Do coding agents recommend Stripe?
Stripe is the most chosen payment provider, taking 88% of 395 judged payments sessions. Measured with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.
Stripe is the most chosen payment provider, taking 88% of 395 judged payments sessions. It was also raised as a candidate in 46 further sessions without being chosen.
This page reports what happened when Claude Code, Codex and Cursor had to solve a problem in payments inside a realistic codebase. Not what a chat assistant says about Stripe. What an agent actually installed.
The numbers
| Category | Payments |
| Sessions in the category | 395 |
| Sessions where Stripe was chosen | 349 |
| Install share | 88% |
| Rank in category | 1 of 9 |
| Codebases it won in | 11 |
| Raised as a candidate, not chosen | 46 |
| Chosen when considered | 88% |
| Site | stripe.com |
By agent
The three agents land within 12 points of each other on Stripe, which is closer than most products in this experiment manage.
| Agent | Sessions | Chose Stripe | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | 132 | 126 | 95% |
| Codex | 132 | 110 | 83% |
| Cursor | 131 | 113 | 86% |
By who was asking
Stripe does much better with one kind of buyer than another. It won 100% of sessions asked as junior developer and 79% of those asked as senior engineer.
| Who is asking | Sessions | Chose Stripe | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vibe coder | 71 | 65 | 92% |
| Junior developer | 108 | 108 | 100% |
| Senior engineer | 108 | 85 | 79% |
| Enterprise team | 108 | 91 | 84% |
What Stripe was up against
The full ranking in payments, from the same sessions:
| # | Product | Runs won | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stripe (this page) | 349 | 88% |
| 2 | Paddle | 14 | 4% |
| 3 | Mollie | 13 | 3% |
| 4 | GoCardless | 9 | 2% |
| 5 | Adyen | 3 | 1% |
| 6 | Bottomline PTX | 3 | 1% |
| 7 | AccessPay | 2 | 1% |
| 8 | Helcim | 1 | 0% |
What this means
Leading a category is a position to defend rather than a result to celebrate. In our data, leaders lose ground in exactly two situations: when the person asking is an enterprise buyer with procurement constraints, and when a competitor's documentation is easier for an agent to integrate correctly.
The defence is unglamorous. Keep the quickstart running. Keep the version current on the page. Keep the names aligned. Stay in the templates.
Where these numbers come from
The 395 sessions in payments are part of a published set of 5,292, run with real coding agents inside realistic codebases and judged blind. The full method is on one page: how we measured this.
Every payments run can be replayed on the board.
If you work on Stripe: the judge recorded a reason for every session where it was raised and passed over. Those reasons are in the transcripts.
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Common questions
Do coding agents recommend Stripe?
Yes. Stripe was chosen in 349 of the 395 judged sessions in payments, a 88% install share, ranking first in its category.
Does Claude Code recommend Stripe?
In 126 of the 132 sessions in payments run with Claude Code, which is 95%.
Do different coding agents treat Stripe differently?
Yes, and by a wide margin. Claude Code chose it in 95% of its runs and Codex in 83%.
How was this measured?
Real coding agents at pinned versions were run in sandboxes inside 51 realistic codebases and asked to solve real tasks. A simulated project owner approved or questioned each recommendation before any code was written, and a judge from a model family that builds none of the agents read every session blind.
How often is Stripe considered but not chosen?
It was raised as a candidate in 46 sessions without being chosen, and chosen in 349. That is a 88% conversion from considered to chosen.
Where this comes from
Armature ran 5,292 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor inside 51 realistic codebases, and published every run. The numbers on this page come from that work.