Craftgate vs Stripe

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.

Stripe is a payments infrastructure company founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, with headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin. Its APIs and documentation set the standard for developer experience, and it processes payments for businesses ranging from early-stage startups to some of the largest internet companies.

The platform covers online card and local payment method acceptance, prebuilt Checkout and Payment Links, Billing for subscriptions and invoices, Connect for marketplaces and platforms, Radar for fraud prevention, Tax for calculating and collecting sales tax and VAT, Terminal for in-person payments, Atlas for incorporating a US company, and treasury, card issuing and capital products. Recent moves include the acquisition of Lemon Squeezy, a merchant of record for digital products, and of Bridge for stablecoin payments. Fees are charged per transaction, with add-on products priced as a percentage of volume and custom pricing for large businesses.

Stripe is the default for online and SaaS businesses in its roughly 46 supported countries. Turkey is not among them, so companies based in Turkey use a merchant of record such as Paddle or Lemon Squeezy, local gateways such as iyzico or PayTR, or incorporate abroad, for example through Atlas. Adyen competes for enterprise volume, PayPal Braintree is common for marketplaces, and merchants of record trade higher fees for taking over tax compliance entirely.