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WooCommerce Plugins for Stripe and PayPal

If you are looking at Stripe and/or PayPal for online credit card payments, what plugins are required before you can start accepting payments from your WooCommerce enabled website?

While both support online credit card payments, PayPal and Stripe differ in several key aspects – you can check out our Stripe vs PayPal comparison article to get an overview.

Commercial vs Non Commercial

Are commercial plugins better than non commercial plugins?

The WooCommerce plugin ecosystem – like the broader WordPress ecosystem – isn’t consistent. Just because a plugin is commercial doesn’t mean it is superior to free alternatives. But it is also the case that some commercial plugins do put time and resources into development and support that can be hard to match when a plugin generates no revenue for the developer.

So reviewing plugins usually requires a case by case analysis, which is what we’ve done for PayPal and Stripe plugins.

Stripe Plugins

WooCommerce have developed a solid Stripe plugin that can be purchased as a WooCommerce extension: Stripe Gateway for WooCommerce.

The extension handles payments easily, and includes refund processing. As of February 2016, the Stripe extension is available free of charge (it used to costs $79 USD).

WooCommerce and Stripe have paid attention to the PCI DSS security requirements. The plugin documentation states that it “uses Stripe JS to tokenize credit card numbers to make payments keeping card data secure”. While your Stripe enabled website will still require an SSL certificate, operating with this plugin means the payment processing is designed to to be fully outsourced to a PCI compliant third party provider.

In addition, there are some alternative Stripe integration plugins for WooCommerce available from WordPress.org. Do your own research to get up to date information on installs, updates and support, and how the plugin addresses security requirements. The following table gives you a snapshot of the three free Stripe plugins with the highest number of active installs:

Plugin Installs Last Update
Stripe for WooCommerce 8,000 6 mths
Stripe Payment Gateway WooCommerce Addon 4,000 4 months
Striper 3,000 7 months

There are also a few plugins available for Stripe on Code Canyon – all of the same considerations for updates, support and security apply.

PayPal Plugins

If you just want to use the basic features of PayPal Standard for hosted payments, you don’t need any plugin at all. Support for PayPal Standard payments is built in to WooCommerce, so all you need to do is enter your PayPal settings and you are set.

Keep in mind there are various features available from different versions of the PayPal product, and the versions available do vary by country.

There is a well reviewed plugin available from WordPress.org called PayPal for WooCommerce. Check it out for current stats – at the time of writing it had over 10,000 installs and has been regularly updated. The developer has extensive links with PayPal, and the plugin gives you thorough access to PayPal’s features.

The paid extension market from WooThemes has a range of choices. You can review this comparison table to get an idea of what is likely to be suitable for your requirements: PayPal Extension Comparison

If the plugin you are planning to use is not using PayPal hosted payments, consider double checking the requirements you need to take into account for PCI DSS security. Installing an SSL certificate on your site is only one small part of the puzzle.