PayPal and Braintree: The Brand Inside the CheckoutNarrow moat

PayPal occupies roughly 32% of payment-management installations¹ and is a genuinely different sort of competitor, because it is two things at once. Braintree, its enterprise processing arm, competes with Adyen for the same large accounts at published rates around 2.59% plus 49 cents. PayPal the wallet is a payment method consumers ask for by name — and any checkout that does not offer it loses conversion.

That second role changes the relationship fundamentally. Adyen cannot beat PayPal-the-wallet; it must support it, route to it, and charge the merchant for the privilege of offering something a competitor owns. This is the ordinary condition of a payments platform — Adyen's product is acceptance of everything, which necessarily includes methods belonging to rivals — and it is why the unified-commerce argument in the moat pages matters more than any individual method.

Braintree's competitive advantage is precisely this bundling: native PayPal and Venmo acceptance without an intermediary. For merchants where those methods dominate, that is a real reason to choose it over Adyen.

Watch which payment methods gain share at checkout. Adyen's position is strongest when no single method dominates, because its value is orchestrating many — and weakest wherever one wallet becomes the way people pay.