This post is part of a series on moving off American software.
PayPal and Stripe are American, and payments are perhaps the most sensitive data category there is: names, addresses, purchase histories, card details. If you run a business in Europe, there is a real alternative ecosystem — payment service providers regulated in the EU, processing under European rules.
One honest caveat before the list: these are mostly business payment providers, not consumer wallets. None of them is "PayPal for sending money to friends." If you want a personal wallet for splitting a dinner bill, this list will not cover you, and we would rather say so up front. What they do replace is the Stripe side: accepting card and online payments on your website, in your shop, or across your marketplace.
Mollie
Mollie is a payment service provider from the Netherlands with a focus on online payments. Integrations for many content management systems and programming languages are offered directly by the provider, so wiring it into an existing shop is a documented path rather than a custom project. For a typical online business, this is a straightforward starting point.
Adyen
Adyen is also from the Netherlands, and it operates at a larger scale. It supports online payments, but also point-of-sale and marketplace payments. It advertises some big European names as customers, including Spotify, Zalando, and eBay. Like Mollie, it offers integrations for many CMS platforms and programming languages directly. If you outgrow a smaller provider — or never fit one to begin with — Adyen is the heavyweight European option.
Unzer
Unzer is a payment service provider from Germany covering many different payment types. Beyond online payments, it offers payment at the terminal, pay-per-link, and installments. That mix makes it relevant if your business is not purely e-commerce — if you also take payments in person or want to send a payment link instead of building a checkout.
Mangopay
Mangopay is a payment service provider from Luxembourg with a focus on payments for marketplaces. Marketplace payments are their own problem: money flows between buyers, sellers, and the platform, often with holds and splits. If you are building a platform where other people sell, this is the specialist on the list.
Klarna
Klarna is a payment service provider from Sweden. It offers integrations for many shopping platforms, which makes it easy to add if your shop runs on one of the common e-commerce systems. Many shoppers will already recognize the name at checkout, which is worth something when you are deciding what payment options to display.
Clearhaus
Clearhaus is a payment service provider from Denmark. The listing is brief, so we will keep this brief too: it is a European card acquirer option, and if you are evaluating Danish providers it belongs on your shortlist.
Quickpay
Quickpay is a payment service provider from Denmark. It offers credit card payments plus Apple Pay and Google Pay, with many integrations to all sorts of CMS systems and an API. If you want the standard card wallets accepted and a documented path into your existing platform, it covers both.
What these are not
To repeat the caveat once more, plainly: these are not consumer payment apps. You cannot use them to send money to another person the way you would with PayPal, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. What you get instead is a European way to accept payments as a business — under European regulation, with European-based processing.
For most online businesses the practical test is simple: check which of these integrates with your CMS or framework, compare their checkout and reporting, and run a small volume through before switching everything.
No comments yet