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Square vs WePay
March 12, 2025 | Author: Sandeep Sharma
30★
Accept credit cards on your iPhone, Android or iPad. Send invoices free with Square Invoices. Signing up for Square is fast and free, and there are no commitments or long-term contracts like with alternative services.
3★
WePay is an online payment service provider powered by JP Morgan Chase. Powerful integrated payments for any business model. WePay's payment API focuses exclusively on platform businesses such as crowdfunding sites, marketplaces and small business software.
Square and WePay are both in the business of moving money from one place to another, preferably into the hands of people who would rather like to have it. They allow businesses to accept payments in various delightful and digital ways, whether via credit card, debit card or the mysterious and occasionally baffling world of digital wallets. Both come with APIs, which means developers—those curious creatures who enjoy making machines talk to other machines—can integrate payments into their platforms without having to reinvent the financial wheel. They also both claim to have excellent fraud detection, though exactly how one goes about detecting fraud before it happens remains one of the great unanswered mysteries of modern commerce.
Square began its journey in 2009 in the United States, presumably after someone noticed that small businesses were having a rather rotten time accepting card payments without large, clunky machines or mountains of paperwork. So Square made a tiny white dongle and, before anyone could say "financial revolution," small businesses were swiping cards on their phones like futuristic shopkeepers. They also got very excited about making other helpful tools—things like invoicing, payroll and even a way to pay your friend back for that suspiciously expensive sandwich. Somewhere along the way, they created Cash App, which allows people to send money to each other with the reckless abandon of someone who has just discovered they can pay for coffee without ever reaching for their wallet.
WePay, on the other hand, appeared in 2008, possibly just to say it had been around longer. Unlike Square, it wasn’t terribly interested in individual businesses and instead decided that online platforms—things like crowdfunding sites, software companies and marketplaces—were a much better place to focus its attention. It never bothered with making card readers or flashy apps but instead concentrated on offering white-label payment solutions, meaning companies could slap their own name on WePay’s work and pretend they had done it all themselves. In 2017, JPMorgan Chase decided it would rather like to own WePay, so it bought the whole thing, presumably because it enjoys moving enormous amounts of money around and figured WePay was rather good at it.
See also: Top 10 Payment Processing platforms
Square began its journey in 2009 in the United States, presumably after someone noticed that small businesses were having a rather rotten time accepting card payments without large, clunky machines or mountains of paperwork. So Square made a tiny white dongle and, before anyone could say "financial revolution," small businesses were swiping cards on their phones like futuristic shopkeepers. They also got very excited about making other helpful tools—things like invoicing, payroll and even a way to pay your friend back for that suspiciously expensive sandwich. Somewhere along the way, they created Cash App, which allows people to send money to each other with the reckless abandon of someone who has just discovered they can pay for coffee without ever reaching for their wallet.
WePay, on the other hand, appeared in 2008, possibly just to say it had been around longer. Unlike Square, it wasn’t terribly interested in individual businesses and instead decided that online platforms—things like crowdfunding sites, software companies and marketplaces—were a much better place to focus its attention. It never bothered with making card readers or flashy apps but instead concentrated on offering white-label payment solutions, meaning companies could slap their own name on WePay’s work and pretend they had done it all themselves. In 2017, JPMorgan Chase decided it would rather like to own WePay, so it bought the whole thing, presumably because it enjoys moving enormous amounts of money around and figured WePay was rather good at it.
See also: Top 10 Payment Processing platforms
