24 ranked
You sign up under the facilitator's master merchant account. Approval is fast and the price is usually published, but the account is theirs rather than yours, which is what makes a sudden hold possible.
Ranked by grade, then by average category score. Equal grades share a position — where our evidence does not separate two providers, neither does this list.
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.
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.
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.
Braintree is a full-featured, globally-capable payment gateway solution (online + mobile) backed by PayPal, offering robust APIs, developer tooling, and enterprise-class features for merchants. Primarily deals in mobile and web payment systems.
PayPal is a global, feature-rich digital payments platform (consumer wallet + merchant services) with extensive integrations and brand reach. It is trusted by many businesses but criticized in public reviews for dispute handling and account-hold practices.
One of Europe's largest independent payment service providers, serving more than 250,000 businesses from Amsterdam and authorised by the Dutch central bank as an electronic money institution. It publishes its full price list, which almost nobody at its scale does, and it is in the middle of absorbing GoCardless in a €1.05 billion deal. It processes for Europe and the UK only, and account freezes are the recurring complaint.
A pay-as-you-go card reader and POS provider with flat published rates, no monthly fee and no contract. Strong for small and mobile sellers; the recurring complaint is account freezes and held funds with slow resolution.
A global business account and payment platform with published rates, no lock-in contract and unusually cheap FX. Strong for cross-border sellers; weaker as a plain domestic card processor, and not an option for high-risk merchants.
Moov Financial is a US payments platform for software companies, built by Wade Arnold and Bob Smith out of the open-source moov.io money-movement libraries Arnold began publishing in 2017. It sells one API that accepts cards and bank payments, holds balances in wallets, sends payouts by RTP, FedNow or push-to-card, and issues virtual cards — the full money-movement stack that a vertical SaaS company would otherwise assemble from four vendors. It is the rare payments company that publishes a complete rate card: interchange plus 0.60% and 15 cents for online card acceptance, interchange plus 0.50% and 15 cents for Tap to Pay, 25 cents for next-day ACH, and a $500 monthly minimum with no setup fee. It has raised roughly $77.5 million across three named rounds, with Visa, Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures and Commerce Ventures on the register, and it operates in the United States only.
Amazon's express checkout button for other people's websites. Amazon's merchant payments business dates to the Amazon Flexible Payments Service beta in August 2007; the product merchants use today launched as Login and Pay with Amazon on 8 October 2013 and took the Amazon Pay name later. A shopper clicks it, signs in with the Amazon account they already have, and pays with a card and address Amazon already holds. Pricing is published and ordinary — 2.9% plus a $0.30 authorization fee on US domestic transactions, 3.9% plus $0.30 when the card was issued abroad, no monthly fee and no setup fee — and Express Payout will fund a US bank account within 24 hours including weekends, for free. What Amazon Pay is not is a merchant account. It is online-only, it has no card-present product, its acceptable use policy bans a long list of categories outright including CBD regardless of state law, and it only ever captures the slice of your checkout that Amazon shoppers choose. Treat it as a second button next to your real processor, not as a replacement for one.
GoDaddy's in-house processor, built on the Poynt technology it bought in 2020. Flat published rates, no monthly fee and next-business-day payouts make it a genuinely competitive small-business option — provided you are willing to run your commerce inside GoDaddy's ecosystem.
An Atlanta payfac-as-a-service provider that publishes its entire buy-rate card in public — 0.30% and $0.30 falling to 0.20% and $0.20 at volume, with no revenue share — for software platforms embedding payments. Not a merchant account, and only four years old.
A San Francisco processor that charges a monthly subscription — from $250 — and takes zero markup on interchange, billing a flat $0.08 or $0.15 per transaction instead. Excellent economics above roughly $1m a year, wrong below it, and with a public track record still too thin to lean on.
WooPayments is the official, Stripe-powered payment solution built exclusively for WooCommerce stores, offering no monthly fees and deep dashboard integration, but plagued by account suspension issues and inconsistent customer support that undermine trust for serious merchants.
Revolut Business is the merchant-acceptance arm of Revolut, the London fintech founded in 2015 by Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko. It is unusual in this directory for a simple reason: it publishes a complete rate card. A merchant can read, before speaking to anyone, that in-person domestic consumer Visa and Mastercard transactions cost 0.8% + £0.02, that the same cards online cost 1% + £0.20, that commercial and international cards cost 2.6% + £0.02 in person and 2.8% + £0.20 online, that a Revolut Terminal is £169 + VAT and a Lite Terminal £129 + VAT, and that a chargeback dispute resolved in the merchant's favour returns £15. Acceptance is a sub-account of a Revolut Business account rather than a separate merchant account with a separate provider, so settlement lands in the same balance the business already banks from, in as little as 24 hours. The important limit is geographic: Revolut has offered acquiring across the UK and continental Europe since 2020–21 — its own January 2021 announcement put the count at 29 European countries, a figure it has not refreshed since — and launched a full merchant-acquiring suite in Australia during 2026. It publishes no United States card-acceptance rates. In March 2026 Revolut exited the Bank of England's mobilisation phase and received a full UK banking licence, roughly twenty months after being granted one with restrictions in July 2024.
QuickBooks Payments is Intuit's card and bank-payment service, sold as an add-on to QuickBooks Online rather than as a standalone merchant account. Intuit was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California; money movement is provided by Intuit Payments Inc., licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services, and the card acquiring itself runs through JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. and Paymentech, LLC under the commercial entity merchant agreement Intuit publishes. Rates are published in full and, as of the figures Intuit dated 30 April 2026, are 2.5% for in-person payments, 2.99% for invoices and other card and digital-wallet transactions, 1% for ACH bank payments, 3.5% for keyed cards, and 2.99% for buy-now-pay-later through Affirm. There is no monthly fee for Payments itself, no minimum and no long-term contract. The defining trade-off is reconciliation: nothing else puts card, ACH, PayPal, Venmo and Affirm volume straight into your books with no matching step, and nothing else in this price band has quite the same reputation for freezing deposits.
A Boulder, Colorado company that sells payments infrastructure to software companies rather than merchant accounts to businesses. Tilled claims to have coined the term PayFac-as-a-Service: a software vendor gets the economics of being a payment facilitator — a share of the processing revenue on every transaction its customers make — without taking on the registration, underwriting and compliance burden of actually becoming one. It is one of the very few companies in this catalogue that publishes its own prices in public, which is the main reason it grades where it does.
A vertical payments company you probably meet through your software, not through a salesperson. REPAY — legally M & A Ventures, LLC doing business as REPAY, and known in full as Realtime Electronic Payments — was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Atlanta. It is publicly traded as RPAY and reported full-year 2025 revenue of $309.3 million, split between a Consumer Payments segment at $285.9 million and a Business Payments segment at $48.4 million, with 2026 guidance of $340 to $346 million. Its business is embedding payment acceptance and vendor disbursement inside the software that particular industries already run: consumer lenders, auto dealers and their finance arms, credit unions, receivables management firms, municipalities, healthcare, HOA and property management. The distinctive products are the ones a general processor does not build — Instant Funding, which pushes loan proceeds to a borrower's debit card in real time through Visa Direct, and an AP automation network REPAY says exceeded 602,000 suppliers at the end of 2025. What it does not do is publish a price or serve a walk-up merchant.
Payoneer is a global fintech platform that enables businesses, freelancers, and marketplaces to send and receive cross-border payments, manage multi-currency funds, and scale internationally.
PaySimple is a Denver payments-and-billing platform for service businesses — the kind that invoice, take deposits and bill the same customers month after month rather than ring up a counter. Its own about page dates the business to 2006 and puts it at more than 22,000 businesses; the site footer carries a 2005 copyright and the Better Business Bureau file records a December 2006 start, so the exact birth year depends on which document you read. What matters more is the lineage: the company Eric Remer founded as PaySimple is the company that was incorporated as EverCommerce in 2016 and listed on Nasdaq in 2021. PaySimple was not bought by EverCommerce so much as it became it, and the brand now sits inside that group as one product among many — the BBB file is registered to "EverCommerce Solutions Inc., DBA PaySimple Inc." PaySimple is a registered ISO of Fifth Third Bank and of Wells Fargo Bank. Pricing is published in full and unusually plain: $79.95 a month with every feature included, 2.9% plus 30 cents on cards, 1% plus 30 cents on ACH, no contract and no cancellation fee.
Wave is a Toronto software company, started in April 2010, that gives away accounting and invoicing to very small businesses and makes its money when those invoices get paid. H&R Block bought it for $405 million in a deal that closed on 1 July 2019, and it has been a subsidiary ever since. Payments run at 2.9% plus 60 cents for Visa, Mastercard and Discover, 3.4% plus 60 cents for American Express, and 1% with a $1 minimum for bank payments, with no monthly fee on the free Starter plan; a $19-a-month Pro plan waives the 60-cent card fee on the first ten transactions each month and adds features. Card money lands in one to two business days, bank payments in one to seven, and eligible accounts can pull an instant payout to a debit card for a further 1%. Since November 2020 Wave has served the United States and Canada only. Its US card processing is powered by Adyen and Stripe, which Wave discloses in its own terms.
BitPay is a cryptocurrency payment processor founded in May 2011 by Tony Gallippi and Stephen Pair, now based in Alpharetta, Georgia, and by its own description the world's longest-operating crypto payments company. A merchant is quoted in fiat, the customer pays in bitcoin, a stablecoin or another supported asset, and BitPay settles to the merchant's bank account in dollars on the next business day, absorbing the price movement. Its merchant pricing is published in full — 2% + 25 cents under $500,000 a month, 1.5% + 25 cents to $999,999, and 1% + 25 cents above $1 million — which puts it ahead of most of the payments industry on transparency. Crypto payments are push transactions, so there are no chargebacks. The company holds a BBB A without accreditation, settled with the US Treasury's sanctions office in 2021 over 2,102 apparent violations, and carries a 1.2-star Trustpilot score driven overwhelmingly by consumers using its wallet rather than by merchants.
Nayax is an Israeli payments and commerce platform built for unattended retail — vending machines, kiosks, car washes, laundromats, amusement machines, coffee service and, increasingly, EV charging. Founded in 2005 by Yair Nechmad and David Ben Avi and headquartered in Herzliya, it listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in May 2021 and on Nasdaq in September 2022. In the second quarter of 2026 it reported revenue of $122.6 million, up 28.2%, on total transaction value of $2.056 billion across 815 million transactions, 1.553 million managed and connected devices and 125,400 customers, at a blended take rate of 2.62%. Its US retail plan is published at $99 a month with no transaction fee on the first $5,000 of monthly volume. Against that: a February 2025 consent decree with the Israeli Competition Authority over its OTI acquisition, a July 2026 cloud security incident, 79 BBB complaints in three years and a 2.2-star Trustpilot.
An embedded-payments specialist that sells to software platforms first and merchants second. Fortis plugs card acceptance into ERP and business software — Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage — and is registered as both a payment facilitator and an ISO for several banks, including KeyBank and Fifth Third. It took a growth recapitalisation from Audax Private Equity alongside existing investor Lovell Minnick in March 2025. It publishes no pricing at all, and the third-party sources describing its contract terms flatly contradict each other, which is the single most important thing to know before you sign.