Technogical advancement has made financial transaction gone beyond physical transaction. Buying and selling are now done easily, quickly and comfortably online. Thus, payment is also completed online.

For smooth running of financial transaction online, a large number of businesses, entrepreneurs, large corporations, freelancers and more take their time to select reliable and efficient payment platforms for their businesses.

This article takes an in-depth comparative look at the two prominent payment platforms in Nigeria – Paystack and Flutterwave – noting their features and benefits to help potential users make sound decision.

About Paystack and Flutterwave

Paystack and Flutterwave are both payments platforms which provides fast, seamless payments solutions to suit individuals or businesses needs, anywhere in the world.

Features and Tools of Paystack and Flutterwave

Paystack and Flutterwave have various features and tools which caters for varying needs of different businesses or users.

Paystack Features and Tools

Paystack dashboard contains a wide range of features and tools which made payment easier for users. These features are explained below.

Payment pages: On Paystack, these are single pages that can help you collect payments from people for a particular product. These pages can help you collect either a one-time payment, recurring/subscription payment or product payment. You can also collect

either a fixed payment amount on the page or different payment amounts. Further customizing a Paystack payment page lets you collect more than just basic information. You can also create a custom link for your payment page.

Products: This feature lets you manage a simple inventory of products and sell directly or with Payment Pages. On the Products Page, you can see a list of all the products you wish to sell from your Paystack Dashboard. With this, you can sell single or multiple products.

Invoices: Paystack allows you to use this feature to “bill your customers easily or send professional invoices.” This can be very useful for freelancers and contract workers.

Recurring billings: With this, your customers can set up a subscription plan (for example) to be billed recurrently. You can create a plan and subscribe users to it.

Others: In 2018, Paystack introduced a new, automated chargeback process. Where a customer can ask for money to be returned to them when they (feel they) haven’t received value. Paystack Merchants can either accept the claim or dispute it with evidence.

Flutterwave Features and Tools

Below are the features and tools available on Flutterwave platform to provide payment solutions to users.

Virtual cards: Flutterwave lets you create and manage virtual cards on their card issuing platform. This means you can generate cards for your different purposes and add spending or site-specific limits. A feature that we strongly believe is made possible
through a VISA partnership.

Invoices: Like Paystack, you can create professional invoices easily, get paid and track payments with Flutterwave invoicing. An icing, however, is being able to share these invoices directly to Whatsapp. Here, you can also remind your customers to pay on time with automated reminders.

Checkout: A checkout page on Flutterwave lets you collect payment from your customers. A business owner, through Flutterwave checkout, can collect payments from customers in over 150 currencies, including Naira, Dollars, Pounds, Euro and Yuan.

Payment Links: These are links that help you collect payment from customers. They work like Paystack’s “payment pages”. Payment links on Flutterwave can be single charge or subscription links.

Others: According to the Flutterwave website, features such as Payouts and POS are tagged “coming soon”.

Pricing

Both payment platforms have pricing models for various packages. Majorly local and international transactions. They also only charge per transaction, which makes sense, as they only make money when their merchants/customers make sales (or carry out transactions).

Paystack charges 1.5% + NGN 100 for local transactions. The NGN 100 fee is waived for transactions under NGN 2,500. An interesting thing about Paystack’s pricing is that charges on transactions are capped at NGN 2,000. Which means that’s the highest a merchant can ever pay for transactions using Paystack.
Pricing

Flutterwave, on their own hand, charges a 1.4% processing fee per local transaction. Processing fees are also capped at NGN 2000 but unlike Paystack, there’s no additional NGN 100 fee.

For international transactions, Paystack and Flutterwave charge a 3.9% (+ NGN 100) and 3.8% processing fee respectively

Going by the highlighted features, it’s apparent that both payments platforms have similar features. However, there exist some things difference which may make some consider that one of the payment processor is better than the other.

Flutterwave seems to be better than paystack in terms of it reach. Flutterwave wave has a wider reach. Flutterwave can collect payment from customers in over 150 currencies.

Also, in terms of pricing Flutterwave charges less compared to Flutterwave unlike Paystack don’t add the additional charge of NGN 100 to it’s processing fee. Flutterwave charges 1.4% processing fee per local transaction. Processing fees as against Paystack 1.5%.

While for international transactions, Paystack charges 3.9% processing fee but Flutterwave charges 3.8% processing fee.