18 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.
NOWPayments is a cryptocurrency payment gateway launched in 2019 by the team behind the ChangeNOW crypto exchange. It lets a business take payments in more than 350 crypto assets through an API, invoices, payment links, plugins, donation widgets, subscriptions and a browser-based point of sale. Each payment can be forwarded to the merchant's own wallet or held in an optional custody balance, which a third-party provider runs. As of October 2026 its pricing page lists a 1% service fee on payments received and settled in the same coin and 1.5% when the payment is converted or taken at a fixed rate, plus blockchain network fees. Payouts and mass payouts carry no service fee, only network fees. There is no monthly fee, setup fee or contract. The operator is FD Transfers LLC, registered in St. Vincent and the Grenadines with a postal address in Tallinn, Estonia. Its Terms of Service, updated 19 October 2026, say (in section 15.1) that the services are not provided to residents or citizens of the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the UAE or Russia, and that the company can close an account at any time without giving a reason. The US, UK and EU exclusion was already in the April 2026 terms; the UAE and Russia were added later in 2026. We found no regulator licence for NOWPayments itself. Trustpilot rates it 4.5 from 1,122 reviews, but 13% are one-star, and some of those describe blocked accounts and withheld funds.
Primer is a London payments orchestration company founded in 2020 by former Braintree staff Gabriel Le Roux and Paul Anthony. It does not process payments itself. A merchant connects its own accounts with processors such as Adyen, Stripe or Braintree, and Primer sits on top: one checkout and API, a card vault that is independent of any one processor, no-code workflows that decide where each payment goes, automatic fallback to a second processor when the first declines, 3D Secure, network tokens, and reporting and reconciliation across every provider. Newer add-ons include an AI assistant called Companion, a fee breakdown tool called Costs Overview, and Global Accounts for holding and converting currencies, which Primer provides through a partner. Primer publishes no prices. As of October 2026 there is no pricing page; fees are set in a signed order form, charged on billable events such as payments, settled transactions, 3DS checks or workflow actions, and topped up to a minimum commitment if usage falls short. The contract runs for a minimum term and then renews for a year at a time unless you give 30 days' notice. Primer raised a $100 million Series C in May 2026 and says it has raised $174 million in total. It is built for mid-size and enterprise merchants running more than one processor, not for small businesses looking for a first card account.
Yuno is a payment orchestration platform for large merchants, banks and wallets. It started in Latin America and now sells worldwide. It does not process payments or hold funds itself. You sign your own contracts with payment processors, acquirers, wallets and fraud tools, enter their credentials in Yuno's dashboard, and Yuno routes each transaction between them through one API. It retries failed payments on another provider and stores card tokens in its own vault. Yuno says it connects to more than 1,000 payment methods and over 460 integrations in 190+ countries. Named customers include McDonald's, Rappi, NetEase Games, GoFundMe and inDrive. It raised a $45 million Series B in August 2026, led by Global PayTech Ventures with Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global taking part. Yuno publishes no prices. Its public merchant terms describe a fixed monthly platform fee plus per-transaction fees for successful payments, payouts, refunds and verifications, with extra fees for add-ons such as 3-D Secure, fraud checks and chargeback alerts. Contracts run for a fixed term set in an order form, renew automatically unless you give 60 days' notice, and leaving early means paying the remaining monthly fees for the term. There is almost no independent user feedback to check its claims against.
PayTabs is a Riyadh-based payments company founded in Saudi Arabia in 2014 by Abdulaziz Al Jouf. It sells a payment gateway to online merchants across the Gulf and North Africa, a payment orchestration and switching platform to banks and large enterprises, and the Paymes Super App for small Saudi businesses. We review it from the point of view of a merchant in Saudi Arabia, where PayTabs publishes the most. There, PayTabs is a technology layer rather than your acquirer: its gateway terms say you sign a separate processing and settlement agreement with a partner bank or payment service provider, which sets your card rates, handles chargebacks and pays you out. PayTabs charges on top of that. As of October 2026 its Saudi gateway agreement lists a one-time SAR 999 setup fee, SAR 199 a month and SAR 1 per transaction, before VAT. The Paymes app is priced separately at SAR 49 a month, with mada cards at 1% and credit cards at 2.25% + SAR 1, which PayTabs labels a testing-phase price. Outside Saudi Arabia the only published prices we found are per-transaction plans on its Egypt page; other markets are quoted by sales. The contract has no fixed term, and either side can end it on 60 days' notice, but fees already paid, including the setup fee, are not refunded. Trustpilot rates it 2.6 out of 5, and recent reviews describe slow payouts, frozen funds and support that is hard to reach.
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.
HyperPay is a payment gateway headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that lets online businesses in Saudi Arabia and several other Arab markets accept cards, wallets and local payment methods through one integration. Its gateway supports mada, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Apple Pay, STC Pay, UnionPay, Tabby, Tamara, SADAD and PayPal, according to its own site. The business began in Amman, Jordan, as Gate2Play, founded by Muhannad Ebwini, who still runs it; HyperPay says it has processed online payments since 2014. It is backed by investors including Mad'a Investment Company and Mastercard, which led its $36.7 million round in 2022. In January 2025 the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) licensed its Saudi entity to provide payment services through an electronic wallet, and HyperPay says it holds Saudi Payments certification as an eMSP payment gateway for mada. HyperPay publishes no prices: its FAQ says pricing depends on your country of registration and sends you to its sales team. Its own payments page says it refers each merchant to a partner bank to open the merchant account, and its FAQ says settlement follows that merchant agreement with the acquiring bank. No merchant terms, settlement times or fee schedules are public, and there is very little independent merchant feedback to judge service by.
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.
eProcessing Network (ePN) is a payment gateway run by eProcessing Network, LLC in Houston, Texas, and has been online since at least 2000. It is not a processor and does not offer merchant accounts. You need a merchant account with an acquiring bank, and ePN connects your website, virtual terminal, POS software or mobile app to that account through processing platforms including Fiserv's First Data, TSYS, Global Payments, Elavon, Chase Paymentech, Worldpay and EPX. It also connects to several ACH, check and gift card providers. ePN sells only through resellers: ISOs, merchant service providers and their agents. It publishes no prices. Its own merchant service agreement has blanks for a monthly gateway fee and a per-transaction fee, so what you pay depends on the reseller. The product range is broad and practical for a small US merchant: an online terminal, hosted order and payment forms, a shopping cart, an Authorize.Net emulation mode (on some processor platforms), recurring billing, invoicing, customer storage, Level III data, QuickBooks sync, Windows POS software and a mobile app. Fraud filters are included with every gateway account. The tooling looks dated, and the company has posted no news since March 2023. Support was the weak point in July 2024. Hurricane Beryl and the CrowdStrike outage hit together, and BBB complaints from that month describe unanswered calls and batches that did not settle, and two later complaints describe billing that continued after merchants asked to cancel.
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.