PAYONE vs Unzer

PAYONE

The developer pages name the Klarna family with twelve countries and seven currencies, SEPA Direct Debit with its country list, and girocard terms, while American Express, MasterCard and Visa appear by name only in the exemption documentation. The homepage's "alle gängigen Bezahlverfahren" is exactly the vague count-claim I distrust, and we found no public information on iDEAL, Bancontact, BLIK, TWINT, EPS, Wero or wallet coverage named per market. Two methods documented with country lists is real work, but it is not a matrix I can plan eight markets against.

Unzer

The pricing page tells merchants they can choose flexibly which payment methods to offer, but no method is ever named — we found no public information on cards, wallets, SEPA Direct Debit or a single local method, let alone which country each one serves. For someone who needs iDEAL named for the Dutch market and Bancontact for Belgium before planning a rollout, this gives me nothing to plan conversion against.

PAYONE

The exemption documentation is the strongest thing here: the engine decides per transaction whether to challenge, low-value exemption rules with the 30€ and 100€ figures are written down, acquirer TRA and soft-decline recovery are explained, and the merchant-liability caveat is stated plainly, with Hosted Checkout Page and server-to-server both documented. But we found no public information on a checkout I could run in my own domain, on PCI DSS scope per integration type beyond a "Low PCI requirements" marketing line, on fraud rules or risk scores exposed to me, or on authorisation-rate reporting. That lands between the anchors, above a basic hosted page, short of a fully engineered authorisation story.

Unzer

PSD2 strong customer authentication and PCI DSS appear as compliance bullets on the pricing page, and an FAQ asks whether Unzer protects against fraud in online trade, which is more than silence on SCA. But we found no public information on hosted versus embedded checkout, 3-D Secure handling, exemption strategy or authorisation rates, so I cannot judge what my checkout conversion would look like.

PAYONE

SEPA mandates are handled as a real product: separate CreateMandate and RevokeMandate endpoints, mandate reuse for card-on-file, recurring mandates valid for an indefinite number of subsequent transactions, a 36-month lifecycle, an 8-week contestation period for valid mandates, plus recovery guidance for failed direct debits. What I cannot see is any subscription logic — plans, scheduled charges, trials, proration, smart retries or dunning — and we found no public information on exporting stored payment credentials to another provider. The rails are there; the billing brain is undocumented.

Unzer

The included-services list covers personal consulting, onboarding and integration without programming skills, and we found no public information on card-on-file tokens, SEPA mandate handling, subscription logic or dunning anywhere in the captured pages. For a business with repeat charges, every recurring-payment question stays unanswered here.

PAYONE

The payout FAQs list the right questions — timing, cycle changes, missing transactions, limits and fees — but the captured pages give no cadence, delay or fee values for any of them, and we found no public information on per-transaction fee breakdowns or reports that tie a payout to its transactions. The API side is more solid, with documented endpoints, webhooks and a test environment with test cases. Finance could integrate; finance could not close a month from this.

Unzer

The pages point to developer documentation and a platform status page, so an API presumably exists, but we found no public information on payout cadence, settlement currencies, per-transaction fee breakdowns, webhooks or reports tying payouts to transactions. My finance team cannot design a reconciliation process from what is captured.

PAYONE

The imprint does the basics properly: PAYONE GmbH in Frankfurt, admitted and supervised by BaFin as an E-Geld-Institut, commercial register HRB 116860, VAT ID, downloadable terms including girocard and factoring conditions, and an online contract termination option. We found no public information on safeguarding of merchant funds, reserve or rolling-hold limits, freeze and termination notice periods, or chargeback fee amounts beyond FAQ topics. The licence is named; the bad-day rules are not on the captured pages.

Unzer

The legal notice is unusually concrete on the regulated chain: Unzer E-Com GmbH is named as a payment institution supervised by BaFin under register number 122914, a Luxembourg entity is listed with the CSSF under number Z00000009, and complaint routes to both supervisors are published. The bad-day terms are missing though — we found no public information on safeguarding of merchant funds, reserve or hold conditions, termination notice, or chargeback fees and dispute timelines.

PAYONE

The contracting chain is European on the vendor's own pages: a Frankfurt entity supervised by BaFin as an e-money institution, owned by Worldline and the DSV-Gruppe, with all group companies seated within the EU/EWR and standard contractual clauses plus adequacy decisions covering third-country recipients. The decisive gap is that we found no public information on where payment and cardholder data are processed and stored, and the published recipient list covers website hosting, analytics and marketing tools rather than the payment chain. European entity, unproven data residency.

Unzer

German and Luxembourg entities with EU licences do the contracting, which is the part I can verify, but we found no public information on where transaction and cardholder data are processed or on any subprocessor list for the payment chain. The only concrete hosting fact on the captured pages concerns the vendor's own website, hosted by Netlify in San Francisco and running US analytics tools including Google and Facebook — and the provenance record flags majority ownership by a US private equity firm.

PAYONE

Starter and Pro publish setup fees of "49,00 €" and "99,00 €", a monthly fee of "19,00 €" for Pro, and transaction fees of "0,99 € + Disagio" and "ab 0,09 € + Disagio" — but the captured pages give no figure for the Disagio itself, which is the rate that decides my margin. Chargeback, payout and withdrawal costs appear only as FAQ topics with no values stated, and the further price lists exist only as downloads whose contents are not captured. For my card and country mix the effective fee is not computable from public pages.

Unzer

The pricing page offers an all-in-one price or a customised quote but shows no numbers at all — every rate runs through a contact form and personal consultation. I cannot compute an effective fee for my card, country and method mix from public pages, so the pricing model is a sales conversation by design.