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Stripe Radar vs Stripe Sigma
Radar and Sigma are both Stripe add-ons but do opposite jobs — Radar decides what happens to a charge in real time, Sigma lets you query the results afterward.
Side by side
| Stripe Radar | Stripe Sigma | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Stripe | Stripe | ||||||||||||
| Pricing model | Usage-based | Usage-based | ||||||||||||
| Free tier | Yes | No | ||||||||||||
| Deployment | Cloud | Cloud | ||||||||||||
| Open source | No | No | ||||||||||||
| Best for | Merchants on Stripe who need automated fraud screening and dispute reduction without a separate fraud vendor. | Finance and analytics teams who want ad hoc SQL reporting on Stripe data without standing up a warehouse. | ||||||||||||
| Pricing | Radar Lite is included free with Stripe Payments; full Radar is billed either per screened transaction or a flat monthly fee.
Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget. | Monthly base fee scaled by successful-charge volume, plus a per-charge overage rate once the plan's included volume is exceeded.
Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget. | ||||||||||||
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Verdict
These are frequently confused because they're both Stripe products that touch the same charge data, but they don't compete — they're sequential. Stripe Radar runs before or at the moment of a charge: a machine-learning model scores fraud risk on every transaction, and merchant-defined rules block, allow or route it to manual review. Stripe Sigma runs after the fact: it's a SQL query editor over your own charges, customers, subscriptions and payouts, for building custom reports and scheduled exports. A baseline version of Radar (Radar Lite) is included free with standard Stripe payments; Sigma has no free tier and is billed by successful-charge volume with a monthly base fee.
Most teams that need one eventually want both — Radar to decide what happens to a charge, Sigma to query what happened afterward — and Stripe prices and documents them as a pair for exactly that reason.
Choose Stripe Radar if
- Your problem is fraud losses or chargebacks, and you need real-time blocking or review, not reporting on past transactions.
- You want machine-learning risk scoring trained across Stripe's network, not just your own rules.
- Radar Lite, free and included, isn't catching enough — the paid tier adds custom rules and a manual review queue.
Choose Stripe Sigma if
- You need custom, ad hoc reports on your own Stripe data — revenue by cohort, custom refund analysis, whatever a pre-built dashboard doesn't cover — without standing up a data pipeline.
- You want scheduled reports exported to CSV or Google Sheets on a recurring basis.
- You're already using Stripe Radar or another fraud tool and just need to analyze the resulting charge data.
The honest caveat
Sigma is included free if you're already on Stripe's Data Pipeline product, which streams data into an external warehouse; outside that, it's a genuine additional cost on top of processing fees. Neither tool aggregates data from a processor other than Stripe — for that, see Pagos. For the broader landscape, see choosing a payments analytics platform and data warehouse.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026