Competitors

Competitors describe PayPal Holdings, Inc.'s market in their own filings and calls. These verified passages and visual pages show where their strategies meet, using source documents preserved in Sources.

Block, Inc. (XYZ)

PayPal's most direct two-front rival: Cash App competes head-on with Venmo for consumer P2P and stored-value spend, while the Square seller ecosystem and Afterpay collide with Braintree/PayPal merchant processing and Pay Later BNPL.

Block's stated scale for Cash App, the direct Venmo rival — monthly transacting actives and total inflows, the consumer-network benchmark PayPal's Venmo is measured against.

As of December 2025, Cash App had 59 million monthly transacting actives across the United States. […] In 2025, Cash App transacting actives brought $316 billion in inflows into Cash App. In the fourth quarter of 2025, our Cash App monthly transacting actives brought in an average of $1,410 of inflows during the quarter.

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Block sizes the Square seller ecosystem — its merchant-processing footprint that competes with PayPal's Braintree/unbranded acquiring — by sellers, transactions and gross payment volume.

In the year ended December 31, 2025, more than 4.5 million sellers used the Square ecosystem to make 5.9 billion individual sales transactions totaling $250 billion of Square GPV. These sales transactions originated from more than 800 million payment cards, across more than 300 million buyer profiles.

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In its own risk factors Block names the fronts it fights on — banking-adjacent services and BNPL — the same categories where PayPal's wallet, Venmo debit and Pay Later collide with Cash App and Afterpay.

We compete with established banks, neobanks, and other financial technology companies that provide access to similar offerings […] We also compete in the BNPL market and a number of our competitors have introduced or offer BNPL products.

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Adyen N.V. (ADYEN)

The purest enterprise-processing rival to PayPal's Braintree/unbranded business: a single global platform for online, in-store and in-app payments, expanding into embedded finance for software platforms — the exact ground PayPal's Commerce Platform contests.

Adyen's own description of its three commercial pillars — the Platforms pillar (embedding payments, capital and issuing into software providers) overlaps directly with PayPal's Braintree/Commerce Platform embedded-finance push.

We organize our commercial activities into three pillars. Digital supports onlinefirst enterprises such as subscription businesses, travel, and mobility. Unified Commerce connects online and in-person payments for global retailers, hospitality, and food & beverage groups. Platforms enables software providers to embed payments and financial services, including capital, issuing, and business accounts, into their offerings.

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Adyen quantifies its enterprise processing scale and take rate for 2025, including a rising in-person (POS) share — the omnichannel reach it presses against Braintree/PayPal-unbranded.

Processed volume for 2025 was €1,394.3 billion, up 8% YoY. Of processed volumes, 84% were full-stack volumes, up from 83% in 2024. In 2025, our point-of-sale volumes were €310.9 billion, comprising 22% of total processed volume, up from 18% in 2024. […] Full-year take rate for 2025 was 17.0 bps, up from 15.5 bps in 2024.

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Adyen's risk disclosure that large merchants deliberately split volume across multiple processors — the multi-PSP dynamic in which Adyen and PayPal's Braintree fight for share inside the same enterprise accounts.

Large enterprise customers typically have arrangements with multiple payment service providers (primarily in order to mitigate their single-point-of-failure risk). These customers could terminate their contracts or shift business away, leading to lower processed volumes and net revenue.

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Visa Inc. (V)

The largest card network is both a rail PayPal rides and a competitor: Visa Direct chases the same P2P and disbursement flows as Venmo/PayPal, and Visa's own disclosures name PayPal directly while classing digital wallets as partner-and-competitor.

Visa names PayPal and Venmo directly — as Visa+ interoperability partners — illustrating how Visa is inserting its rails beneath the very P2P apps PayPal owns.

In addition, our Visa+ solution provides interoperability for our clients. In fiscal 2023, we announced the launch of Visa+, which enables transfers between participating P2P apps. Visa+ is now fully live for eligible users of PayPal and Venmo in the U.S.

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Visa's stated scale for Visa Direct, the money-movement platform that competes with Venmo/PayPal P2P, payouts and settlements.

We have the largest money movement platform in the world — by transactions, volumes and endpoints […] In fiscal 2025, Visa Direct processed more than 12.5 billion transactions for more than 650 partners

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Visa's 10-K competition language: the 'Alternative Payments Providers' category — closed ecosystems, BNPL and crypto/stablecoins — that PayPal and Venmo epitomize, with Visa's admission that such players are 'both a partner and a competitor.'

Alternative Payments Providers: These providers, such as closed commerce ecosystems, BNPL solutions and cryptocurrency platforms (including stablecoins), often have a primary focus of enabling payments through ecommerce and mobile channels […] In some cases, these entities can be both a partner and a competitor to Visa.

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Mastercard Inc. (MA)

The other global network with the same frenemy relationship: Mastercard Move targets the disbursement and P2P flows Venmo/PayPal monetize, its filings class digital wallets as competitors, and management names PayPal directly as both issuing partner and competing wallet.

Mastercard's CEO names PayPal directly — as an expanded card-issuing partner and, in the same breath, a competing wallet operator launching contactless in Germany — capturing the coopetition at the heart of the relationship.

Michael Miebach, Chief Executive Officer: With PayPal, we extended our card issuing partnership in the United States. We also signed new credit and debit issuing agreements in the U.K. and Germany, and we are excited for PayPal's recently launched contactless mobile wallet in Germany.

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Mastercard's competition disclosure describes PayPal's category without naming it — 'digital wallets and other fintechs… processing payments using in-house capabilities' — the online, in-house-processing model PayPal/Braintree runs.

The global payments industry is highly competitive. […] We compete against general purpose payments networks, debit and local networks, ACH and real-time account-based payments systems, digital wallets and other fintechs (focused on online activity across various channels and processing payments using in-house capabilities), digital public infrastructure and other government backed solutions and digital currencies.

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Mastercard sizes the Move disbursements-and-remittances platform — the consumer and cross-border money-movement rails that overlap Venmo/PayPal P2P and payouts.

Through our Mastercard Move platform, we enable consumers, businesses, governments and merchants to send and receive money domestically and across borders to consumers with greater speed and ease, with a payout reach of more than 17 billion endpoints globally across multiple channels, and in more than 60 originating countries and 155 receiving countries

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Apple Inc. (AAPL)

Apple Pay, Apple Cash and Tap to Pay ride a 2.5-billion-device installed base into the wallet, in-store acceptance and P2P layers PayPal and Venmo compete for — a distribution advantage no standalone wallet can match.

Apple ties an all-time revenue record in payment services to its 2.5-billion active-device base — the built-in distribution PayPal and Venmo must overcome to win wallet share.

Kevan Parekh, Chief Financial Officer: Our services revenue reached an all time high of $30 billion, up 14% year over year. As we said earlier, we had all-time revenue records on advertising, music, payment services, and cloud services […] With our installed base of over 2.5 billion active devices, we have an incredibly strong foundation for new growth opportunities

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Apple's global expansion of Tap to Pay — turning iPhones into acceptance terminals in 50+ markets — presses on the merchant-acceptance turf PayPal and Venmo are extending into.

Kevan Parekh, Chief Financial Officer: And we continue to improve the quality and expand the breadth of our Services—from the expansion of features like Tap to Pay, now available in over 50 markets, to deeper support for enterprise customers.

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Alphabet Inc. (Google) (GOOGL)

Google Pay/Wallet and Google's push to own the agentic-checkout surface (Universal Commerce Protocol, Buy with Google Pay) contest the branded-checkout and wallet layer PayPal monetizes — while, for now, partnering with PayPal on commerce.

Google describes moving into agentic checkout and names PayPal — as a partner in that build-out — signaling Google increasingly owns the checkout surface where PayPal is one option among many.

Philipp Schindler, President & Chief Business Officer: we also introduced new agentic checkout, which will let shoppers use like agentic AI to buy products from merchant sites and so on. We have a partnership with PayPal to help merchants build agentic commerce experiences.