Payment Orchestration Alternatives for Platforms

Why Platforms Look Beyond Payment Orchestration

Payment orchestration platforms solve a real problem — for merchants. They let large enterprises route transactions across multiple PSPs, optimise authorisation rates, and manage tokens in a single vault. If you're a merchant with three acquiring relationships and you want smart failover between them, orchestration is built for you.

But if you're a platform embedding payments for your merchants, orchestration solves the wrong problem. Here's why.

Orchestration Is Merchant-Facing, Not Platform-Facing

Primer, Spreedly, and Gr4vy are designed for individual merchants optimising their own payment stack. A single business, managing its own PSP relationships, controlling its own routing rules.

Platforms have a fundamentally different architecture. You're not optimising one merchant's transactions — you're onboarding hundreds or thousands of merchants, each with their own processing needs, each expecting payments to feel like part of your product. Orchestration platforms don't have a concept of "sub-merchants" or "connected accounts." They assume a single entity controls the entire payment flow.

No White-Label Tools

Orchestration gives you APIs. It doesn't give you a white-label checkout, a merchant onboarding flow, or a branded portal where your merchants can manage refunds and view settlements. You build all of that yourself — or you don't offer it.

For platforms, this is the difference between launching a payments feature and launching a multi-quarter engineering project.

No Multi-Channel Coverage

Voice payments, payment links, chat payments, AI agent payment capture — none of this is part of payment orchestration. Orchestration platforms route card transactions. If your platform needs to capture payments over a phone call, send a hosted payment link, or process a payment through a conversational AI agent, orchestration doesn't cover it.

You'd need to integrate separate solutions for each channel, each with its own PCI surface and engineering overhead.

Heavy Integration Burden

Orchestration platforms are middleware. Sophisticated middleware, but middleware nonetheless. Spreedly in particular is consistently flagged by engineering teams as complex to integrate — with implementation timelines stretching to months. Primer's no-code workflow builder reduces some of this, but you're still assembling infrastructure, not deploying a product.

For platforms on a roadmap, "months of payment integration" is a hard sell to your product team.

You're Buying Building Blocks, Not a Product

This is the core issue. Orchestration gives you routing, tokenisation, and PSP connectivity. Everything else — checkout UI, merchant onboarding, compliance, reporting, settlement reconciliation, merchant portal, multi-channel support — is your problem.

For a large enterprise with a payments engineering team, that's fine. For a platform that wants to offer embedded payments as a feature, it's a distraction from your core product.

Orchestration vs What Platforms Actually Need

The mismatch becomes clear when you map orchestration capabilities against platform requirements:

What orchestration provides:

• Multi-PSP routing and failover

• PSP-agnostic tokenisation

• Authorisation rate optimisation

• A single API abstraction over multiple gateways

What platforms actually need:

• White-label checkout embedded in their product

• Merchant onboarding that works out of the box

• A merchant portal branded as their platform

• Multi-channel payment capture (voice, links, AI agents)

• PCI compliance without scope expansion

• Revenue share on payment volume

• Sub-merchant management at scale

• Speed to market measured in weeks, not quarters

Orchestration addresses the first column. Platforms need both columns — and the second column is where the real complexity lives.

The Alternatives

1. Stripe Connect

What it is: Stripe's purpose-built platform payments solution. Unlike orchestration, Connect is a complete product — onboarding, checkout, payouts, and reporting, all designed for platforms embedding payments for their merchants.

Strengths:

• Fast to integrate — excellent documentation and developer experience

• Handles merchant onboarding (Express, Standard, and Custom account types)

• Built-in payouts, reporting, and dispute management

• Large ecosystem and community

• Application fee model for monetisation

Limitations:

• Single-PSP. Every Connected Account processes through Stripe. If an enterprise merchant has a Worldpay contract or needs a local acquirer in a market where Stripe is weak, you can't support them.

• Geographic gaps in some emerging markets

• No voice payments, AI agent payment capture, or robust payment link infrastructure

• Pricing pressure at high volumes

Best for: Platforms that are happy with Stripe as their sole processor and only need online checkout.

2. Adyen for Platforms

What it is: Adyen's platform and marketplace solution. Creates dedicated merchant accounts for each sub-merchant on the Adyen network.

Strengths:

• Strong global acquiring coverage, especially for enterprise

• Unified commerce (online + in-store on one platform)

• Good multi-currency and local payment method support

• Enterprise-grade infrastructure and risk management

Limitations:

• Single-PSP. You've traded orchestration's complexity for Adyen lock-in. Merchants process through Adyen — no flexibility for enterprise customers with existing PSP relationships.

• Enterprise-focused — not accessible for mid-market platforms

• Sales-led, not self-serve

• Developer experience less polished than Stripe

Best for: Enterprise platforms committed to Adyen as their sole processor, especially those needing unified commerce.

3. PayFac-as-a-Service (Payrix, Finix)

What it is: Managed PayFac infrastructure. You get merchant onboarding, underwriting, and higher payment margins without building a PayFac from scratch.

Strengths:

• Higher per-transaction revenue than revenue-share models

• More control over merchant pricing and underwriting

• Faster than building your own PayFac

Limitations:

• Typically single-PSP. Most PFaaS solutions process through a single acquirer.

• Compliance obligations remain — you're still operating as a PayFac, with the regulatory surface that entails

• No multi-channel coverage (voice, links, AI agents)

• Longer time to market than pre-built payment layers

• Regulatory burden scales with your merchant base

Best for: Platforms where payment revenue is the primary business model and you want maximum margin — and you're willing to accept the compliance overhead.

4. PSP-Neutral Payment Layer (Shuttle)

What it is: A payment layer that gives platforms the multi-PSP flexibility that orchestration promises — combined with the platform-ready tools that orchestration lacks. White-label checkout, merchant onboarding, management portal, and multi-channel support through a single integration.

Strengths:

• PSP-neutral: 40+ gateways. Your merchants choose their PSP, or you assign one. Enterprise customers bring their Worldpay/Adyen/Checkout.com account without friction.

• Multi-channel: Embedded checkout, voice payments, payment links, chat, and AI agent payments — all through the same integration. No separate PCI surfaces.

• White-label everything: Checkout, onboarding, merchant portal — branded as your platform.

• PCI compliance included: PCI DSS Level 1 + ISO 27001 + SOC 2. Your PCI scope is effectively zero.

• Live in weeks: Pre-built components, not a multi-month build project.

• Revenue share: Monetise payments without becoming a PayFac or managing compliance.

Limitations:

• Lower per-transaction margin than full PayFac ownership

• Less granular transaction-level routing optimisation than dedicated orchestration platforms

• Newer entrant — smaller brand recognition than Stripe or Adyen

Best for: Platforms that need multi-PSP flexibility, white-label tools, and multi-channel payment capture — without the engineering overhead of assembling it from orchestration building blocks.

What Orchestration Gets Right — and What It Misses

Credit where it's due. Payment orchestration platforms have pioneered genuinely valuable capabilities:

Smart routing — directing transactions to the PSP most likely to approve them based on card type, geography, BIN data, and historical performance. This measurably improves authorisation rates for merchants processing at scale.

PSP-agnostic tokenisation — storing card credentials in a vault that isn't tied to a single processor. Spreedly's vault, in particular, is a mature piece of infrastructure. This gives merchants portability: if you switch PSPs, your tokens come with you.

Failover and redundancy — if one PSP goes down, transactions automatically route to another. For high-volume merchants, this uptime guarantee is critical.

These are real, valuable capabilities. But they're merchant capabilities, not platform capabilities.

A platform doesn't need to optimise its own authorisation rates — it needs to embed payment acceptance for hundreds of merchants. A platform doesn't need PSP-agnostic tokens for its own cards on file — it needs each merchant to be able to use their preferred PSP. A platform doesn't need failover between its own PSP connections — it needs white-label checkout, onboarding, and reporting that work out of the box.

Orchestration answers the question: "How do I optimise my payment stack?" Platforms are asking: "How do I offer payments to my customers?"

Different question. Different solution.

Comparison Matrix

Making the Decision

Orchestration might still be right if:

• You are a merchant (not a platform) optimising your own payment stack

• You have an engineering team dedicated to payments infrastructure

• You already have checkout, onboarding, and reporting built

• Your primary goal is authorisation rate optimisation across existing PSP relationships

• You're willing to invest months in integration

Look at platform-ready alternatives if:

• You're a platform embedding payments for your merchants

• You need white-label checkout, onboarding, and merchant management

• You want multi-PSP flexibility without building everything yourself

• You need multi-channel payment capture (voice, links, AI agents)

• Speed to market matters — deals are waiting

• You don't want to carry PCI compliance scope

FAQ

Is Shuttle a payment orchestration platform? No. Shuttle is a payment layer built for platforms. Orchestration platforms are merchant-facing middleware that optimise routing between PSPs. Shuttle is platform-facing infrastructure that embeds multi-PSP payment acceptance — with white-label checkout, merchant onboarding, a branded portal, and multi-channel support — into your product. The multi-PSP flexibility overlaps, but the architecture and use case are fundamentally different.

Can I get multi-PSP without orchestration? Yes. Multi-PSP support doesn't require orchestration middleware. A PSP-neutral payment layer like Shuttle connects to 40+ gateways and lets each merchant use their preferred PSP — without the integration complexity of orchestration. You get the PSP flexibility without having to build checkout, onboarding, and merchant management yourself.

What about routing optimisation? If your primary need is transaction-level smart routing (sending each transaction to the PSP most likely to approve it based on BIN data, geography, and historical performance), orchestration platforms are purpose-built for that. For most platforms, however, PSP-level routing — letting each merchant use their preferred gateway — delivers the flexibility they actually need. Transaction-level routing optimisation is a merchant concern, not typically a platform concern.

Should I use orchestration AND a payment layer? In theory, you could layer orchestration underneath a platform payment solution. In practice, it adds complexity and cost without clear benefit for most platforms. The multi-PSP connectivity that orchestration provides is already built into a PSP-neutral payment layer. You'd be paying for two abstraction layers that solve overlapping problems. The exception might be very large platforms with specific routing optimisation requirements at the individual transaction level — but that's a niche case.

Related Reading

• Shuttle vs Primer — detailed comparison of Shuttle and Primer for platforms

• Shuttle vs Spreedly — detailed comparison of Shuttle and Spreedly for platforms

• Shuttle vs Gr4vy — detailed comparison of Shuttle and Gr4vy for platforms

• How to Get Payments Off Your Product Roadmap — the hidden cost of building and maintaining payment infrastructure

• How Platforms Monetise Payments Without PSP Lock-In — why PSP-neutral architecture unlocks more revenue

• Payment Orchestration vs Payment Layer — the detailed category distinction

Looking for multi-PSP flexibility without the orchestration overhead? Shuttle gives your platform 40+ PSPs through a single integration — with white-label checkout, voice payments, payment links, and AI agent support. Your enterprise customers bring their own gateway. No months-long integration. PCI DSS Level 1 compliance included.

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