I've shipped both Paystack and Stripe in production from Nigeria, sometimes in the same app. If you're a Nigerian developer trying to decide which to use, the honest answer is that it depends on who's paying you and from where. Here's how they actually compare once you've gone past the docs.
The short version
Use Paystack for local customers paying in naira. Use Stripe when you need to charge international customers in their own currency. On Fasco I ran both at once and picked the gateway based on the buyer, which sounds like overkill but solved a real problem.
Getting paid out
This is the part that decides it for a lot of people. Paystack settles to a Nigerian bank account in naira, usually next day. That's the whole reason it exists and it does it well.
Stripe is harder. Stripe doesn't fully support Nigeria for receiving payouts the way it does the US or UK, so Nigerian developers usually reach for it through a workaround like Stripe Atlas (a US company) or a service that gives you a US/UK account. If your customers are global and you can handle that setup, Stripe's reach is worth it. If you just want naira in your bank, Paystack is far less friction.
Fees
Both take a percentage per transaction, and local cards on Paystack are cheaper for naira payments than running the same charge through Stripe's international rails. International cards cost more on either one. For a Nigerian audience paying in naira, Paystack usually wins on cost. For a global audience, Stripe's pricing is competitive and predictable across currencies.
Developer experience
Stripe's documentation and tooling are still the best in the industry. The dashboard, the test mode, the CLI that forwards webhooks to localhost, the libraries, all of it is polished. Paystack is genuinely good too and noticeably more pleasant than most local alternatives, but Stripe is the one I reach for when I want everything to just be there.
The integration shape is nearly identical, though. Both give you a hosted checkout or a popup, both confirm real payments through signed webhooks, and both expect you to verify on the server rather than trust the browser. If you can integrate one, the other takes an afternoon.
What I'd tell you to do
If your customers are Nigerian and paying in naira, start with Paystack and don't overthink it. If they're international, use Stripe and plan for the account setup early. If you're serving both, run them side by side and choose per transaction. The two aren't really competitors for the same job. They cover different sides of the same store.
