What is the difference between Adyen Drop-in and Components?

What Drop-in does

You create a session on your server, you give that session to Drop-in, you mount it into one empty div, and from there Adyen takes over. It decides which payment methods to show, builds the forms, validates the input, handles the redirect to iDEAL or the 3D Secure challenge, and tells you at the end whether the payment worked.

The best part comes later, after you have launched. Say you are opening in Poland and you want Blik: you switch it on in the Customer Area and it appears in your live checkout, with no ticket, no sprint and no deploy. For a small team, that is a big deal.

The cost is that Drop-in owns the whole block. You can change colours and fonts, but you cannot split it up, so there is no putting Apple Pay at the top of the page with everything else at the bottom, and no slipping your own address field into the middle of it. The block is the block.

What Components does

Components gives you the same payment logic with no opinion about how it looks, so you create the card component and mount it where you want, create the PayPal button and mount it somewhere else, and decide the order, the spacing and the whole layout yourself.

You get full control, and you pay for it twice. First, nothing shows up unless you wrote code for it, so a new payment method means a deploy rather than a toggle. Second, you now own all the logic Drop-in was handling for you: which methods for which country, what to do when a method needs to redirect, and what to do when the payment comes back with an action instead of a result.

What about saved cards

Drop-in shows a returning shopper their stored payment methods automatically, as part of the same block, with the remove control built in. Components does not. You fetch the stored methods yourself, render each one as its own component, and build your own remove button against the Recurring API.

If saved cards matter to your conversion rate, that is real work you are taking on, and it is the difference people underestimate most often when they choose Components.

The upgrade cost is not the same either

If you are on Adyen Web v5 and planning the move to v6, that upgrade is a small job for Drop-in and a real project for Components, because Components has to be rebuilt around the new per-method classes. Worth knowing before you promise a date. See what changed in Adyen Web v6 for the detail.

Which one should I use?

If you cannot say your reason in one sentence, you probably want Drop-in.

See them side by side

Both playgrounds run on the same merchant account and the same Sessions flow, so the only difference you see is the integration style. Change the country in each one and watch the method list change.