company to become more security-centric as it is right now. In 2004, they have suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which had lasted for more than a week, and this had led to a pause in payment operations and transactions of all its users. Again in 2009, they had an outage where their whole web infrastructure had crashed and all systems went offline. At that time, they already had a huge userbase, none of whom could process any payments of their credit cards.
However, now Authorize.net has taken a lot of security measures and is reportedly even one of the best when it comes to payment gateway security.
Main Differences Between Stripe and Authorize.net
- Stripe is cheaper than Authorize.net.
- Authorize.net has better security measures than Stripe.
- Authorize.net has faster processing speeds compared to Stripe.
- Stripe is comparatively more customizable than Authorize.net.
- Authorize.net allows third-party merchant accounts, while Stripe does not.
Conclusion
The e-commerce sector is a rapidly rising industry with more and more products and services coming online every day. It is natural that this stiff competition is going to give rise to various companies who have very unique features to offer. At one point it becomes tough for the user to decide what is best for them A little research into them can easily help one decide.
References
- https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=CtwvDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR15&dq=stripe+payment&ots=ZTy9MKutnV&sig=uRUal0JjExzvvJYHmRJc4V7mXDM