Top Five Alternatives to Stripe in Australia

Stripe is one of the best-known payment-gateway providers in the world. It is trusted by major global brands, including the mighty Amazon. There are, however, many alternatives to Stripe available in Australia and some of these may offer better deals for your business, especially if it’s on the smaller side.

Understanding Stripe

Stripe is well-known for being a payment gateway created with developers in mind. It’s also a highly-customisable solution with a wide range of client and server libraries to help you create your own solution. 

If this isn’t what you’re looking for, Stripe also offers a wide range of partner integrations and an online dashboard. That being said, so do several of its competitors.

Stripe pros and cons

Stripe is known for offering three main benefits. These are:

1. A high level of customisability

2. The ability to manage all payment-related actions from one place.

3. Global reach

However, Stripe is also known for having three main drawbacks. These are:

1. Stripe’s out-of-the-box solutions are not as comprehensive as its support for developers

2. Its customer service can be challenging to navigate

3. Stripe is very much a card-first company and its global reach comes from its integration with the card networks rather than its own infrastructure

The main alternatives to Stripe

The main alternatives to Stripe in Australia are Square, PayPal, GoCardless, eWay and Braintree. These can all be used to replace Stripe. Alternatively, with the exception of Square, they can be used to complement Stripe. Here is a quick overview of each of these alternatives to Stripe.

Square 

Square is a payment gateway provider and point-of-sale system that offers a range of features to help businesses manage their payments. Like Stripe, Square is very much focused on payment cards.

Square’s transaction fees are competitive and it offers a range of pricing plans for businesses with different needs. This includes a free plan.

Square’s headline selling points are:

1. Its ease of use

2. Its vast range of integrated tools and partner integrations

These selling points are, however, also Square’s weaknesses. Essentially, this platform’s simplicity and high level of native functionality are very appealing to smaller businesses. Unfortunately, they also tend to make it uncomfortably restrictive for larger ones.

PayPal

PayPal is an ewallet. This means it allows account holders to load it with funds which they can then spend at merchants that accept PayPal. Many PayPal transactions are backed by cards. Some are backed by bank debits and a few by funds sent by other PayPal account holders.

PayPal’s fees are on the expensive side even for merchants that qualify for volume discounts/custom pricing. With that said, they do have a pricing plan that has no monthly fees.

PayPal’s headline selling points are:

1. Its ease of use.

2. Its wide acceptance and recognisability.

It is, however, worth noting that any customer who has a PayPal account has to have a means of funding it. That means a card and/or a bank account. This means that any payment processed by PayPal could, potentially, be processed by another payment gateway provider.

Also, while PayPal is effectively an online-only payment gateway provider, it does have a subsidiary brand, Zettle, that provides real-world payment processing services. Unfortunately, Zettle did not make it into the list of top five alternatives to Stripe.

GoCardless

GoCardless focuses on bank-to-bank payments. In Australia, it supports both regular BECS payments and PayTo payments. PayTo is powered by the Australian New Payments Platform (NPP). It makes taking both one-off and recurring payments faster, easier and more secure than ever before.

GoCardless’ transaction prices are very attractive. It also offers a range of service packages to suit different needs, including a plan with no monthly fees.

GoCardless’ headline selling points are:

1. Its ease of use

2. Its low percentage of failed payments

GoCardless can be used via an online dashboard, a range of partner integrations or a robust and well-documented API. This means that it’s easy to fit GoCardless into existing business systems and processes. 

What’s more, GoCardless can help to reduce the amount of payment-related administration businesses have to manage. 

In particular, the fact that GoCardless is a bank-to-bank payment system means that payment failures are minimal. When they do happen, payments can be retried automatically or manually, according to each merchant’s preference.

eWay

eWay offers a range of payment processing options, including credit and debit card payments, recurring payments, and the ability to accept payments in multiple currencies. eWay's transaction fees are competitive. Furthermore, they decrease as the monthly sales volume increases. 

In addition to its payment processing services, eWay offers a range of features to help businesses manage their payments and sales, including invoicing, reporting tools and integration with popular e-commerce platforms like WooCommerce and Magento.

eWay’s headline selling points are:

1. Its emphasis on fraud prevention

2. Its value-add functionality

It’s important to note that, currently, eWay only processes online payments. Merchants needing to process payments in the real world therefore require another solution.

Braintree

Braintree is actually owned by PayPal. Like PayPal, it allows merchants to charge customers through multiple payment types (including PayPal). Unlike PayPal, its transaction fees are fairly competitive. It also has options for volume discounts and/or custom pricing.

Braintree offers a huge range of advanced features, including reporting tools to help businesses analyse their sales data. These features can, however, be complex to set up and use.

Braintree’s headline selling points are:

1. Its support for a wide range of payment types

2. Its advanced functionality

Like eWay, Braintree is very much geared towards online and mobile payments. Merchants wanting to take payments in the real world therefore require another solution.

How can GoCardless help?

GoCardless is a global payments solution that helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of financial admin your team needs to deal with. Find out how GoCardless can help you with one-off or recurring payments.