Which Stripe product is essential for powering Marketplaces and SaaS Platforms?

The correct choice is Connect because it is specifically designed to cater to the needs of marketplaces and SaaS platforms. Stripe Connect offers robust features for managing multiple accounts and facilitating transactions among different parties, such as service providers and customers.

This product allows businesses to onboard users easily and manage payouts, which is essential in a marketplace setting where multiple vendors or service providers are involved. Connect supports a variety of payment methods and can handle complex scenarios, such as splitting payments between different parties, making it the ideal solution for platforms that require more functionality than typical payment processing.

While other options like Billing, Payments, and Checkout provide essential payment processing features, they do not encompass the full spectrum of capabilities that a marketplace or a SaaS platform requires. Billing focuses more on subscription management, Payments offers generic transaction processing, and Checkout is geared towards creating payment forms but lacks the marketplace-specific functionalities that Connect provides.