Braintree

Payments built for scale

PayPal's developer payment platform with native PayPal, Venmo, cards, and ACH processing.

Our take

Braintree is PayPal's developer-facing payments SDK — the full-featured REST/GraphQL API alternative to Stripe's API, with PayPal and Venmo natively integrated alongside cards. For marketplaces and platforms that need to split payments, Braintree's marketplace solution (Braintree Marketplace) handles complex payment flows. The fee structure (2.59% + $0.49 per transaction) is slightly higher than Stripe's standard 2.9% + $0.30 for low-ticket transactions but competitive on high-ticket items. The honest comparison with Stripe: Stripe's developer experience, documentation, pre-built UI components (Payment Element), and ecosystem of integrations (Sigma, Radar, Connect) are more polished. Braintree makes most sense when PayPal/Venmo wallet acceptance is a requirement — Braintree can't be beaten on PayPal integration because it is PayPal.

Product roadmap

Braintree is being integrated more tightly with PayPal's broader commerce platform, expanding marketplace and platform payment capabilities, and improving its developer tooling to stay competitive with Stripe. PayPal's focus on Buy Now Pay Later (Pay Later) is bringing installment payment options to Braintree merchants.