Payment orchestration vs. payment gateway: which should you choose?

8 min read

If you’re building or scaling a business, the payments landscape can feel like a maze. There are so many tools, providers, and platforms out there that even seasoned payment pros sometimes struggle to make sense of it all.

At Primer, one of the most common questions we hear is: 

What’s the difference between a payment gateway and payment orchestration, and which one is right for me?”

In this article, we’ll break down the difference between the two to help you make the right decision for your business needs. 

Do you need a solution that can simplify and scale your payment stack? Read on to learn more about Primer, or book a call now with our team to explore how Primer can help.

The differences between payment gateways and payment orchestration

What is a payment gateway?

A payment gateway is a technology that handles online transactions. One way to think of it is as your online point-of-sale system. It collects and encrypts customer payment details, then securely passes them to the payment processor.

The payment processor sends the transaction details through the card network to the customer’s bank or card issuer to request authorization. If the issuer approves the transaction, the funds are held in the customer’s account. The actual transfer of funds happens later, typically within one to two business days, during the clearing and settlement process.

Some companies, such as Stripe and Adyen, offer both gateway and payment processing services, enabling businesses to manage transactions through a single provider.

Read more: What is a payment gateway, and how does it work?

What is payment orchestration? 

Payment orchestration is not a replacement for gateways or processors. It’s a middleware technology layer that brings them together under a single API integration.

Instead of building and maintaining individual integrations with each gateway, processor, acquirer, or local payment method, orchestration does the heavy lifting for you. It coordinates everything behind the scenes, so you don’t have to.

Without orchestration, merchants would need to integrate and maintain separate connections with each payment provider. That means technical builds, reporting formats, and operational workflows. Scaling into new markets or switching providers can become time-consuming and costly.

With payment orchestration, all of that is simplified. 

You can:

  • Route transactions based on performance, cost, or geography
  • Add or swap providers with minimal effort
  • Retry failed payments automatically using alternate routes
  • Access unified reporting and insights across your payment stack

For businesses operating at scale or across multiple regions, orchestration provides greater flexibility, a faster time to market, and reduced operational overhead.

Read more: What is payment orchestration and how can it maximize payment efficiency?

Payment orchestration vs payment gateway: Key differences

Feature Payment orchestration Payment gateway
Integration complexity A single integration to access PSPs, gateways, and third-party services Requires separate integration for each payment gateway.
Payment methods Supports a wide range of global, local, and alternative payment methods across multiple providers. May support only a subset of methods, often tied to its region or infrastructure. Scaling requires new integrations.
Intelligent payment routing Enables rule-based, automatic routing across providers, optimizing for cost, performance, or geography. Basic or no routing; advanced routing requires building logic across multiple integrations and services.
Cascading payments Built-in cascading payments enable you to automatically route transactions to a backup processor if a payment is declined or the primary processor fails. Cascading payments require integrating with multiple processors, as well as complex logic and significant downtime to implement.
Chargebacks Chargeback data is centralized and unified, allowing for access from a single dashboard, which makes disputes more efficient. Chargeback data varies by gateway and is typically accessed and managed separately for each provider.
Reconciliation Aggregates and normalizes settlement and reconciliation data from all connected providers into unified reports. Each gateway or processor provides separate reports in different formats, resulting in a more manual and fragmented reconciliation process.
Data visibility Offers centralized, real-time reporting and analytics across all transactions, providers, and geographies. Reporting is siloed as each gateway has its own dashboard and data, making holistic analysis more difficult.
3DS Some payment orchestration solutions, such as Primer, feature agnostic 3DS, which functions across all processors and can be applied across providers, as well as reused across retries. May support gateway-specific 3DS, which requires re-authentication if a payment fails.

Which one is right for your business? 

Relying on payment gateways might be enough if:

  • You operate in a single market with limited payment method requirements
  • You're comfortable with a single payment provider for all transactions
  • Your business has simple payment flows and limited growth plans
  • You have ample engineering resources to manage integration and compliance
  • You can accept the risk of processor downtime affecting all transactions
  • Your transaction volumes don't yet require optimizing for approval rates

But if you're thinking about scaling and need the ability to:

  • Expand into multiple markets with localized payment methods
  • Add new payment providers in hours rather than weeks or months
  • Implement cascading payments to recover failed transactions
  • Access unified analytics across your entire payment stack
  • Streamline your payment flows without coding or engineering resources
  • Offer a consistent checkout experience regardless of the processor
  • Reduce PCI compliance burden with a secure payment vault

Then, a payment orchestration platform might be a better fit for you. 

Is Primer a payment gateway or a payment orchestrator? 

Primer is a unified payments infrastructure with a payment orchestration layer, designed to give modern businesses more control, optionality, and visibility across their entire payment stack.

Primer was founded on a simple insight: traditional full-stack providers and gateways often fall short, especially for businesses operating across markets or relying on multiple payment tools. They’re often rigid, hard to scale, and slow you down when you need to move fast.

Primer solves this by unifying your global payment stack in one place, helping you reduce complexity, optimize performance, and turn payments into a strategic advantage.

Instead of processing payments directly, we connect and coordinate your gateways, processors, fraud tools, and more, ensuring everything works together seamlessly through a single integration.

The result? A flexible, future-proof setup that helps you reduce complexity, optimize performance, and turn payments into a real growth lever.

For example, with Primer, you can: 

  • Integrate with payment service providers (PSPs) and payment gateways with no code: Setting up a single payment gateway is pretty straightforward, but as your business scales and expands into new markets, managing a patchwork of providers can become time-consuming and fragmented. But with Primer, you can connect multiple gateways, processors, fraud tools, and payment methods in just a few clicks. Everything is managed from a single dashboard, with no code required. Primer supports leading gateways, including Adyen and Stripe, among others, making it easy to stay agile as your business evolves.

    Primer also offers integrations for a wide range of payment options to help you meet customer preferences around the world, including:

  • Digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay
  • Buy now, pay later (BNPL) options such as Klarna and Afterpay
  • PayPal
  • Bank transfers and account-to-account payments
  • Local payment methods like iDEAL, PayNow, and AliPay

Only offering debit and credit card payments could be limiting your growth. Learn more: Alternative payment methods: offer customers more ways to pay

  • Set up smart routing using workflows: Once you’ve connected the gateways and processors, you need Primer Workflows puts you in control of how every transaction is handled.

    You can route payments based on region, card type, transaction amount, or any other logic that matters to your business. Want to send European card payments to one provider and US cards to another? Easy.

    You can also set up load balancing between processors for high-volume peak periods, configure conditional 3DS and fraud checks, and connect with other payment and payment-adjacent services where and when you want them. You can do all of this without any coding. 

  • Use automated Fallbacks to recover lost revenue: When you work with individual gateways, you need to invest engineering resources in configuring cascading payments. But with Primer, you can set up Fallbacks to automatically reroute failed payments to the backup processor of your choice. You control the logic without using any code from an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface.

    And Primer’s agnostic 3DS solution means you never have to run a 3DS challenge twice. If a transaction is soft declined (and is recoverable), Primer 3DS automatically uses the same results to reauthenticate if a transaction fails or declines. It’s a smoother experience that helps you recover revenue without adding friction.

  • Track your performance with Observability: Working with multiple gateways and PSPs often means siloed data. You have to pull various reports from different platforms and reconcile codes, fields, and formats to make sense of them.

    Observability consolidates real-time payment data from all your payment gateways, processors, and payment methods into a single, unified view. You can also set up Monitors to instantly alert you (through webhooks, email, or even Slack) if performance falls outside your set parameters. This helps you to efficiently and proactively manage your payment ecosystem.

How Banxa rescued revenue with payment orchestration

Banxa, a leading crypto exchange, came to Primer to help optimize its payment systems. 

With Primer, they were able to: 

  • Create a frictionless user experience
  • Deliver higher authorization rates
  • Offer their customers new ways to pay

Because Banxa used Primer, they could set up cascading payments (Fallbacks) in just a few clicks. They didn’t have to manually route across multiple gateways to recover more payments and deliver higher authorization rates.

With Fallbacks, Banxa was able to recover over US$7 million in revenue in the first half of 2024 alone. 

Read the full case study here: Banxa deploys Primer to break down barriers to crypto adoption.

Get payment orchestration and more with Primer

Using a single gateway might work when you’re small and local. But if you’re aiming to scale, payment orchestration is the smarter way to manage and optimize your entire payments strategy.

With Primer, you don’t just get orchestration; you get a unified platform to run your whole payment stack. You can manage virtually all aspects of your payment stack in one platform. Connect the tools you need. Automate what used to take weeks. Move faster, with less complexity.

Book a call and find out how Primer can help your business

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