Stripe vs Square

At a Glance

Attribute	Stripe	Square
Category	Payments	Payments
Pricing Model	freemium	freemium
Starting Price	Free	Free
Free Tier	Yes	Yes
Open Source	No	No
Platforms	web, mobile, platforms, marketplaces	—

Stripe

Square

Stripe

Square

No features listed.

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