At first glance, Visa Inc (NYSE:V) and eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY) look like apples and oranges, but look under the hood at they have something big in common. After all, Visa is the world’s largest payments processor, while the best thing Ebay has going for it is its ownership of payments processor PayPal. (Too bad that puts eBay’s core business in a precarious position.)

True, these two companies don’t have all that much commonality beyond that. Ebay is an e-commerce company. Visa is in the financial services industry. Ebay has been a publicly traded company for nearly 20 years, while Visa held its IPO only seven years ago.

But by the one measure that really counts — share price performance — Visa and eBay aren’t all that different, at least not in how they’ve done in the current bull market. Indeed, both are big-time market beaters.

Of course, past results don’t mean squat for future returns. If you had to bet on just one of these names for future growth, which one wins? An e-commerce giant with an upstart payments business, or the king of electronic funds transfers?

Here’s a look at V and EBAY head-to-head.

Ebay (EBAY)

The best thing about eBay is also the worst thing about eBay: Its almost total dependence on PayPal. Heck, PayPal accounted for nearly 45% of eBay’s total revenue in the most recent quarter. It also contributes almost all of eBay’s revenue growth, as the core marketplace business has slowed to a near-standstill.

Whenever two parts of the same company find themselves with very different growth profiles, the playbook is to separate them — and that’s exactly eBay’s plan with PayPal.

Under pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, eBay intends to spin off the payments business later this year. PayPal will become a publicly traded company owned by eBay shareholders, tax free. This is by far the most attractive thing about owning eBay stock. Indeed, eBay without PayPal is a snooze.

Visa (V)

Visa, meanwhile, has been a market-crushing stock over the last 52 weeks and has new growth opportunities cropping up all the time. Indeed, every time a company like Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) launches a payment service like Apple Pay, Visa wins. With so many tech companies clamoring to get in on the act, Visa is in an enviable place indeed.

That’s the beauty of a payments processor like Visa. An increasingly digital world creates demand for credit card and debt card transactions, and that gives Visa an amazing growth rate for a megacap company.

Heck, analysts expect Visa to generate a compound annual growth rate of 17% for the next five years. Revenue forecasts have Visa adding as much as 10% to its top line over the next couple of years. We’re talking about a company with almost $13 billion in annual revenue here. So much for the law of large numbers.

Our First-Round Pick: EBAY

This call is tougher than you’d think. For all its woes of slowing marketplace growth and falling behind the competition, eBay stock has been on fire throughout the bull market. It’s up 480% since March 2009, vs. 440% for Visa and 200% for the S&P 500.

Now, a lot of that outperformance has been driven by PayPal, and PayPal has lots of growth going for it. Revenue grew close to 20% in the most recent quarter. It’s also supremely positioned to take advantage of the explosive growth of mobile payments.

In an upset win, eBay beats Visa because shareholders will get PayPal in late 2015 and PayPal is hotter than Visa. Once the spinoff is complete, stockholders can ditch their eBay stock and — of they’re so in love with Visa — buy it with the proceeds.

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As of this writing, Dan Burrows did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.