The honest answer to "should I take payments via Square or Stripe" is that it depends, and the thing it depends on is one specific question about your business. The question is whether your customers are mostly standing in front of you or whether they are mostly arriving through a website or an app.
Both Square and Stripe will process payments competently, charge similar fees, and handle the things you are afraid of like fraud and reconciliation. The decision rarely comes down to which one is cheaper or more reliable, because the differences on those axes are smaller than the marketing on either side suggests. The decision comes down to which one fits the shape of how you sell.
Square was built for businesses where the customer is physically present. The card reader, the chip insert, the contactless tap, the receipt printer, the cash drawer that opens when the sale completes. The whole product was designed around someone walking up to the counter, paying, and walking away. The software is set up for that flow. The reports are set up for that flow. The hardware is meant to be plugged in once and forgotten. If most of your sales happen in person, Square will feel right almost immediately, the staff will pick it up without much training, and the friction of getting started will be low.
Stripe was built for businesses where the customer is on the other end of an internet connection. A checkout form on a website. A subscription that renews automatically. A marketplace where buyers and sellers transact through your platform. The product is mostly an API and a set of building blocks that developers assemble into checkout flows specific to the business. If you have a developer or are willing to use a website builder that integrates with Stripe, the product is enormously flexible. If you do not have a developer and are not selling online, Stripe is going to feel like a more complicated version of a tool you did not need to be complicated.
The middle case is the business that does both. The salon that takes in-person walk-ins but also sells gift cards online. The contractor who runs jobs in person but invoices through email. The small e-commerce brand that sometimes does pop-up markets. For these businesses, the right answer is usually to pick one as the primary system and use the other only where it has to be used. Most of the time the primary should be the one that handles the larger share of revenue, because that is where the operational efficiency matters most. Reconciling between two payment systems at the end of the month is annoying but manageable when one of them is small.
A few specific situations have a clear answer. If you are a brick-and-mortar shop, salon, restaurant, food truck, market vendor, or any business that takes payments at a physical counter, Square is almost always the right primary. The friction of starting is low, the hardware works, and the reports answer the questions you are likely to ask about your day. Trying to bend Stripe to fit a counter operation is possible but takes more setup time than it saves.
If you are an online business of any kind, Stripe is almost always the right primary. The checkout integrations with major website builders are mature, the support for subscriptions is excellent, the international currency handling is good, and the API surface gives you room to grow into custom flows when you need them. Square has an online product, but it lags behind Stripe on the depth of features online businesses tend to need.
If you are a service business that bills via invoices that customers pay later, the answer depends on how the invoices are delivered. If you mostly send invoices through email or text and customers pay via a link, Stripe Invoicing is mature and clean. If you mostly print invoices and customers pay in person at the next visit, Square handles that flow more naturally because the in-person collection is what it is built for.
Cost is rarely the deciding factor. The standard rates for both are within a fraction of a percent of each other on most card types, and both occasionally run discounts or have rate changes. If you are at the volume where the difference between two-point-six percent and two-point-seven percent matters in absolute dollars, you are also at the volume where you should be negotiating with both providers rather than picking based on the rack rate. Below that volume, the difference is real but small enough that it should not drive the choice.
Switching costs are worth understanding before you commit. Both systems hold your transaction history, your customer payment methods, and your saved payment profiles. Moving to a different processor later means setting up the new one, sometimes asking customers to re-enter their payment details, and accepting that the old reports will live in two systems. None of this is fatal. But the act of changing payment processors is enough work that you should pick the one that fits your shape rather than starting on whichever was easiest to sign up for and switching when you outgrow it.
For an owner deciding right now, the working pattern is to ask one question. Where do most of your sales happen. If the answer is "at a counter or in person," start with Square. If the answer is "on a website or through a link," start with Stripe. If the answer is "honestly, both," pick the one that handles the larger share, and add the other later only where you have to. That decision is right often enough that the more elaborate analyses people do online are usually overcomplicating it.
The thing the question depends on is your customers, not your processor.