Compare with ConnectPublic preview
Learn which payouts integration fits your business.
Stripe offers two ways to send money to third parties:
- Global Payouts: Send money directly to a recipient’s bank account.
- Connect payouts: Stage payouts in a payee balance before paying out to an external account.
The following diagram shows the flow of funds in a Global Payouts integration and a Connect payouts integration. The main difference is that funds must pass through a connected account balance before being paid out to an external account when using a Connect payouts integration.
Compare Global Payouts and Connect payouts
| Global Payouts | Connect payouts | |
|---|---|---|
| Description | Send money directly to the bank account of a third party. | Send money to a dedicated payee balance before making payouts. |
| Fit | ||
| Best for | Businesses that need a payouts-only solution that can be decoupled from payments and want the ability to pay out with only recipients’ email addresses. | Businesses that want a bundled solution for payments and payouts, and want to provide payee tools to track and manage earnings. |
| Use cases |
|
|
| Cadence | One-time or recurring recipients that don’t need to track funds. | Established relationship with frequent, recurring recipients. |
| Funding | ||
| Legal and compliance requirements | Manage your own legal and compliance requirements. If you’re managing your customers’ funds, you might need a Money Transmitter License. | Offload legal and compliance requirements to Stripe using the Stripe Money Transmitter License. |
| Fund from payments revenue | Use revenue splitting to automatically fund from your payments balance. | Use destination charges or separate charges and transfers to fund specific transfers. |
| Fund from other payments processors | Use your external bank account to fund your account from other payment processors. | Use top-ups to fund your account from other processors. |
| Payee management | ||
| Payee balance | No balance is maintained on Stripe. Funds go directly to your payee’s payout method. | Maintain a separate balance on Stripe to keep track of money owed to your payees. You can debit your payees for fees, refunds, or a dispute. |
| Risk management: Reverse payouts to payees | Payout reversals aren’t guaranteed. Use payout reversals to recapture funds for an accidental or canceled payout. | Delay payouts as needed and use transfer reversals to recapture funds for an accidental or canceled payout. |
| Payee services | ||
| Payee reports | Use our API to display a history of payouts to your payee. | Use a Stripe-hosted Dashboard or use our embeddable components to build payee reports on your own site or app. |
| Enable merchant services for payees | No merchant services for your payees. | Offer merchant services such as Stripe Capital or Stripe Payments to your payees. |
| Distribute tax forms to payees | Not supported. | Use Stripe Tax to issue 1099 forms to payees. You can send forms to payees with Stripe-hosted components. |
Other types of payouts
Stripe offers several other types of payouts, depending on your use case:
- Withdraw your earnings from Stripe by paying them out to your business bank account.
- Allow platform customers to withdraw their funds.
- Distribute payout capabilities to your users with Treasury.
- Create and issue branded physical or digital cards to send money with Issuing.