Braintree Payments was founded in 2007 by Bryan Johnson, designed to provide a powerful payment system for online and mobile transactions. The company was bought out by PayPal in 2015 after gaining a reputation as one of the most innovative payment processors in the industry.
Braintree support for payment types is about as comprehensive as it gets with all the major credit and debit cards covered, as well as mobile payments and digital wallets including PayPal and Venmo. The list doesn’t sound quite as impressive now that other payment firms have generally caught up but Braintree was one of the first to offer such extensive support for payment types.
The other key selling point of Braintree is its combination of competitive fees, customisability and integration with third-party platforms – much like Stripe. In fact, Stripe is easily Braintree’s most direct competitor and both platforms put flexibility ahead of simplicity on the development side of things. Fair enough.
Much like Stripe, you’ll be paying 1.9% +20p per transaction with no monthly fees or minimums. You’ll also be charged an extra 1% for transactions in foreign currencies and £20 for chargebacks.
Our main concern with Braintree that its online reputation has dropped recently – most notably on Trustpilot. The strange thing is there are very few reviews dated before 2018 and the ones that show are basically all negative. Meanwhile, reviews are still mostly positive on other sites such as G2 Crowd.
The most common complaints revolve around accounts being frozen and funds being withheld, which is a known problem with PayPal and Braintree but we can’t be sure if this issue has gotten worse or something has happened with the company’s Trustpilot account.