Craftgate vs Paddle

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.

Paddle is a London-based payments company founded in 2012 that acts as a merchant of record for software, SaaS, apps and digital products. As the merchant of record, Paddle legally sells your product to the customer on your behalf, which means it calculates, collects and remits sales tax and VAT across more than 200 markets, handles fraud and chargebacks, and issues compliant invoices and receipts.

Paddle Billing, the current platform, combines overlay and inline checkout with localised prices and currencies, cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and local payment methods, subscriptions with trials, upgrades, proration and dunning, plus APIs and webhooks for developers. Paddle acquired ProfitWell in 2022, which brought Retain for recovering failed payments and free subscription metrics. Standard pricing is a single fee of 5 percent plus 50 cents per transaction, with custom pricing for larger volumes.

Paddle fits SaaS and software companies selling internationally that would rather not register for tax in dozens of countries, including founders in countries where Stripe is not available, such as Turkey. The fee is higher than a payment processor alone, customisation is narrower than building on Stripe, onboarding includes a review, and payouts are slower. Stripe with Stripe Tax gives more control if you can handle compliance yourself, Lemon Squeezy (now owned by Stripe) and Polar serve smaller indie sellers with a similar model, and FastSpring is a long-standing merchant of record competitor.