Who are Stripe's competitors?
Stripe is private and files no 10-K, so it has no Competition section of its own; the record of who it competes with comes from rivals' filings and the trade press. Global Payments' 2025 10-K lists Stripe among its primary U.S. merchant-acquiring competitors, alongside Fiserv, Chase Paymentech, Toast, Shopify and Block. Marqeta's 2025 10-K names Adyen and Stripe as emerging card-issuing competitors, and Payoneer's lists "merchant service providers like Adyen, Braintree and Stripe". In online and enterprise payments the main rivals are Adyen, which processed €803.8 billion in the first half of 2026; PayPal, including Braintree, with $1.79 trillion of total payment volume in 2025; and Checkout.com, which processed more than $300 billion in 2025 and whose spokesperson called it "the only viable challenger to Stripe" in 2023. In point-of-sale and small-business acquiring Stripe meets Block's Square, Fiserv's Clover, Global Payments, which bought Worldpay in January 2026, and JPMorgan Payments, which American Banker calls the world's largest merchant acquirer. Plaid competes with Stripe's Financial Connections in bank data, and Airwallex in cross-border payments and billing. Stripe, for its part, says businesses on it generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34%. Several rivals are also partners: Shopify relies on Stripe and PayPal for Shopify Payments, and Stripe and Advent offered $53.4 billion for PayPal in July 2026 before ending the pursuit in August. The newest contest is agentic commerce: Stripe and OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol arrived two weeks after Google's competing protocol, and Visa, Mastercard, Adyen, PayPal and Worldpay each push their own standards or products.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]
Data as of Nov 2, 2026 · Stripe profile updated Oct 22, 2026 · 38 sources cited on this page · 56 fintechs profiled on this site · Markdown
What does Stripe say about its competition, and which filings name Stripe as a rival?
Stripe is private and files no 10-K, so it has no Competition section or risk factors to quote. What it says publicly is about scale and openness: its 2025 annual letter release (February 24, 2026) says businesses on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34%, that its services power more than 5 million businesses directly or via platforms, and that Stripe "remained robustly profitable". In 2024 it began offering its checkout, billing and fraud products to companies that process payments with rival providers; Will Gaybrick said Stripe wanted to win payments customers on quality, "not because you've been technologically coerced by Stripe's payments adjacent services", Payments Dive reported.[13][21]
The clearest statements of rivalry are in other companies' filings. Global Payments' 2025 10-K, filed February 20, 2026, lists Stripe with Fiserv, Chase Paymentech, Elavon, Bank of America Merchant Services, Wells Fargo Merchant Services, Toast, Shopify and Block as "our primary competitors in the merchant acquiring space" in the United States. Marqeta's 2025 10-K lists "emerging providers, such as Adyen and Stripe" among its card-issuing competitors, and Payoneer's names "merchant service providers like Adyen, Braintree and Stripe". PayPal's and Block's 2025 10-Ks describe their competition at length without naming Stripe.[1][2][3][5][8]
Many rivals also depend on Stripe. Shopify's 2025 10-K says it relies on two suppliers for the technology behind Shopify Payments, Stripe and PayPal; Lightspeed's 2026 annual information form lists payment processing agreements with Stripe, Adyen and PayPal; and Klarna's 2025 20-F says it partners with Stripe to offer its payment methods across all of Stripe's merchants. In AI, Stripe presents its agent tools as open: businesses not processing with Stripe can adopt the Agentic Commerce Protocol, it said in September 2025, and the Collisons' 2025 letter said agentic commerce "suffers from having been overhyped too early in some corners".[14][22][23][17][24]
Who competes with Stripe, where, and how do they compare on scale and AI?
One row per competitor. Scale figures use each company's own metric and period, so they are not directly comparable; Stripe's own figure is $1.9 trillion of total volume in 2025, an unaudited company statement.
| Competitor | Where they compete | Dated scale figure | How they compare on AI | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adyen | Enterprise online and in-store payments and card issuing; Marqeta's 10-K names Adyen and Stripe as emerging issuing providers and Payoneer's names both as merchant service providers; Payments Dive put Adyen at about the same size as Stripe in 2023 | €803.8 billion processed volume, H1 2026 | Adyen Uplift and Dynamic Identification raised customer conversion by 0.9 percentage points on average by the end of H1 2026; Adyen Agentic launched to process payments across AI agent protocols | Marqeta 10-K 2025; Payoneer 10-K 2025; Payments Dive, Aug 2023; Adyen H1 2026 results[2][3][25][4] |
| PayPal (including Braintree) | Branded checkout (PayPal, Venmo) and unbranded processing; Payoneer's 10-K lists Braintree with Adyen and Stripe. Stripe and Advent offered $53.4 billion for PayPal in July 2026 and ended the pursuit in August | $1.79 trillion total payment volume, 2025 | Agentic Commerce Services, "agent ready" and "store sync"; processes payments for merchants using OpenAI's Instant Checkout and added support for Meta's Muse (September 2026) | PayPal 10-K 2025; Payoneer 10-K 2025; CNBC, Jul 2026; American Banker, Aug and Sep 2026[5][3][15][16][19] |
| Checkout.com | Enterprise online acquiring; a spokesperson called it "the only viable challenger to Stripe" as it expanded in the U.S. (2023); its Georgia merchant acquirer bank charter was approved in January 2026 | More than $300 billion ecommerce volume, 2025 | Launched an MCP server on September 1, 2026, claiming an 81% reduction in integration time; supports the Agentic Commerce Protocol, Google's AP2 and Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines | Payments Dive, Feb 2023; Finextra, Jan 2026; Forkast via Yahoo Finance, Sep 2026[7][6][26] |
| Block (Square) | Point-of-sale, online payments and software for sellers, increasingly mid-market; Global Payments' 10-K lists Block and Stripe among its primary U.S. merchant-acquiring competitors | $259,631 million Gross Payment Volume, 2025 | Managerbot is automating marketing, margin analysis and operational fixes for sellers (Q2 2026 shareholder letter) | Global Payments 10-K 2025; Block 10-K 2025; Block Q2 2026 letter[1][8][27] |
| Fiserv (Clover) | Merchant acquiring and the Clover point-of-sale platform; first in Global Payments' list of U.S. acquiring competitors that includes Stripe. Stripe previously sent payments to Fiserv's First Data for processing, Payments Dive reported in 2024 | $10,140 million Merchant segment revenue, 2025 | Collaboration with Visa (December 2025) to deploy the Trusted Agent Protocol so Clover and Fiserv merchants can accept agentic transactions | Global Payments 10-K 2025; Fiserv 10-K 2025; Payments Dive, May 2024; Finextra, Dec 2025[1][9][21][28] |
| Global Payments (Worldpay) | Merchant acquiring; its 2025 10-K names Stripe among its primary U.S. competitors. It acquired Worldpay and sold its Issuer Solutions business to FIS in January 2026 | $7,705,878 thousand Merchant Solutions revenue, 2025 (before the Worldpay acquisition) | Worldpay released a free, publicly available Model Context Protocol server for AI-agent payment integrations (November 2025) and endorsed Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (January 2026) | Global Payments 10-K 2025; Payments Dive, Nov 2025 and Jan 2026[1][20][29] |
| JPMorgan Payments (Chase) | Merchant acquiring; Global Payments' 10-K lists Chase Paymentech alongside Stripe, Klarna's 20-F names J.P. Morgan Payments and Stripe among the PSPs making Klarna a default payment option, and American Banker calls JPMorganChase the world's largest merchant acquirer | More than $18 billion in yearly revenue (reported May 2025) | Released AI cash management tools for CFOs and treasurers and is extending generative AI to most of the bank's employees (May 2025) | Global Payments 10-K 2025; Klarna 20-F 2025; American Banker, May and Sep 2025[1][23][10][30] |
| Marqeta | Card issuing platforms; Marqeta's 2025 10-K names Adyen and Stripe as "emerging providers" it competes with | $382.5 billion total processing volume, 2025 | Added an AI-powered risk score, trained on Marqeta transaction data, to its Real-Time Decisioning product (March 31, 2026) | Marqeta 10-K 2025; Business Wire via Yahoo Finance, Mar 2026[2][31] |
| Plaid | Bank-account linking and data; Business Insider reported in May 2022 that Stripe's Financial Connections put Stripe in direct competition with Plaid, a former partner | $8 billion valuation in an employee share sale, February 2026 | Its transaction and sequential foundation models now power its intelligence products, including ACH payment risk, underwriting and cash advance (October 2026) | Business Insider, May 2022; TechCrunch, Feb 2026; Plaid, Oct 2026[11][32][33] |
| Airwallex | Cross-border payments, checkout and corporate cards, plus billing since May 2026, which Fortune says puts it "even more squarely in competition with Stripe" | $8 billion valuation (May 2026) | — (not disclosed in the cited coverage) | Fortune, May 2026[12] |
What companies are similar to Stripe, and who are they for?
Close alternatives by what they sell. Each description comes from the cited filing or coverage, not from a ranking.
| Company | Why it is similar | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Adyen | Lets merchants process payments online or in person, holds banking licences in the EU, UK and U.S., and sells an AI payment optimization product, Adyen Uplift | Global enterprise merchants; customers named by American Banker include eBay, Netflix and Spotify[25][30] |
| Checkout.com | Online payment processing for large merchants; approved in January 2026 for a Georgia bank charter to operate as its own U.S. acquirer | Enterprise ecommerce; customers named include Uber, eBay, Pinterest, Klarna and GE Healthcare[6] |
| PayPal (Braintree) | Online branded checkout and unbranded payments processing with cards, digital wallets, BNPL and local payment methods | Merchants that want PayPal's consumer network, 439 million active accounts across approximately 200 markets at the end of 2025[5] |
| Square (Block) | Software, hardware, payments and financial services for sellers, with APIs and SDKs for developers and larger sellers | Sellers of varying sizes, increasingly mid-market sellers, which Block defines as those generating more than $500,000 in annualized Square GPV[8] |
| Airwallex | Checkout, payments, corporate cards and billing; its chief product officer says Airwallex and Stripe are converging | Businesses selling internationally; Airwallex says its edge is international breadth[12] |
| Plaid | Connects financial applications to users' bank accounts for payments and data verification, overlapping with Stripe's Financial Connections | Apps that need bank-account linking and verification[32][11] |
Who is Stripe competing with to set the rules for agentic commerce?
Protocols and products for AI agents that buy on a consumer's behalf, in date order. Several companies back more than one.
| Standard or product | Backers | What it is and where Stripe stands | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) | Google, collaborating with Mastercard; Checkout.com is a supporting partner | Payments Dive described Google's protocol as competing with the one Stripe released two weeks later | September 2025[17][18][26] |
| Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) | Stripe and OpenAI; Checkout.com adopted it in November 2025 | Co-developer; Stripe says businesses not processing with Stripe can adopt it with their existing providers | September 29, 2025[17][26] |
| Visa Trusted Agent Protocol and Intelligent Commerce | Visa; Fiserv is deploying the protocol across its merchant acceptance | Visa's Jack Forestell pointed to "hard work" on specifications with Stripe; Stripe's Shared Payment Tokens provision Visa agentic tokens | October 2025[18][28][34] |
| Worldpay MCP server | Worldpay (Global Payments) | A publicly available server, free of licensing fees, that lets companies build AI agents with direct payment integrations to Worldpay's API | November 2025[20] |
| Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) | Google with Shopify, Target and Walmart; endorsed by about 20 payments players including Adyen, PayPal, Stripe, Worldpay, Mastercard and Visa | Endorser; first transactions use Google Pay, followed by PayPal | January 2026[29] |
| Mastercard and Google authorization standard | Mastercard and Google, with buy-in from Worldpay, Fiserv, Checkout.com and Adyen | Stripe is not among the processors Payments Dive named; Stripe's Shared Payment Tokens provision Mastercard agentic tokens | March 2026[18][34] |
| Adyen Agentic | Adyen | A rival product letting enterprise merchants process payments across AI agent protocols | H1 2026[4] |
| PayPal agentic services | PayPal | Agentic Commerce Services, "agent ready" and "store sync"; PayPal also processes for merchants using OpenAI's Instant Checkout, while Meta's Muse uses Stripe's Link wallet | September 2026 (reported)[19] |
What does the Stripe profile record on this topic?
The rows below are the entries of the Stripe AI strategy profile that bear on this page, as of Oct 22, 2026; the profile holds the full record of 18 dated moves, 10 use cases and 27 sources.
| Use case | What the record shows | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agentic Commerce Protocol and Instant Checkout | Open standard co-developed with OpenAI that lets AI agents place orders with merchants; powers checkout in ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Facebook. | In production | [35][36][37] |
| Date | Move | Detail | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 28, 2026 | PayPal pursuit ends | American Banker, citing Bloomberg, reported that Stripe and Advent had ended their attempt to acquire PayPal, following PayPal's cool response to the offer. | [16] |
| Jul 15, 2026 | Stripe and Advent offer $53.4 billion for PayPal | CNBC confirmed a joint $60.50-a-share cash offer by Stripe and Advent International, valuing PayPal at $53.4 billion. | [15] |
| May 28, 2026 | Stripe's Georgia acquirer bank takes on card acquiring | Stripe published Member Bank terms, last updated May 28, 2026, under which Stripe MALPB, a Georgia Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank in Atlanta, is the payment method acquirer for applicable Visa and Mastercard transactions processed by Stripe. | [38] |
| Feb 24, 2026 | 2025 volume reaches $1.9 trillion; $159 billion tender offer | Businesses on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in 2025, up 34%; the annual letter describes the Agentic Commerce Protocol, Agentic Commerce Suite, Shared Payment Tokens and machine payments, and a tender offer valued Stripe at $159 billion. | [13] |
| Jan 8, 2026 | Stripe powers Copilot Checkout for Microsoft | US Copilot users will be able to buy from Etsy sellers and retailers such as Urban Outfitters in the chat, with Stripe connecting to sellers over the Agentic Commerce Protocol. | [36] |
| Sep 29, 2025 | Agentic Commerce Protocol and Instant Checkout in ChatGPT | Stripe and OpenAI released the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard, and US ChatGPT users began buying from Etsy sellers in the chat with Stripe-powered checkout and Shared Payment Tokens. | [35] |
Who are Stripe's biggest competitors?
In online and enterprise payments, Adyen, PayPal with Braintree, and Checkout.com; in point-of-sale and small-business acquiring, Block's Square, Fiserv's Clover, Global Payments and JPMorgan Payments. Global Payments' 2025 10-K names Stripe among its primary U.S. merchant-acquiring competitors, and Marqeta's names Adyen and Stripe in card issuing.
What companies are similar to Stripe?
Adyen and Checkout.com are the closest: both sell online payment processing to large merchants, and Adyen processed €803.8 billion in the first half of 2026. PayPal's Braintree offers unbranded processing, Square serves sellers in stores, Airwallex adds cross-border payments and billing, and Plaid overlaps with Stripe's Financial Connections in bank data.
Stripe vs Adyen: which is bigger?
Stripe says businesses on it generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, while Adyen reported €803.8 billion of processed volume in the first half of 2026. The figures use different definitions, currencies and periods, and Stripe's are unaudited company statements; Payments Dive described the two as about the same size in 2023.
Is PayPal a competitor of Stripe?
Yes, in online checkout and processing: Payoneer's 2025 10-K lists Braintree with Adyen and Stripe as merchant service providers, and PayPal processed $1.79 trillion of total payment volume in 2025. The two are also both suppliers to Shopify Payments, and Stripe and Advent offered $53.4 billion for PayPal in July 2026 before ending the pursuit.
Who competes with Stripe in agentic commerce?
Google, whose Agent Payments Protocol came two weeks before Stripe and OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol; Visa and Mastercard with their own agent standards; and processors including Adyen with Adyen Agentic, PayPal with Agentic Commerce Services, Worldpay with an MCP server, and Checkout.com, which supports ACP, AP2 and Mastercard Agent Pay.
- Global Payments Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025
- Marqeta, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal 2025
- Payoneer Global Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025
- Adyen publishes H1 2026 financial results
- PayPal Holdings, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal year 2025
- Checkout.com secures approval for Georgia bank charter
- Checkout.com changes up leadership
- Block, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for 2025
- Fiserv, Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025
- JPMorganChase's high-tech payments division: A look inside
- Stripe launches open banking product in direct competition with Plaid
- Exclusive: Airwallex launches billing product as $8 billion fintech continues to compete with rival Stripe
- Stripe publishes 2025 annual letter and announces tender offer to provide liquidity to current and former employees
- Shopify Inc. Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025
- Stripe, Advent make $53 billion takeover offer for PayPal, sending stock soaring
- Stripe, Advent suspend their pursuit of PayPal
- Stripe pushes agentic AI sales via chat
- Visa, Mastercard jockey to set agentic standards
- PayPal partners with Meta's Muse AI assistant
- Worldpay floats agentic protocol
- Stripe unbundles services as industry shifts
- Lightspeed Commerce Inc. Annual Information Form, fiscal year ended March 31, 2026 (Exhibit 99.1 to Form 40-F)
- Klarna Group plc Annual Report on Form 20-F for 2025
- Stripe's slower view of agentic commerce
- Adyen, Braintree and Stripe face off
- Checkout.com Is Building Its Own Agent Infrastructure While Backing Three Rival Protocols (Forkast via Yahoo Finance)
- Block Q2 2026 Shareholder Letter (Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K)
- Fiserv joins with Mastercard and Visa for agentic commerce
- Google takes agentic retail into chat
- Banks are losing the fight for merchants' business
- Marqeta Delivers AI-Driven Risk Decisioning to Enhance Real-Time Fraud Prevention (Business Wire via Yahoo Finance)
- Plaid valued at $8B in employee share sale
- From grammar to fluency: Our foundation models now power Plaid's intelligence products
- Supporting additional payment methods for agentic commerce
- Stripe powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and releases Agentic Commerce Protocol codeveloped with OpenAI
- Stripe helps power Copilot Checkout
- Stripe brings a new checkout experience for Facebook
- Stripe MALPB Acquirer Terms
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