Charges versus Payment Intents APIs
Learn about the differences between Stripe's two core payment APIs and when to use them.
Understanding the Stripe payment APIs
There are three ways to accept payments on Stripe today:
- Stripe Checkout
- Payment Intents API
- Charges API (deprecated for creating payments)
Stripe Checkout is a prebuilt payment page that you can redirect your customer to for simple purchases and subscriptions. It provides many features, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, internationalization, and form validation.
The Payment Intents API is the unifying API for all Stripe products and payment methods. It lets you build custom payment flows and experiences. New features are only available with the Payment Intents API.
Deprecated
We’ve deprecated use of the Charges API to create card payments and plan to remove support. Use Checkout or the Payment Intents API instead. New integrations can’t use the Charges API to create payments.
The Charges API doesn’t support the following features, many of which are required for credit card compliance:
- Businesses in India
- Bank requests for card authentication
- Strong Customer Authentication
Migrating code that reads from charges
If you have an application with multiple payment flows and are incrementally migrating them from the Charges API to the Payment Intents API, you should first update any code that reads from the Charge object. To help with this, the charge object has two additional properties, payment_method_details and billing_details, which provide a consistent interface for reading the details of the payment method used for the charge.
These fields are available on all API versions and on charge objects created with both the Charges API and the Payment Intents API.
The following table shows commonly used properties on a charge and how the same information can be accessed using the additional properties:
| Description | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Details about the payment method used to create a charge | charge.source | charge.payment_method_details |
| ID of the payment method used for the charge | charge.source.id | charge.payment_method |
| Type of payment method used | charge.source.object (for example, card or bank_account) | charge.payment_method_details.type |
| Billing information for the charge (for example, billing postal code) | charge.source.address_zip | charge.billing_details.address.postal_code |
| Name of the cardholder | charge.source.name | charge.billing_details.name |
| Last 4 digits of the card used | charge.source.last4 | charge.payment_method_details.card.last4 |
| Fingerprint of the card | charge.source.fingerprint | charge.payment_method_details.card.fingerprint |
| CVC verification status for the charge | charge.source.cvc_check | charge.payment_method_details.card.checks.cvc_check |
| Card brand values | charge.source.brand can be one of: American Express, Diners Club, Discover, JCB, MasterCard, UnionPay, Visa | charge.payment_method_details.card.brand can be one of: amex, diners, discover, jcb, mastercard, unionpay, visa |
| Google Pay enum value | charge.source.tokenization_method is android_pay | card.wallet.type within charge.payment_method_details is google_pay |