12 ranked
The layer that carries a transaction from your checkout to a processor. A gateway is not a merchant account, and most businesses need both.
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.
Authorize.Net is a mature, Visa-owned payment gateway that offers robust, developer-friendly payment tools, strong fraud controls, and wide platform integrations. Pricing and merchant-account terms that vary depending on whether you use Authorize.Net’s all-in-one plan or attach your own processor.
Akurateco is a white-label PCI DSS-compliant payment orchestration platform that enables businesses and PSPs to deploy advanced payment infrastructure and unify multiple payment methods globally.
Spreedly is a payment orchestration platform and PCI-compliant card vault founded in 2007 and run from Durham, North Carolina. It does not process payments itself. It stores your customers' card credentials in its own vault, connects them to more than 140 payment gateways through one API, and routes, retries and optimises transactions across them. It reported annual gross merchandise volume expected to exceed $60 billion for 2025, up from $50 billion in 2024, across more than 400 customers in 100-plus countries. Entry pricing for the vault starts at $750 a month; everything above that is quoted. It is enterprise infrastructure, not a merchant account, and a small business should not be shopping for it.
Bluefin is an Atlanta company that sells payment security rather than payment processing. Founded in 2007 and originally trading as Capital Payments, LLC doing business as Bluefin Payment Systems, it built its business on PCI-validated point-to-point encryption — technology that scrambles card data inside the terminal at the moment of the tap, so that what travels through the merchant's systems is already worthless to a thief. Around that it has assembled a gateway (PayConex), a decryption service sold to other processors and gateways (Decryptx), a tokenization platform for personal, health and card data (ShieldConex) and, more recently, a proxy layer called PointConex that adds validated encryption without forcing anyone to recertify their processor integrations. Bluefin says it now supports more than 40,000 customers across 60 countries through over 300 integration partners. Its headquarters is in Atlanta, with offices in Waterford, Ireland and Vienna, Austria; the Vienna presence came with its November 2022 acquisition of TECS Payment Systems. The Better Business Bureau rates it A+ and has accredited it since July 2017.
PayTrace is a Spokane-area payment gateway built for businesses that sell to other businesses and to government. Its differentiator is automatic Level 2 and Level 3 data capture, which can qualify commercial and purchasing card transactions for materially lower interchange. It publishes no rate card, and the processing rate you actually pay is set by whichever merchant services provider sells you the account.
Visa's enterprise payment gateway, founded in 1994 in Silicon Valley and bought by Visa for about $2 billion in 2010. It is one of the largest gateways in the world — Cybersource's own marketing claims 14.3 billion transactions a year, connections to more than 200 acquirers and processors across 160-plus countries, and 99.999% uptime — and its Decision Manager fraud engine is genuinely among the best-regarded in the industry. What it does not do is publish a single price. Cybersource has no public rate card, no published gateway fee and no self-serve signup; every quote comes through a sales conversation or through whichever acquirer resells it to you. For a large merchant with a payments team that is normal. For anyone smaller, it is the main reason to look at its sister brand Authorize.net instead.
EBizCharge is an embedded payment gateway and integrated merchant services platform that simplifies credit card, debit card, and ACH payment processing directly inside accounting, ERP, CRM, and ecommerce systems.
NMI (Network Merchants, Inc.) is a mature, ISO/ISV-focused embedded-payments gateway and enablement platform with broad developer tooling and enterprise integrations, but merchant experiences can vary depending on the partner/acquirer relationship.
CardFlight is a New York software company, founded in 2013 by Derek Webster, whose product SwipeSimple is the payment-acceptance app a great many American small businesses use without ever hearing the name CardFlight. That is by design: CardFlight has historically sold through banks, merchant acquirers and independent sales organisations, which rebrand or resell SwipeSimple to their own merchants, and the company says ten of the top thirty US merchant acquirers and ISOs have selected it as their preferred small-business acceptance product. It reports more than 125,000 small businesses on the platform as of August 2026. Alongside that channel business it now sells direct, as SwipeSimple Connect, with fully published pricing: 2.6% plus 10 cents in person, 3.5% plus 10 cents keyed, no monthly, annual, batch, statement or PCI fees, no contract, a $49 mobile reader and a $299 smart terminal. WestView Capital Partners took a growth stake in October 2024.
A high-risk-friendly gateway that does the one thing almost nobody in high risk does: it publishes its prices. Bankful sells gateway plans off a public page — $0 a month with a $50 monthly minimum and $0.15 a transaction at the bottom, $495 a month and $0.08 a transaction at the top — and lists the add-on costs alongside them, down to $38 per Ethoca alert and $1.60 per eCheck authentication. It is an officially supported third-party gateway for WooCommerce and works with BigCommerce, Wix, Ecwid and Shopify, and it accepts categories those platforms' own processors decline: CBD, nutraceuticals, firearms, tobacco, adult, dating, bail bonds and tech support. The reservations are substantial and you should weigh them properly. The card processing rate — the number that actually determines your cost — is not published, only the gateway fee on top of it. The independent record is polarised: an A+ Better Business Bureau file, accredited since 2020, against a 2.1 Trustpilot score where 91% of eleven reviews are one star. And Bankful shares a suite address and a co-founder with eMerchantBroker, so treat the two as one commercial relationship rather than two quotes.
Inovio is a payment gateway aimed squarely at specialty and high-risk verticals — adult, firearms, e-cigarettes and vape, online gaming, online alcohol, credit repair, CBD, telemedicine, online pharmacy and nutraceuticals — alongside ordinary retail and SaaS. It is a wholly owned brand of North, the company formerly called North American Bancard, which launched it in April 2016, and it is a registered ISO of BMO Harris Bank. Its own site says 'Since 1992', a date that belongs to its parent group and to its sister brand Humboldt Merchant Services rather than to Inovio. It publishes no rates, no fees and no contract terms, and it has no Better Business Bureau profile of its own.
Bolt Financial, Inc. is the one-click checkout company founded in San Francisco in 2014 by Ryan Breslow and Eric Feldman, which raised $355 million led by BlackRock in January 2022 at an $11 billion valuation. The product is a hosted checkout backed by a claimed network of more than 80 million US shoppers, the idea being that a returning Bolt account holder skips the form entirely, and the pricing is genuinely the most detailed and the most aggressive published in this market: a flat 2.5% plus 30 cents for processing, a $5 chargeback fee, 100% of fees returned on refunds, subscriptions and Checkout Everywhere free, and the statement that there are no lock-in commitments, ever. The problem is not the product sheet. It is the company. Bolt's valuation was reported as low as $300 million in 2024 secondary sales, down from $11 billion in January 2022; it has cut staff four times since 2022, most recently by roughly 30% in April 2026; it eliminated its entire human resources function; the founder left the chief executive role in 2022 and returned in March 2025; and trade reporting describes a company that has struggled to pay vendors. Two of its largest named customers sued it and settled. For a merchant, that is not background colour — the checkout is the least replaceable component in a store.