Payment Orchestration in 2026

Most teams discover their routing gaps during a processor outage on peak sales day, not during a vendor demo. The fixes that actually move authorization rates are unglamorous and technical: BIN and geography-based routing, conditional 3DS with a sane retry ladder, and a token vault that does not belong to any single PSP. Everything else is dashboard decoration.

The pressure to get this right keeps climbing because the payment mix keeps fragmenting. Worldpay's 2026 Global Payments Report, now published under Global Payments following its acquisition of Worldpay in January 2026, surveyed more than 63,000 consumers across 42 markets and found digital wallets now account for 56 percent of global e-commerce transaction value and 33 percent of in-store spending.

Credit cards sit at 20 percent of e-commerce, debit at 10, account-to-account at 7, and BNPL at 4. Wallets are no longer the alternative method; cards are the fragmented remainder. Meanwhile McKinsey's most recent Global Payments Report projects industry revenues growing at roughly 4 percent annually to about $3 trillion by 2029, off a base of $2.5 trillion.

Every method and market you add multiplies integration work unless a dedicated layer owns routing, tokens, and reporting. This guide compares four platforms, Gr4vy, Juspay's Hyperswitch, Primer, and Solidgate, on what they actually control and what they cost.

Payment Orchestration Platforms at a Glance

Platform	Best for	Pricing model	Standout
Gr4vy	Enterprises wanting dedicated-instance isolation	Cloud Vault from $199/mo, orchestration custom	Single-tenant architecture with 400+ connectors
Juspay Hyperswitch	Teams needing self-hosting or data residency	Free to self-host, managed tiers custom	Apache 2.0 open source, PCI certified, Rust-based
Primer	Merchants wanting payment ops, not just routing	Custom quote	AI agent moving from insights to autonomous execution
Solidgate	Digital merchants wanting orchestration plus acquiring	Custom quote	Orchestration, acquiring, billing, and disputes in one contract

How We Evaluated These Platforms

Orchestration platforms all claim smart routing. The differences show up in architecture, ownership, and what happens after the transaction. Every platform here was assessed on:

• Routing sophistication: whether rules are static, volume-based, or genuinely machine-learned, and how much of it you can configure without engineering.
• Token ownership and portability: whether the vault is provider-agnostic and whether tokens survive a PSP change, which is the real switching-cost question.
• Connector breadth: number of PSPs, acquirers, and local methods reachable through one integration, weighted by your actual markets.
• Deployment control: managed cloud, dedicated instance, or self-hosted, and what that means for data residency and PCI scope.
• Post-transaction depth: reconciliation, settlement reporting, dispute handling, and whether finance can close the month without stitching CSVs.
• Pricing transparency: whether any part of the cost is published before you enter a sales cycle.

The 4 Best Payment Orchestration Platforms

1. Gr4vy

Gr4vy is a cloud-native payment orchestration platform offering routing, vaulting, and checkout through a single integration, built on a dedicated-instance model where each customer runs in an isolated private cloud environment rather than shared multi-tenant infrastructure.

Best for: Enterprises and platforms that want independent vaulting, multi-PSP control, and genuine infrastructure isolation.

Key features:

• Single integration reaching more than 400 payment methods, acquirers, and anti-fraud providers
• Provider-agnostic cloud vault with regional deployment and token portability across connected PSPs
• Flow-based routing with conditional logic, failover, and retries configurable per market or product line
• Network token support extended to Discover in 2026, plus Mastercard Transaction Link Identifier handling that automatically captures and replays the identifier across recurring payment series
• Native 3DS in the iOS and Android SDKs, removing web-view redirects during authentication
• An MCP layer for agentic commerce that identifies AI-agent-initiated transactions and routes them separately from standard e-commerce traffic

Why we like it: The single-tenant architecture is the substantive differentiator, and it is the kind of thing that only matters until the day it matters enormously. Dedicated instances give you data sovereignty and blast-radius isolation that shared infrastructure cannot, which changes the conversation with security and compliance teams. The agentic commerce work is also the most concrete we found among these four; routing agent-initiated payments through separate fraud rules and PSPs is a practical answer to a problem most merchants have not yet had to solve.

Limitations:

• Independent review coverage on major directories is very limited, making peer benchmarking difficult
• The dedicated-instance approach raises fixed costs relative to multi-tenant orchestrators, so it suits volume that justifies the floor
• Not a full fraud, KYC, or AML suite; you will still bring specialist vendors for those layers
• Orchestration sits above acquirers and card networks, so it does not change interchange or scheme fees directly

Pricing: Partially public, which is rare in this category. Cloud Vault plans are listed at $199 per month for Entry and $299 per month for Growth, with Advanced on request. The broader orchestration offering is enterprise-priced and quoted.

2. Juspay Hyperswitch

Hyperswitch is Juspay's open-source payment orchestrator, Apache 2.0 licensed and PCI certified, built in Rust and open-sourced in 2022 from the payments stack Juspay runs for enterprises and banks. You can self-host it anywhere or buy it as a managed service with enterprise SLAs.

Best for: Teams prioritizing open source, data residency, or on-premise control, and merchants that want to own the stack outright.

Key features:

• Connectors to more than 300 PSPs, acquirers, and payment methods through one unified API
• Routing driven by rule-based, volume-based, and machine-learning algorithms, integrable into an existing multi-PSP setup
• Unified reconciliation framework with automated data fetch from processors and banks, real-time exception handling, and customizable rules for audit-ready output
• Self-hosted deployment on cloud or on-premise, or fully managed APIs and SDKs from Juspay
• Certifications spanning PCI DSS 4.0, ISO 27001:2022, and SOC 2 Type 2, plus a Platform Organization mode for programmatically onboarding merchants at scale

Why we like it: Nothing else here lets you read the routing logic. For engineering teams that have been burned by black-box decisioning, or that operate under data residency rules a managed vendor cannot satisfy, open source is not a philosophical preference but the only workable answer. The scale behind it is real too: Juspay's underlying platform processes around 300 million daily transactions for 500-plus enterprises and banks, so this is battle-tested code rather than a side project. A July 2026 partnership integrating Hyperswitch into Recurly's subscription billing ecosystem also signals it is being adopted as infrastructure by other platforms, not just merchants.

Limitations:

• Self-hosting means you own the infrastructure, the upgrades, and the on-call rotation; the license is free, the operation is not
• In India, some payment aggregators pushed back on third-party routing, so evaluate local commercial dynamics before rollout in that market
• Public review volume on mainstream review sites remains limited, reducing peer benchmarks for specific regions
• The breadth of the open-source project means capability maturity varies by module; validate the specific connectors and features you need

Pricing: Free and open source to self-host under Apache 2.0. Managed cloud tiers are not publicly listed; contact Juspay for a quote.

3. Primer

Primer is a unified payments infrastructure platform founded by former Braintree and PayPal executives, combining orchestration with reconciliation, FX, security, and financial operations in a single layer. It raised a $100 million Series C in May 2026 led by Sofina, bringing total funding to $170 million.

Best for: Global mid-market and enterprise merchants that want drag-and-drop control across routing, checkout logic, and provider connectivity without engineering sprints.

Key features:

• No-code workflow builder for routing, retries, conditional 3DS, fallbacks, and provider automations
• Marketplace of processors, payment methods, and fraud providers assembled into custom payment flows
• Component-based checkout integration that can be iterated without redeploying
• Primer Companion, an AI agent launched in 2025 that surfaces contextual insights and is being extended to run experiments and execute decisions autonomously within merchant-defined parameters
• Data layer capturing over 400 data points per transaction, covering an average of more than 95 percent of a customer's payment volume

Why we like it: Primer's argument is that orchestration has a ceiling, and it is a fair one. Connecting providers does not give you clean data, cross-team visibility, or control over what happens after the payment attempt, and reconciliation and settlement complexity pile up the moment you run multiple PSPs across markets. Building the data foundation first is also the right sequence for AI: agents deployed across fragmented payment data do not underperform gracefully, they make confidently wrong routing decisions. Merchants including GetYourGuide, Dialpad, and Printful run on it.

Limitations:

• Pricing is not published anywhere, so procurement needs a custom quote and a proof of value before anyone can model ROI
• Public user reviews specific to orchestration remain sparse on major review sites
• It is a standalone orchestrator, not a merchant of record, so tax compliance and related obligations stay with you
• Autonomous agent execution is a genuine risk surface; a bad routing decision or false fraud flag costs revenue directly, so scope the parameters carefully

Pricing: Not publicly available. Contact Primer for a custom quote.

4. Solidgate

Solidgate describes itself as a unified payment infrastructure with three layers: orchestration, global acquiring and acceptance, and value-added services. It sits on top of an existing stack rather than replacing it, which lets merchants route a controlled slice of traffic before committing.

Best for: Digital and subscription merchants that want orchestration plus acquiring, billing, and dispute tooling under one contract.

Key features:

• More than 100 acquirer and local payment method connections through a single API, configurable from the dashboard without code changes
• Smart routing with cascading and real-time failover, plus a provider-agnostic card vault
• Network tokenization, level 2 and 3 data support, and Click to Pay to lift acceptance rates
• Subscription billing and recurring payment management, chargeback management, dispute representment, and prevention alerts
• Multi-currency processing across 150-plus local currencies with like-for-like settlement in major markets, and unified settlement reporting

Why we like it: For product-led and subscription businesses, bundling orchestration with acquiring, billing, and disputes cuts real vendor sprawl, and running market-by-market experiments without adding tooling is a genuine operational advantage. The migration path is also unusually low-risk: keep existing PSPs live, route a single market or product line through Solidgate, compare auth rates and decline patterns in one dashboard, then decide how much volume to shift.

Limitations:

• Independent user review volume is limited, so peer benchmarks during evaluation are thin
• Public pricing and packaging details are scarce, extending vendor diligence
• Like Primer, it is not a merchant of record, so tax compliance remains your responsibility
• Solidgate's own guidance suggests orchestration becomes worthwhile at roughly $400,000 per month in volume, two or more markets, or two or more providers; below that threshold the platform is likely premature

Pricing: Not publicly available. Contact Solidgate for a custom quote.

Architecture and Coverage Comparison

Platform	Deployment model	Connector breadth	Routing intelligence
Gr4vy	Dedicated single-tenant instance, cloud	400+ methods, acquirers, fraud providers	Flow-based conditional logic with failover
Hyperswitch	Self-host on cloud or on-premise, or managed	300+ PSPs and acquirers	Rule-based, volume-based, and ML-driven
Primer	Managed cloud	Marketplace of processors and fraud providers	No-code workflows plus AI agent optimization
Solidgate	Managed cloud with own acquiring	100+ acquirers and local methods	Smart routing with cascading and failover

Scope and Ownership

Platform	Vault ownership	Beyond orchestration	Pricing visibility
Gr4vy	Provider-agnostic, regionally deployable	Checkout, SDKs, agentic commerce routing	Vault tiers published, orchestration quoted
Hyperswitch	Open-source token vault, self-controlled	Reconciliation, payouts, cost observability	Free to self-host, managed quoted
Primer	Provider-agnostic	Reconciliation, FX, financial operations	Fully quoted
Solidgate	Provider-agnostic	Acquiring, subscriptions, disputes, settlement	Fully quoted

Strategic Decision Framework

Critical question	Why it matters	What to evaluate	Red flags
Do we need multi-acquirer routing in our top five markets?	Auth rate gains usually come from local acquirers	Connector coverage by country, BIN success by acquirer	One-size-fits-all routing claims with no data
Who owns the tokens, and can we re-tokenize across PSPs?	This is the entire switching-cost question	Export paths, network tokenization, vault portability	Vault or tokens tied to a single PSP
How will we run conditional 3DS and retries?	Directly determines conversion and fraud exposure	No-code rules, decline reason normalization, retry ladders	Black-box logic with limited reporting
What is our deployment and residency model?	Determines PCI scope and regulatory viability	Managed cloud versus dedicated instance versus self-host	No local data control option where required
Can finance reconcile across PSPs?	Reconciliation is where orchestration savings get eaten	Unified settlement reports, payout matching, exception handling	Manual CSV stitching, no treasury view
Are we actually big enough for this?	Below a volume threshold, orchestration adds cost and complexity without payback	Monthly volume, number of markets, number of providers	Buying orchestration to solve a single-PSP problem

Problems & Solutions

• Problem: Cross-border success rates drop on a single global PSP, and local method coverage is thin where it matters.
  Solution: This is the core case for orchestration. Gr4vy reaches 400-plus methods and providers through one integration, and Hyperswitch covers 300-plus PSPs including local rails across Europe, APAC, LATAM, and the Middle East. With wallets now at 56 percent of global e-commerce value and market-specific rails like Pix and UPI expanding beyond their home countries, adding methods per market has stopped being optional.

• Problem: Data residency rules or vendor risk policy rule out a fully managed black box.
  Solution: Hyperswitch is the only genuine answer here. Apache 2.0 licensed and PCI certified, it self-deploys on your own cloud or on-premise infrastructure, giving full auditability of routing logic while keeping orchestration features. Gr4vy's dedicated-instance model is the middle path if you want isolation without owning operations.

• Problem: A PSP outage during a promo takes checkout down and revenue with it.
  Solution: Automatic failover across providers is what separates orchestration from a gateway. All four platforms cascade to a backup provider on soft declines and timeouts before the customer sees a failure, but the implementations differ: Solidgate's cascading and Gr4vy's flow-based failover are configurable per market, while Primer's fallbacks are built in the no-code workflow editor.

• Problem: Finance cannot reconcile payouts and fees across PSPs, and month-end drags.
  Solution: Reconciliation is the least glamorous and most underrated selection criterion. Hyperswitch ships a unified reconciliation framework with automated data fetch from processors and banks plus real-time exception handling. Solidgate provides unified settlement reporting across providers, and Primer builds reconciliation and financial operations into the same layer as routing.

• Problem: Your payments team spends more time explaining what happened than improving what happens next.
  Solution: This is the argument for the operations layer above pure orchestration. Primer's position is that connecting providers does not produce clean data or shared visibility, which is why its AI agent work depends on consolidating the transaction record first. Gr4vy's consolidated settlement reporting and Solidgate's single-dashboard comparison of auth rates and decline patterns address the same gap from the reporting side.

The Bottom Line

If you sell across multiple markets or methods, orchestration has moved from optimization to operating requirement. But it is not free, and buying it too early is a real failure mode: below roughly two markets, two providers, or meaningful monthly volume, you are adding a layer to solve a problem you do not yet have. Above that threshold, pick by constraint rather than feature list.

Gr4vy suits enterprises that need dedicated-instance isolation and the broadest connector count, and it publishes at least part of its pricing.

Hyperswitch is the answer when data residency, auditability, or vendor independence are non-negotiable, provided you can staff the infrastructure.

Primer fits teams whose real problem is payment operations rather than routing, and whose finance and payments people want to run experiments without filing engineering tickets.

Solidgate makes sense when you would otherwise buy orchestration, acquiring, subscription billing, and dispute tooling from four vendors.

Whichever way you lean, validate with a proof of concept on real traffic in one market before committing. Authorization rate improvements are measurable, and any platform confident in its routing should be willing to prove it on a slice of your volume.