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Ask HN: Can anyone compare Stripe & Samurai?

8 points by maxbrown ↗ HN
Both seem to be new and exciting alternatives to the existing online payment solutions.

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!

4 comments

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JoshTriplett
Looking at the pricing offers one obvious answer: Samurai charges 2.3% plus $0.30, plus another $0.15 for American Express, and also charges $25/month. Stripe charges 2.9% plus $0.30, but charges no monthly fee and doesn't vary the price by card type.

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.

CameronHickey
I don't think it makes sense to compare these products directly. Samurai is a gateway only -- you still need a merchant account which is a lengthy process, while Stripe lets you start accepting payments immediately. That distinction implies they are for different use-cases. Samurai is useful if you want a simpler integration than Authorize.net and Strip if you have nothing, and want to get up and running immediately.

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.