Craftgate vs Lidio

Craftgate is an Istanbul-based payment orchestration platform for Turkish merchants. Instead of integrating each bank's virtual POS separately, a merchant connects its existing POS agreements and payment providers to Craftgate once and manages them through a single API and dashboard, routing every transaction to the most suitable provider and reducing dependency on any single acquirer.

The platform covers smart routing rules based on card type, bank, installment count or cost, automatic fallback to another POS when a provider fails, installment tables and campaigns, a hosted checkout form and payment links, card storage for repeat payments, fraud rules, and marketplace features for sub-merchant onboarding and split payouts. Reporting brings transactions from every bank into one view, which simplifies reconciliation, and SDKs and plugins help with integration into custom sites and common e-commerce platforms. Pricing is not public and is agreed with each merchant, typically based on transaction volume.

Craftgate suits mid-size and large merchants, marketplaces and subscription businesses that already have several bank POS agreements and want better approval rates, lower costs and resilience. Very small merchants without their own bank agreements are usually better served by an all-in-one payment service provider such as iyzico, PayTR, Param or Sipay, which handle the merchant relationship themselves. Global orchestration tools such as Spreedly or Primer have little coverage of Turkish banks and local installment practices.

Lidio is a payment orchestration platform run by Lidio Ödeme Hizmetleri A.Ş., an Istanbul-based payment institution licensed by the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (TCMB). It grew out of the online payment platform Mobilexpress and is led by co-founder and CEO Emre Güzer. Its core job is to connect a merchant to many banks and payment institutions through one API, so payments can be collected, routed and stored in a single place.

Merchants can use Lidio's own virtual POS under one contract and start taking payments within about 24 hours, or route through their existing bank POS agreements. Smart routing retries failed transactions on another POS in milliseconds. Other modules cover card tokenization, the Lidio Pass one-click wallet, AI-assisted fraud screening, marketplace payouts with escrow, bulk payouts, B2B dealer collections with ERP links, pay-by-link, recurring billing, instant bank transfer and split payments. Pricing is commission-based and quoted after application.

Lidio fits mid-sized and large Turkish merchants, marketplaces and multinationals entering Türkiye that need multi-bank routing. Small shops with one POS may find iyzico or PayTR simpler to start with, and Craftgate is the closest orchestration rival. With no public price list, compare offers.

Recent development: Lidio is authorised by TCMB for cross-border collections and partners with Worldline and dLocal. It reported over $4 billion in 2024 volume and says it stores 60 million+ cards and handles 16 million+ transactions a month. Shopify, WooCommerce and OpenCart plugins speed up setup.