Craftgate vs Recurly

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.

Recurly is a subscription billing and management platform founded in 2009 and based in San Francisco. It is best known among consumer, media and subscription box businesses for revenue recovery: intelligent retry logic and dunning campaigns that recover a large share of failed card payments before they turn into involuntary churn.

The platform manages plans, add-ons, trials, coupons, gift subscriptions and promotions, supports one-time and usage-based charges, and can run on several payment gateways at the same time, so businesses are not tied to one processor. Subscription analytics cover MRR, churn, cohorts and retention, and revenue recognition helps finance teams with ASC 606 reporting. Integrations connect Recurly to Salesforce, NetSuite and QuickBooks. The Starter plan combines a monthly fee with a small percentage of billing volume and a 90-day free trial, while All-Access is custom-priced for larger businesses.

Recurly suits established consumer and media subscription companies with high transaction volumes, multiple gateways and a meaningful failed payment problem. Its revenue-based fees and implementation effort make it less attractive for early SaaS startups, which usually start on Stripe Billing or Paddle, and parts of the interface feel dated. Chargebee is the closest competitor with stronger B2B SaaS features, Zuora targets complex enterprise billing, and Maxio serves B2B companies that need finance-grade reporting.