Infrastructure vs Product
Spreedly and Shuttle both provide multi-PSP connectivity. Both eliminate the need to build individual gateway integrations. But they're fundamentally different products built for different use cases.
Spreedly is payment infrastructure — a vault and API layer that connects your application to 120+ payment gateways. It provides tokenisation, routing, and transaction management. You build everything else (checkout, onboarding, reporting, merchant management) on top.
Shuttle is an embedded payment product — a complete payment layer that platforms deploy for their merchants. It includes white-label checkout, onboarding, merchant portal, multi-channel support, and PCI compliance, all through a single integration.
The simplest way to think about it: Spreedly gives you building blocks. Shuttle gives you a finished solution.
Side-by-Side Comparison
Spreedly | Shuttle
Category | Payment vault / orchestration infrastructure | Embedded payment layer
Primary user | Enterprise engineering teams | Platforms embedding payments for merchants
Core product | Vault (tokenisation) + Connect (PSP connectivity) | Multi-PSP payment infrastructure + white-label merchant tools
PSP connections | 120+ | 40+
Tokenisation | PSP-agnostic vault (core product). Network tokenisation available. | PSP-agnostic tokenisation included
Transaction routing | Recover product (retry + failover) | Routing included
Fraud orchestration | Protect product (via Dodgeball acquisition) | Via PSP fraud tools
White-label merchant onboarding | No | Yes
White-label merchant portal | No | Yes
White-label checkout | No (API only — you build checkout UI) | Yes
Voice payments / IVR | No | Yes (PCI-compliant DTMF, agent-assisted, AI voice)
Payment links | No | Yes (SMS, email, chat)
AI agent payment capture | Limited (claims agentic commerce via existing API) | Yes (voice and chat agent infrastructure)
Contact centre / CCaaS | No | Yes
Merchant management | Merchant aggregator API (developer-level) | Full white-label portal
PCI compliance | PCI DSS Level 1 | PCI DSS Level 1 + ISO 27001 + SOC 2
Pricing | $200-$1,500/mo base + per-API-call fees | Transaction-based (POA)
Integration effort | Months (flagged as complex by users) | Weeks
Revenue share model | Not available | Yes — platforms monetise payments
Where Spreedly Wins
Vault Depth
Spreedly's vault is their foundational product — and it's the most mature PSP-agnostic payment vault in the market. Over 1 billion secured payment methods under management. Features include:
PSP-independent tokenisation (tokens portable across any gateway)
Network tokenisation (Visa, Mastercard, Discover tokens)
Payment method lifecycle management (keeps cards "evergreen" through automatic updates)
BIN enrichment and Payment Account Reference (PAR)
For enterprises that need a best-in-class token vault decoupled from any single PSP, Spreedly's vault is the benchmark.
Connection Count
120+ direct gateway connections — more than any competitor in the orchestration space. If you need a specific niche gateway or regional processor, Spreedly is more likely to have it pre-built.
Decline Recovery
Spreedly's Recover product handles transaction retries and intelligent failover — rerouting declined transactions to secondary gateways or retrying with optimised parameters. For high-volume merchants losing revenue to declines, this directly improves authorisation rates.
Fraud Orchestration
Following their September 2025 acquisition of Dodgeball, Spreedly now offers integrated fraud orchestration within the payment flow. This combines multiple fraud detection tools in a unified workflow — a capability that differentiates them from pure vault/routing solutions.
Enterprise Track Record
$60B+ annualised GMV. Average customer tenure of 7+ years. Named customers including Adidas, SeatGeek, and Rappi. Spreedly has deep enterprise credibility from operating since 2008.
Where Shuttle Wins
Complete Product vs Building Blocks
This is the core distinction. Spreedly provides APIs. You build the product.
With Spreedly, a platform still needs to build:
Checkout UI (Spreedly has no pre-built checkout)
Merchant onboarding flows
Merchant management portal
Transaction reporting and reconciliation UI
Refund and dispute management interface
Channel-specific payment flows (voice, links, chat)
With Shuttle, these are included — pre-built, white-label, and deployable in weeks.
For a platform that needs to offer payment capabilities to its merchants, Spreedly is a starting kit. Shuttle is a finished product.
Multi-Channel Coverage
Shuttle supports payment channels Spreedly doesn't offer:
Voice payments: PCI-compliant DTMF capture during phone calls, agent-assisted payment flows, AI voice agent payment processing
Payment links: Branded payment links sent via SMS, email, or messaging
AI agent payments: Consumer card capture through AI voice and chat agents
Chat payments: Secure payment within messaging interfaces
Spreedly is focused on API-level transaction processing — online checkout and server-to-server. For platforms operating contact centres, deploying AI agents, or sending payment links, Spreedly has no coverage.
Integration Speed
Spreedly is consistently described by users as complex to integrate. Review data from Capterra flags it as "one of the hardest platforms to integrate" with "time-consuming" implementation. Enterprise implementations are multi-month projects.
Shuttle's integration takes weeks. Pre-built components (checkout, onboarding, portal) mean the platform doesn't need to build payment UI from scratch.
Built-In Reporting
Spreedly's reporting capabilities are limited — users report that "reporting is pretty bad" and "searching for payments is problematic." Most Spreedly customers build reporting outside the platform.
Shuttle includes a white-label merchant portal with transaction views, refund management, and reporting — out of the box.
Platform Revenue Model
Shuttle enables platforms to earn revenue share on their merchants' transactions. Spreedly doesn't offer a platform revenue model — it's priced as infrastructure (per-API-call), not as a monetisation layer.
Compliance Breadth
Both hold PCI DSS Level 1. Shuttle also holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications — important for platforms in regulated industries (insurance, healthcare, financial services) where these certifications are procurement requirements.
Pricing Transparency
Spreedly's per-API-call pricing model can be opaque — a single payment may involve multiple API calls (tokenise, authorise, capture), making true per-transaction cost hard to predict. Median enterprise spend is approximately $130K/year. Shuttle's transaction-based pricing is more predictable for budgeting.
The Platform Question
The decision often comes down to one question: Are you a merchant or a platform?
If you're a merchant — you have your own PSP relationships, your own payment engineering team, and you want to optimise your payment stack — Spreedly is built for you.
If you're a platform — you need to embed payment capabilities for your merchants, with white-label tools, multi-channel support, and the ability for different merchants to use different PSPs — Shuttle is built for you.
Spreedly's "merchant aggregator" APIs acknowledge the platform use case exists, but it's a developer-level construct, not a product-level solution. You'd still need to build onboarding, checkout, reporting, and merchant management on top of Spreedly's APIs — essentially building a payment product from infrastructure components.
When to Choose Spreedly
You're a merchant (not a platform) with a complex, multi-PSP payment stack
You need the deepest possible vault — network tokenisation, lifecycle management, BIN enrichment
You need 120+ gateway connections — including niche or regional processors
You want integrated fraud orchestration (via Dodgeball/Protect product)
You have a payment engineering team that can build checkout, onboarding, and reporting
Transaction routing optimisation is your primary goal (decline recovery, failover)
When to Choose Shuttle
You're a platform embedding payments for your merchants
You need white-label tools — checkout, onboarding, merchant portal
You need multi-channel — voice, links, chat, AI agent payments
You want to go live in weeks, not months of integration work
You want to monetise payments through revenue share
You need built-in reporting and merchant self-service
You're in a regulated industry requiring ISO 27001 and SOC 2
FAQ
Doesn't Spreedly have more PSP connections? Yes — 120+ vs 40+. The question is whether you need connections to niche regional processors that Shuttle may not cover, or whether the 40+ gateways Shuttle supports (which include all major global PSPs) meet your merchants' requirements. More connections don't help if you still need to build everything else.
What about Spreedly's agentic commerce claims? Spreedly's CEO has stated they processed "agentic commerce transactions" in Q4 2025. This means their existing API can be called by AI agents — not that they have purpose-built AI agent payment infrastructure. Shuttle provides dedicated infrastructure for AI voice and chat agents to capture consumer card payments in PCI-compliant environments.
Is Spreedly's vault better than Shuttle's tokenisation? Spreedly's Advanced Vault is more feature-rich — network tokenisation, payment method lifecycle management, BIN enrichment. If your primary need is a best-in-class token vault decoupled from PSPs, Spreedly is stronger. If your primary need is embedded platform payments with tokenisation included, Shuttle covers the tokenisation use case within a broader product.
Can I switch from Spreedly to Shuttle? Yes. The migration involves reconnecting your PSPs through Shuttle and re-tokenising card data (Spreedly tokens are Spreedly-specific). Existing PSP relationships and configurations transfer. The practical benefit: you gain white-label tools, multi-channel support, and simpler reporting — while reducing integration complexity.
Isn't Spreedly cheaper? Spreedly's published pricing starts at $200/month plus per-API-call fees. Enterprise median spend is approximately $130K/year. But this doesn't include the cost of building checkout, onboarding, reporting, and merchant management — which the platform must develop and maintain separately. When you factor in engineering cost for building what Shuttle provides out of the box, the total cost of ownership comparison shifts.
Need a payment product, not payment infrastructure? Shuttle gives platforms white-label checkout, merchant onboarding, and a management portal — plus 40+ PSPs, voice payments, payment links, and AI agent support. All in one integration.
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