Payment Processing

Stripe is a developer-first payments infrastructure platform providing APIs and SDKs for online and in-person payment acceptance, subscription billing, fraud detection, tax automation, and embedded financial services. It is used daily by engineers, platform operators, and finance teams at companies ranging from early-stage startups to large enterprises — anyone who needs to accept money, manage recurring revenue, or embed financial workflows into software products. The core tradeoff practitioners face is excellent API ergonomics and network-effect fraud data at a flat-rate pricing structure that becomes expensive at high volume without custom negotiation.

2Checkout is a Merchant of Record (MoR) and digital commerce platform primarily targeting software, SaaS, and digital goods vendors who need to sell globally without building their own tax, compliance, and payment infrastructure. It handles the full transaction stack — checkout, recurring billing, global tax/VAT remittance, fraud management, and affiliate/partner distribution — across 200+ countries. Practitioners integrate via API 6.0 (JSON-RPC, SOAP, REST), ConvertPlus hosted checkout, Inline Cart embed, or 120+ pre-built shopping cart connectors including Shopify and Magento.