By now, we all know that accepting credit cards is necessary— clients expect it and may consider it a red flag if you don’t accept credit card payments. While we all know about the main players for credit card processing— namely Stripe, PayPal, and Square— you may be wondering who the best payment processor is for your company.

Our Goodshuffle Pro users have lucked out, as we chose to integrate with Stripe early on. Why? Because Stripe is not only well known for their security, but also their flexibility. Stripe can seamlessly integrate with nearly twice the number of different software than Square or PayPal can, plus it comes with fraud detection and protection built in. These awesome features are only part of the reason we chose Stripe— let’s take a look at the other reasons.

Comparisons: Accepted Payments

If you thought that Stripe, PayPal, and Square all accepted the same payments, you’d be wrong. While all three accept all major credit cards, PayPal doesn’t accept Apple or Android Pay, nor does it accept ACH payments. This automatically rules out PayPal for most event pros, as ACH is a main form of payment for some clients.

Comparison: Usage

While all of these platforms offer online payment capabilities, Square is primarily an in-person, Point of Sale system and is geared towards brick and mortar establishments. If you’d like to rely on automatic payments, online bill pay, or keeping cards on file, Square isn’t your ideal option.

PayPal is well known for being an online payment platform, and is both well known and respected for its capabilities. However, the fact that they do not accept ACH payments is a deal-breaker for many event companies.

While Stripe doesn’t offer its own credit card reader like Square, Stripe is made with developers in mind. This means that if a program is designed to accept in-person payments, Stripe can accept them too. Solid inventory management softwares, like Goodshuffle Pro, include options for accepting online and offline payments, which means that you’ll be able to easily accept payments from clients in person.

Additionally, according to research performed by IDC (an analyst firm), Stripe users experience 81% fewer unplanned outages than their competitors. This means that while your competitors are waiting on their payment processors to come back online— and losing opportunities— you’ll be booking clients!

Comparison: Security

All three payment processors are PCI compliant and offer a high level of security for your client’s data. However, PayPal does require their clients to check and maintain a degree of their own PCI compliance for their Pro account. I don’t know about you, but I definitely don’t want to have to stress about meeting PCI standards and being responsible for my client’s financial data. Square and Stripe take that stress out of a business’ hands.

A huge bonus for Stripe users is their built-in fraud detection algorithms. There’s no hidden fees or a catch; it’s automatically included with every account. This extra protection means that you’re less likely to be confronted with disputes on the grounds of credit card fraud.

In short…

We believe that Stripe is the most flexible credit card payment processor for event pros. Not only can they accept ACH payments, integrate with a wide variety of apps and tools, and have fewer outages, but they also offer an extra layer of security by providing early-warning fraud detection— and they assume the responsibility of PCI compliance (and therefore liability), so you don’t have to. Worry less, accept more payments, and experience less downtime with one processor that will also integrate with all of your business tools— get Stripe.