Choose the right payment infrastructure for your business
Payment professionals regularly evaluate whether to continue with direct gateway integrations or move to orchestration platforms that promise unified management and routing. This decision affects your technical architecture, operational complexity and ability to scale efficiently across international markets.
Understanding the practical differences between these approaches helps you choose the right payment infrastructure for your business stage and operational requirements.
This guide provides decision frameworks based on your complexity needs, scaling timeline and technical resource availability.
Comparing Payment Orchestration vs Payment Gateway
Payment gateways and orchestration platforms serve different stages of business complexity. Gateways provide direct processing relationships while orchestration adds intelligent routing and management layers for advanced operations.
Integration Complexity and Development Resources
A payment gateway authorises and processes individual card or digital transactions, linking merchants to their payment processor. A payment orchestration platform goes further. It connects multiple gateways and payment service providers, enabling dynamic routing, automated failover, and unified reporting from a single interface.
If your business requires multiple gateways, either for redundant credit card processing and dynamic routing based on factors like authorisation rates, then managing these integrations yourself becomes increasingly complex.
On the other hand, orchestration platforms provide a single integration that connects to multiple processors and/or gateways simultaneously, reducing your team’s workload and management responsibilities.
Payment Routing and Failover Capabilities
If a payment gateway suffers an outage, you lose the ability to accept payments if they are your only solution, or you must manually switch to backup systems. However, orchestration platforms offer automatic routing between processors based on performance rules; however, this creates the need to have staff and the know-how to manage and optimize more complex payment systems.
Cost Structure and Transaction Economics
Gateway relationships involve per-transaction fees and, with some processors, monthly minimums, creating predictable cost structures that scale linearly with transaction volume.
Orchestration platforms charge platform fees in addition to underlying processor costs, potentially reducing total expenses through optimised routing and consolidated volume negotiations, but adding an additional layer of fees that may not be cost-effective depending on your business model and payment volumes.
Additionally, some enterprises with sophisticated payment and development capabilities may find it more cost-effective to build and manage their own orchestration layer purpose-built for their needs.
Analytics and Performance Monitoring
Payment gateways offer individual reporting dashboards for each processor relationship, requiring your team to manually consolidate performance data across multiple processors. If you’re managing multiple gateway/processor relationships, this can result in a lack of unified visibility into overall payment performance patterns and optimisation opportunities..
Orchestration platforms offer unified analytics across all processor relationships through consolidated dashboards that display comprehensive performance metrics. Your team gains sophisticated routing optimisation data and cross-processor performance comparisons.
Regulatory Compliance and Risk Management
Gateway integrations require your compliance team to meet different standards across multiple processors, creating a greater administrative burden and potentially slower onboarding processes that delay time-to-revenue.
You navigate varying regulatory requirements across multiple vendor relationships, continuing to maintain consistent fraud prevention and customer verification standards across all payment methods.
Orchestration platforms centralise compliance monitoring across processor relationships through unified risk management frameworks that maintain individual processor requirements.
Your compliance team benefits from consolidated oversight and reporting capabilities, though platform compliance may not address industry-specific regulatory requirements that affect your particular business vertical.
The following table summarises these key differences:
| Feature | Payment Gateway | Payment Orchestration |
| Integration Complexity | Multiple APIs | Single unified API |
| Development Resources | High – many integrations | Low – one integration |
| Routing Capabilities | Manual failover required | Algorithmic routing with platform dependencies |
| Cost Structure | Transaction + processors fees + minimums | Platform fees + transaction fees + processor costs |
| Analytics | Separate dashboards per gateway | Unified cross-processor analytics |
| Compliance Management | Individual processor requirements | Centralised |
| Implementation Timeline | As little as one day | Months for the full platform implementation |
| Operational Control | Direct processor relationships | Platform-mediated management |
Payment gateways are direct technical connections between your payment systems and individual payment processors, which handle transaction authorisation, processing and settlement through established banking relationships.
Each gateway offers access to specific payment methods and geographic markets, depending on the processor’s capabilities and licensing agreements.
Types of Payment Gateways
Payment gateways vary in their technical architecture and integration approaches, affecting how you manage payment processing within your existing systems:
- Hosted payment pages: Customers complete transactions on processor-hosted checkout pages that reduce your PCI compliance scope whilst limiting checkout customisation options. Customers can be redirected to a hosted checkout page, or a hosted checkout can be integrated into your site via iframe.
- API integration: Though not technically a gateway itself, API-based payment processing occurs within your checkout systems through direct processor connections, providing complete control over the customer experience.
- Mobile-optimised gateways: Specialised solutions focused on mobile payment experiences, including in-app purchases, mobile wallet integration and responsive checkout flows optimised for smartphones and tablets.
Remember, your choice may impact PCI compliance scope, checkout customisation options and operational control levels.
Explaining Payment Orchestration Platforms
Payment orchestration platforms are unified management layers that coordinate multiple payment processor relationships through a single integration, which provides intelligent routing and performance optimisation capabilities.
Rather than maintaining direct relationships with individual processors, you work through platform providers that manage processor connections, routing logic and performance monitoring.
Types of Payment Orchestration Platforms
Payment orchestration platforms differ in their technical architecture, routing sophistication and integration approaches depending on target market complexity and business requirements:
- Full-stack orchestration platforms: Comprehensive solutions manage processor relationships, routing logic, fraud prevention, analytics and settlement coordination through complete payment ecosystem management
- Routing-focused platforms: Specialised solutions emphasise intelligent transaction routing and failover capabilities whilst relying on your existing processor relationships for settlement
- API-first orchestration services: Developer-focused platforms provide routing and management capabilities through flexible API frameworks that integrate with existing payment infrastructure requirements
- Enterprise orchestration suites: Large-scale platforms designed for high-volume operations with advanced compliance management, detailed analytics, extensive customisation capabilities and dedicated support for complex international business requirements
Your platform choice affects routing capabilities, analytics depth and operational control levels.