Stripe vs Polar

At a Glance

Attribute	Stripe	Polar
Category	Payments	Payments
Pricing Model	freemium	open-source
Starting Price	Free	Free
Free Tier	Yes	Yes
Open Source	No	Yes
Platforms	web, mobile, platforms, marketplaces	web

Stripe

Polar

Stripe

Polar

Stripe

Pros

Stripe Radar blocks fraudulent payments automatically and the machine learning improves over time without any configuration+176
The test mode with fake card numbers lets you simulate every failure scenario before going live — no other provider does this as well+164
Webhooks are reliable and the dashboard makes it easy to replay failed events, which saves hours of debugging payment edge cases+149
The Stripe CLI for local webhook forwarding makes local development with payment events actually pleasant+138
Billing portal is fully hosted — your customers can manage their own subscriptions without you building any UI+121

Payments

Stripe vs Paddle

Payments

Stripe vs Paddle vs Lemon Squeezy

Payments

Stripe vs Lemon Squeezy

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Cons

2.9% + 30 cents per transaction adds up fast at scale — at $1M ARR you're paying $30K+ per year just in fees+189
The Billing product for subscriptions has so many edge cases (prorations, upgrades, trials) that you'll inevitably hit a bug in your checkout flow+143
International payment methods like SEPA, iDEAL, and Klarna require a lot of extra configuration that isn't obvious from the main docs+97

Polar

Pros

Zero fees on the free tier for open source projects — finally a payments tool designed with OSS maintainers in mind+154
The GitHub integration lets backers sponsor your repo directly from the README which lowers the friction for OSS donations+138
Fully open source, so you can self-host or audit the code — no black box in your payment infrastructure+112
Issue funding lets users back specific bugs or features, which is a creative way to prioritize work based on community demand+97

Cons

Payout availability is still limited to certain countries and US-based founders have fewer friction issues than international ones+109
Product is still maturing — you'll hit rough edges in the dashboard that require a workaround or a support ticket+83
Brand recognition is low and some customers may hesitate to enter payment details on an unfamiliar checkout page+74