We grade payment processors on pricing transparency, features, support and contract terms — then publish the reasoning behind every grade.
reviewed
independent
always
The report card
real directory dataStripe
Payfac / Aggregator
PayKings
Agent Office / Reseller
Square
POS & Business Software
The evidence
Rates, fees, payout times and contract terms come from published documentation and public filings — never from a sales call. Each review carries the date it was last fact-checked.
Where a provider doesn't disclose a number, the review says so. We don't estimate, and we don't fill gaps with marketing copy.
The fact sheet
real directory dataHelcim
Fact-checked September 7, 2026
Every value above is published by the provider. A processor that doesn't publish a number gets “Not disclosed” in that cell — never an estimate.
The grade
Pricing transparency, feature set, ease of use, customer support, contract terms and industry reputation — every review scores all six, and the grade is what the scores say it is.
No pay-to-play, no sponsored placements. A provider can't buy a better grade; they can only earn one, and the reasoning is published either way.
The scorecard
real directory dataHelcim
Mean category score 4.5/5
The six weighted scores produce the letter grade — the same rubric for every review in the directory.
Head to head
Same criteria, same evidence, side by side — with a winner called per row and overall, and the reasoning for each call.
Where the honest answer is “it depends on your business”, the comparison says that instead of forcing a verdict. And it's not just the featured matchups — any two of the reviewed processors can be compared.
Head to head
real directory data| Viva.com | SumUp | |
|---|---|---|
| UK consumer card, no monthly fee | 1.69% | 1.69% |
| Domestic consumer card, on a monthly plan | 1.69% on every plan (£3.99–£15.99 a month) | 0.99% on Payments Plus (£19 a month)✓ |
| American Express in person | 2.65% (+0.40% if issued outside the EEA) | 1.69% (pay-as-you-go and Payments Plus)✓ |
| Commercial, European and international cards | 1.16% plus interchange and scheme fees | 1.69% on premium and international cards |
Full transparency
Lawsuits, regulatory actions, undisclosed pricing, contract traps — when the evidence turns up a problem, it goes in the review with the same prominence as the praise.
A grade you can trust has to be allowed to be bad. Every item in this feed links to the review that documents it.
Watch out
from published reviewsFTC v. Qualpay, Inc. (M.D. Fla., No. 6:20-cv-00945)
Qualpay · 2020-06
Banco Central do Brasil sanctioning proceeding PE 136559 (Conta EBANX and EBANX Dollar Card)
EBANX · 2020-02
Central Bank of Nigeria penalty over Zap by Paystack
Paystack · 2025-04
In re Mindbody, Inc., Stockholder Litigation (Del.)
Mindbody · 2024-12-02
Doesn't publish its pricing
Qualpay
Doesn't publish its pricing
EBANX
Documented in the linked reviews — legal actions are listed with case title, date and status.
Top rated
Ranked by grade, then by average category score. Equal grades share a position. An acquirer and an agent office are not the same purchase — pick a category to rank like against like.
Stripe is a leading payment processor known for its developer-friendly API, transparent pricing, and comprehensive suite of payment solutions for businesses of all sizes.
PayKings is a specialized payment processor offering tailored solutions for high-risk industries with a strong emphasis on fraud prevention.
Square offers simple, transparent payment processing ideal for small businesses. Flat-rate pricing, no monthly fees, and excellent software make it a top choice — but account holds and limited support are key concerns.
Helcim is a Calgary-based payment processing company that offers genuinely transparent interchange-plus pricing with no monthly fees, no hidden charges, and a comprehensive suite of free payment tools.
Adyen is a global, enterprise-grade payments platform that unifies acquiring, processing, routing and risk management into a single stack for merchants with international and omnichannel needs.
Shopify Payments is Shopify’s own branded payments service — processed by Stripe, per Shopify’s published processor list — giving merchants one-click access to accepting cards and wallets inside Shopify, simplifying setup and eliminating third-party gateway fees for supported merchants.
The directory
Yoco is a Cape Town payments company that sells card machines, a free point-of-sale app and online payment tools to small and independent businesses in South Africa, and only in South Africa: its terms refuse businesses registered elsewhere and limit processing to sales made in the country, in rand. A merchant signs Yoco's own agreement rather than applying to a bank for a merchant account, with Absa and Citibank named in the terms as examples of the banking partners behind the payment service, which is why sign-up takes minutes and why Yoco, not a bank, decides when to pause a payout. As of September 2026 there are three plans. Core costs nothing a month and charges 2.30% excluding VAT on local cards in person, dropping to 1.35% on debit cards once the rolling three-month average of monthly sales reaches R50,000. Plus (R249 a month per location) and Pro (R499) lower those rates and add loyalty, multi-location, table management and accounting integrations. Online payments cost more: 2.95% + R2 excluding VAT on local cards on Core. Hardware is bought outright, with no rental: the Khumo 2 card machine was R699 on promotion. Standard payouts are free and, on Yoco's own schedule, reach the bank two to three business days after the sale, and faster payouts cost extra except on Pro. Yoco said in May 2026 that it serves more than 200,000 merchants; its newer card-machine page claims 250,000+ businesses. Its public review record is mixed: 3.7 out of 5 across 356 HelloPeter reviews in the past year, with praise for named support staff and complaints about account reviews, held payouts and chatbot-first support.
GlossGenius is booking, point-of-sale, marketing and staff software for US salons, barbers, spas, medical spas and wellness and fitness studios, built in New York by twin sisters Danielle Cohen-Shohet, the chief executive, and Leah Cohen-Shohet. The company was incorporated in August 2015, raised a $44 million Series D at a $1.15 billion valuation in July 2026 and at the same time renamed itself Genius AI, with GlossGenius kept as its main product; it says more than 125,000 businesses use the platform. Card processing is built in and runs on Stripe: GlossGenius is the platform, Stripe is the processor, and every business gets a Stripe connected account rather than its own merchant ID. The published price is one flat 2.6% with no per-transaction fee, and it is the same whether the card is tapped, keyed, stored on file or used to pay a deposit online, which is unusual among salon platforms. Invoices cost 2.9% + $0.30 and buy-now-pay-later 6% + $0.30. A setting lets the business pass some or all of the fee to clients as a 2.5% or 3.5% convenience fee. The software costs $24, $48 or $148 a month billed annually ($28, $56 or $168 billed monthly), is month to month, and standard payouts are free, sent each evening Sunday to Thursday, and usually arrive the next day. The weak spots are the service record: a D- BBB rating for failing to respond to 24 complaints, and recent complaints from businesses whose payouts were held for verification.
Clip is a Mexico City payments company founded in 2012 by Adolfo Babatz, still its chief executive, which processed its first transaction in 2013 and now serves what it calls hundreds of thousands of Mexican businesses with card readers, countertop terminals, Tap to Pay on Android and iPhone, payment links, an online checkout and a free business account. It is independent and privately held: it became a unicorn in June 2021 on a US$250 million round led by the SoftBank Latin America Fund and Viking Global, at a valuation Clip put at nearly US$2 billion; raised US$100 million from funds managed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value and a West Coast mutual fund manager in June 2024; and in June 2026 was reported by Bloomberg Línea to have secured US$500 million from unnamed investors at a valuation above US$2.5 billion, in a round still subject to regulatory approval, as it launched a consumer wallet, Mi Clip, built with Ant International, Mastercard and TelevisaUnivision. The model is an aggregator's: the merchant signs Clip's own online terms, with the service provided either by PayClip, S. de R.L. de C.V. as aggregator or by Payclip Servicios de Adquirencia, S.A. de C.V. as acquirer, at Clip's discretion. As of September 2026 the standard commission is 3.6% + IVA per transaction, and a loyalty program cuts it to between 2.99% + MX$1 + IVA and 2.49% + IVA for merchants selling at least MX$10,000 a month by card, with Amex and international cards at 3.50%. There is no monthly fee and no fixed term, readers sell for as little as MX$129 on promotion, and card-present sales land instantly in a Clip Cuenta or within 24 hours in a bank account. The costs sit elsewhere: steep meses-sin-intereses surcharges, and terms that let Clip hold funds, suspend service or end the relationship without notice.
Xendit is a Jakarta-based payments company founded in 2015 by Moses Lo, Tessa Wijaya, Bo Chen and Juan Gonzalez, which went through Y Combinator's Summer 2015 batch as a peer-to-peer payments app and pivoted to payment gateway products in 2016. It now operates in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore and Hong Kong, and publishes a Mexican rate card as well. A merchant signs Xendit's own services agreement and is paid out of a Xendit balance, under licences held by group companies in each market — a Bank Indonesia payment gateway licence, a Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas operator-of-payment-system registration, a Bank Negara Malaysia merchant-acquiring licence through Payex, a Bank of Thailand payment service provider licence, and others. Xendit publishes one regional rate card with every method's price, which is its real strength: as of September 2026, domestic cards are 2.9% + IDR 2,000 in Indonesia, 3.5% in the Philippines, 1.9% to 2.0% in Malaysia and 3.2% + THB 10 in Thailand, QRIS is 0.7%, and Indonesian virtual accounts are a flat IDR 9,000. The catch is a pricing overhaul. From 1 October 2026 Xendit adds a fixed processing fee to every transaction attempt — IDR 4,000, PHP 11, MYR 0.90 or THB 7, including failed attempts and refunds — plus a US$25 card chargeback fee, a US$50 monthly minimum for low-volume and dormant accounts and a US$250 monthly charge for merchants still on its legacy API. On small tickets the fixed fee can exceed the percentage. Card settlement is five business days in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Xendit says it serves more than 15,200 businesses; its most recent widely reported round was a US$300 million Series D in May 2022, at an undisclosed valuation.
Qualpay is a San Mateo, California payments company that sells a merchant account and its own payment gateway as a single product, so one account covers online checkout, a virtual terminal, recurring billing, invoicing and text-to-pay, ACH and in-person terminals, with one set of reports running from authorisation to deposit. It was incorporated in October 2013, launched its platform in 2014 and was founded by payments-industry veterans, and its leadership team comes largely from BA Merchant Services and Merchant e-Solutions; Craig Gass has been chief executive since at least 2015. It is a registered ISO of its sponsor bank, which is now Pinnacle Bank, a Tennessee bank, doing business as Synovus Bank: Synovus took a 60% stake and three of five board seats on 1 June 2023, Synovus combined with Pinnacle Financial Partners on 1 January 2026, and Synovus Bank merged into Pinnacle Bank the next day; Pinnacle's filings still list the 60% holding as of March 2026. The merchant agreement is signed by Qualpay, the bank and the merchant, and runs for three years with an early-termination fee equal to your average monthly Qualpay fees multiplied by the months left, with a $150 minimum. Qualpay publishes no rates at all as of September 2026; pricing is quoted after a free statement audit it calls the Savings Challenge. Qualpay says card payments take two to three days to fund. In recent years Qualpay has concentrated on propane and heating-oil dealers, waste haulers, utilities, nonprofits and B2B sellers, and it says its energy-sector volume passed $1 billion in the first quarter of 2025. The main blemish on its record is a 2020 Federal Trade Commission settlement over payment processing for the MOBE business-coaching scheme, which permanently bars it from processing for business-coaching and money-making-method sellers, permanently requires it to screen and monitor its riskier card-not-present clients, and imposes 15 years of compliance reporting and recordkeeping.
EBANX is a cross-border payments company founded in Curitiba, Brazil in 2012 by Alphonse Voigt, Wagner Ruiz and João Del Valle, built to let companies outside Latin America sell to Brazilian shoppers in reais through local methods such as boleto and, later, Pix. It now says it covers more than 20 emerging markets across Latin America, Africa and Asia with more than 200 payment methods, serves more than 500 merchants — Spotify, Uber, AliExpress, Microsoft and Booking.com among the names on its site — and grew total payment volume 48% in 2025, with 65% of gross profit earned outside Brazil. It became a unicorn after a 2019 round from FTV Capital and Endeavor Catalyst, took a $400 million investment from Advent International in June 2021, plus a $30 million commitment to a planned US listing, and postponed that IPO in February 2022; it remains private. The model is an aggregator's: a foreign merchant signs a single agreement with EBANX's Singapore entity, EBANX group companies collect from shoppers locally, handle the currency exchange and taxes such as Brazil's IOF, and wire the net proceeds abroad in US dollars or euros — no local entity needed. Pricing is negotiated and unpublished. The published standard terms are merchant-unfriendly by default: a three-year term, an 80% exclusivity commitment, a fixed 4% reserve on every settlement for the first 180 days, funds available seven days after payment, and a $15 chargeback fee. On the shopper side, EBANX's Reclame Aqui page is rated 'Not recommended', with 2,683 complaints between March and August 2026 and none answered there. In 2020 it settled a Brazilian central bank case over a discontinued consumer foreign-currency account by paying R$880,000 under a commitment term.
Paystack is a payment aggregator for businesses in Africa, founded in Lagos in 2015 by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, put through Y Combinator in early 2016 and bought by Stripe in October 2020 in a deal widely reported at over $200 million. Its own help desk says the service is available to businesses registered in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Kenya, with Côte d'Ivoire — which has a published rate card — described as a private beta alongside Egypt. Paystack's site says more than 200,000 businesses use it; its chief executive put the figure at 300,000 in January 2026. A merchant signs up with Paystack rather than applying for a merchant account of their own, which is the reason onboarding is quick and the reason Paystack, not an acquiring bank, decides when to hold funds. Pricing is published in full for every market, which is unusual in this segment: Nigeria is 1.5% + ₦100 on local transactions with the ₦100 waived under ₦2,500 and the whole fee capped at ₦2,000, 3.9% + ₦100 on international cards; South Africa is 2.9% + R1 excluding VAT locally and 3.1% + R1 internationally; Ghana is a flat 1.95%; Kenya is 1.5% on M-PESA and 2.9% on local cards; Côte d'Ivoire is 1.95% on mobile money and 3.2% on local cards. Settlement is next working day in Nigeria and Ghana and two working days in South Africa, with no setup or monthly charge. In January 2026 the business reorganised under a holding company, The Stack Group, whose founding shareholders are Stripe, Paystack's employees and Akinlade, alongside the Zap transfer app and a microfinance bank. The reservations are the ones that come with any aggregator: the Central Bank of Nigeria fined Paystack ₦250 million in April 2025 over Zap operating outside its licence, and the public review record is dominated by accounts of balances held during compliance review.
Mindbody is booking, scheduling and point-of-sale software for fitness studios, gyms, salons and spas, founded in San Luis Obispo, California in 2001 and now the best-known brand in wellness software. Payment processing is sold as Mindbody Payments, built on Stripe Connect, and takes cards, ACH, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna and Tap to Pay in more than forty countries. The pricing picture is unusually lopsided: Mindbody's own support documentation publishes card-present and card-not-present rates for around twenty regions — Canada at 2.89% + $0.25 CAD online and 2.39% + $0.10 CAD in person, the UK at 2.19% + 20p and 1.99% + 10p, most of the EU at 2.4% + €0.25 — and for the United States and Australia prints an email address instead. Software runs from $79 a month per location on the Starter plan, with the Accelerate and Ultimate tiers quoted rather than listed. Bookings that come through the consumer Mindbody app via its marketing tools are charged 3.5% plus a 20% marketplace fee, capped at $30 and applied only to a new client's first purchase. The terms of service, updated 20 March 2026, make early exit expensive: fees are non-refundable, thirty days' notice is required, and a customer who leaves before the end of a subscription term remains liable for the rest of it. The corporate context changed twice recently — the brands were gathered under a parent called Playlist in June 2025, and that business completed a merger with the German connected-fitness company EGYM in March 2026 at a combined valuation of $7.5 billion.
Mangopay is payment infrastructure for marketplaces and platforms rather than a processor a shop signs up with. It launched in 2013 as a spin-off of the French group-gifting site Leetchi, was bought by Crédit Mutuel Arkéa in 2015, and has been majority-owned by Advent International since April 2022, which put €75 million of new capital in at the same time; Sergi Herrero, previously global director for payments and commerce partnerships at Meta, has been chief executive since September 2024. Mangopay S.A. is registered in Luxembourg and licensed by the CSSF as an electronic money institution, which is the core of the product: it can open an e-wallet for every buyer and seller on a platform, hold funds there, split a payment between several parties, and pay out later — the money movement a marketplace legally cannot do itself without a licence of its own. Its UK arm, Mangopay U.K. Limited, has been an FCA-authorised electronic money institution since 2023, under firm reference 984753. The company says it has created 207 million wallets and processed €68 billion in transactions, and its named clients are the big European marketplaces: Vinted, Wallapop, Chrono24, Rakuten France, ManoMano, Malt, Mirakl. It bought the Polish anti-fraud firm Nethone in November 2022 and the Dublin payment orchestrator WhenThen in March 2023, and now sells fraud screening, identity verification, FX across twenty-plus wallet currencies, payouts in thirty-plus countries and virtual IBANs alongside the core wallet. What it does not do is publish prices: pricing is custom and volume-based, quoted per platform, with no self-serve tier and no public rate card.
Compare processors on published facts — rates, fees, contract terms and support — with a grade that explains itself.
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