11 Best Payment Gateways in India (2026)

India is the largest payment gateway market in the world by transaction count. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI), launched by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2016, processed more than 18 billion transactions in a single month in late 2025, and a typical Indian consumer now reaches for UPI before a card or a wallet for everything from a ₹40 chai to a ₹400,000 EMI. For an operator selling into India in 2026, "which payment gateway should I use" is less about Visa/Mastercard processing and more about how cleanly a provider plugs you into UPI, RuPay, the various netbanking rails, e-wallets, and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) compliance regime that sits on top of all of it.

This guide is for founders and payments leads choosing or replacing a gateway for an Indian-domiciled merchant entity, and for international merchants trying to take INR online. We rank the eleven providers in our directory that we see most often in real Indian stacks, with real fee data and clear notes on what each one is actually built for. As with our other guides, we don't take affiliate commissions on rankings — these are based on what providers publish, what we see in our directory of 1,200+ payment companies, and what tends to work for different categories of merchant.

What Makes the Indian Market Different

A payment gateway in India is not the same animal as one in the United States or Europe. Five things shape the stack:

UPI has reordered the hierarchy. UPI is now the dominant payment rail in India by every consumer-facing metric: number of transactions, number of users, brand recognition, and average daily volume. Cards still matter for higher-ticket purchases, recurring billing, and cross-border, but a gateway that doesn't handle UPI well is unusable for most domestic merchants. Settlement is near-instant, MDR for merchants on UPI is regulated to zero on most flows, and consumers expect QR and intent flows to "just work" inside Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm, BHIM, and a long tail of bank apps.

RBI's payment aggregator regime is unusually strict. Since the PA-PG guidelines came into force in 2020, only RBI-licensed Payment Aggregators may hold and settle merchant funds. That single rule has consolidated the market: most of the gateways listed below either hold a PA license or operate under one through a banking partner. International merchants who want to take INR almost always plug into a domestic PA rather than running their own.

Tokenization is mandatory for stored cards. Since 2022, merchants in India cannot store raw 16-digit card numbers — only card-on-file (CoF) tokens issued by networks or token service providers. Every credible gateway in India now exposes tokenization APIs and a network-token vault. If a provider is vague about how stored-card flows work, that's a red flag.

E-mandate replaces traditional recurring. Recurring billing in India runs on UPI AutoPay or e-mandate (NACH-based) flows, both subject to RBI's Recurring Payment Framework. Caps on auto-debits, pre-debit notifications, and AFA (Additional Factor of Authentication) shape how subscription products work. SaaS founders moving from Stripe to an Indian gateway are usually surprised by how different the mechanics are.

FX and cross-border are gated. Inbound cross-border (a foreign merchant collecting INR from Indian customers) and outbound (Indian merchants collecting USD/EUR from global customers) both run under LRS / FEMA rules and require additional documentation, an Import-Export Code (IEC), and a banking partner that supports the relevant flow. Some of the gateways below specialise in this; most do not.

If you're an operator in another emerging market, our guides to Kenya, Malaysia, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia cover the equivalent landscape there. The structural lessons travel — the rails do not.

The 11 Best Payment Gateways in India for 2026

The list is grouped by what each provider is actually best at, not by raw transaction volume. We've cross-checked headline pricing against each company's public pricing page and against the data in our directory.

1. Razorpay — The Default for Indian Startups

Razorpay is the gateway most Indian B2C and SaaS startups reach for first, and the reason is straightforward: developer experience. Self-serve onboarding, live keys within hours for most business types, clear API documentation, and SDKs in Node, PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, .NET, iOS, and Android. Headline pricing is 2% + GST for cards, UPI, netbanking, and wallets, with custom rates negotiable above a few crore in monthly volume.

Razorpay supports all the payment methods Indian customers expect — Visa, Mastercard, Amex, RuPay, UPI, Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, netbanking, EMI, cardless EMI, paylater, and bank transfer — and offers instant payouts, an instant sandbox, and recurring payments through e-mandate and UPI AutoPay. Settlement is instant to T+3 depending on plan and merchant category.

Best for: SaaS, D2C, marketplaces, and any merchant where engineering velocity matters more than the absolute lowest MDR.

Watch out for: Some merchant categories (financial services, certain marketplaces, "high-risk" niches) are not supported and will need a different acquirer. Razorpay's onboarding is fast for the typical case and unforgiving for the atypical.

2. Cashfree Payments — Full-Stack Payments + Payouts

Cashfree Payments is the gateway most often paired with Razorpay in head-to-head evaluations, and increasingly the one that wins when payouts matter. Headline pricing is 1.90% per transaction, marginally below Razorpay, and Cashfree publishes a 15% higher payment success rate backed by a 3-attempt auto-retry feature on declined cards.

Where Cashfree pulls ahead is the breadth of the platform: payment gateway, payouts, banking-as-a-service APIs, subscriptions, and a verification suite (KYC, bank account verification, PAN verification) that's particularly useful for marketplaces and any business that needs to send money out as well as in. Settlement is T+2 working days by default, with instant settlement available on certain plans.

Best for: Marketplaces, gig platforms, finance apps, and any merchant whose payment flow involves both inbound collections and outbound payouts.

Watch out for: The platform sprawl is a feature only if you actually use it. For a pure "take a card, ship a product" use case, simpler tools cost less.

3. PayU India — Enterprise Scale and Local Bank Coverage

PayU India is one of the older gateways in the market — founded in 2002 — and remains a default choice for larger Indian e-commerce companies. Headline pricing is 2% per transaction with custom enterprise rates, support for 150+ payment methods including UPI, cards, netbanking, wallets, and EMI, and settlement at T+2 business days.

The case for PayU India over the newer challengers is depth of bank integrations and a track record on high-volume merchants where success-rate optimisation across issuers materially affects revenue. Several of India's largest direct-to-consumer brands and travel platforms run on PayU. PayU's global parent also operates PayU Poland, PayU Romania, PayU Czech, and PayU Turkey — useful for India-headquartered merchants expanding into Central and Eastern Europe.

Best for: Mid-to-large e-commerce, travel, and ticketing operators where peak-event success rates and a dedicated account team matter.

Watch out for: Documentation and developer experience are noticeably less polished than Razorpay or Cashfree. Implementation is a project, not a weekend.

4. CCAvenue — Multi-Currency and Regional Coverage Beyond India

CCAvenue is one of the oldest payment gateways in India (founded 2001) and remains the go-to for merchants whose customer base extends into the Middle East and global markets. CCAvenue supports 200+ payment methods, multi-currency processing, and operates not only in India but in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the United States, and globally. Headline pricing is in the 2–3% range depending on plan and method, with settlement at T+2 to T+3 business days.

The reason a 25-year-old gateway is still on this list is that few competitors handle "Indian merchant selling globally in multiple currencies" as completely. CCAvenue offers settlement in 27 currencies, supports invoicing and payment links, and integrates with the major Indian banks for direct settlement.

Best for: Indian exporters, education-tech selling globally, and any merchant whose customers span India, the Gulf, and the West.

Watch out for: UI and console date back to an earlier era. The product works; the surface looks it.

5. BillDesk — The Default for Bill Payments and Recurring

BillDesk processes more than 400 million transactions annually and is effectively the standard for utility, insurance, and recurring bill payments in India. Custom pricing, no public MDR table, and onboarding that assumes you are a bank, telco, insurer, or large recurring-revenue business.

For a SaaS startup, BillDesk is overkill. For an enterprise running e-mandate-based collections at scale — say, an insurer collecting premiums or a utility collecting bills — BillDesk's bank coverage and reliability are unmatched. The acquisition by PayU's parent Prosus in 2021 was abandoned in 2022, and BillDesk has remained an independent player.

Best for: Insurance, utilities, telco, lenders, and large recurring-billing operators.

Watch out for: Self-serve onboarding does not exist. Plan for sales cycles measured in weeks, not days.

6. Easebuzz — Competitive Pricing for Small and Mid-Market

Easebuzz is a Pune-based gateway founded in 2017 that has carved out a position on price and feature breadth for small-to-mid-market merchants. Headline pricing from 1.75%, with split payments, payouts, subscription billing, and dashboards aimed at non-technical operators. Settlement at T+1 to T+3.

The split-payments capability is the under-appreciated piece. For marketplaces and aggregators that need to fan out a single customer payment to multiple sub-merchants — common in travel, education, and B2B platforms — Easebuzz handles the split natively rather than requiring application-level reconciliation.

Best for: Price-sensitive small businesses, marketplaces with multi-party splits, and merchants who want subscription billing without the Stripe stack.

Watch out for: Outside India, Easebuzz has limited coverage. International cards work for inbound; international expansion of your product does not.

7. Instamojo — Small Business and Payment Links

Instamojo serves more than 2 million small businesses and is the closest thing India has to a "payment link in 30 seconds" tool. Headline pricing is 2% + ₹3 per transaction, with online-store builder, payment links, and lightweight business tools attached. Settlement at T+3 business days.

For a sole proprietor running a tutoring business, a hand-made-jewellery store, or a side-hustle SaaS, Instamojo's onboarding is faster than anything else on this list and the operational overhead is minimal. UPI, cards, netbanking, and wallets are all supported out of the box.

Best for: Solo operators, side hustles, freelancers invoicing clients, and any business where the alternative to Instamojo is "WhatsApp me your UPI ID."

Watch out for: As volume scales past a few lakh per month, the per-transaction fee compounds and a percentage-only competitor becomes cheaper.

8. Juspay — Payment Orchestration, Not a Gateway

Juspay does not sit in the same category as the others on this list. It's a payment orchestration platform — it sits in front of multiple gateways and acquirers and routes transactions to whichever one will give the best success rate for a given card BIN, UPI app, or geography. Juspay processes 50M+ daily transactions and powers checkout for Amazon India, Google Pay India, and other large platforms.

Pricing is custom and aimed at high-volume merchants. The economic case is straightforward: if you process a few hundred crore a month, a 1–2 percentage-point improvement in card success rate funds Juspay several times over. For smaller merchants, Juspay is overkill — but for any business large enough that issuer-level routing matters, Juspay is the default Indian orchestrator.

Best for: High-volume e-commerce, OTT platforms, ride-hailing, food delivery, and anyone whose checkout success rate is a board-level metric.

Watch out for: Implementation is a multi-month project. Don't sign Juspay before you've maxed out a single-gateway approach.

9. PhonePe — UPI-Native Acquiring

PhonePe processes more than 50% of all UPI transactions by volume and now offers a PhonePe Payment Gateway for merchants who want UPI-first acquiring with seamless deep linking into the PhonePe app. UPI is free for merchants under regulated MDR, and gateway fees for cards and other methods are competitively priced.

The value proposition is conversion: when a PhonePe user clicks pay-by-UPI on a merchant site, the PhonePe app opens directly with the transaction pre-filled, and the user authorises with their UPI PIN. Drop-off through generic UPI intent flows is real; the same-app deep-link version is meaningfully tighter.

Best for: D2C and consumer apps where PhonePe penetration in your customer base is high.

Watch out for: PhonePe-as-a-gateway is newer than the rest of this list, and the product surface is still evolving. Expect fewer ancillary tools (refunds tooling, analytics, dashboards) than Razorpay or Cashfree.

10. Paytm for Business — Wallet + Gateway in One

Paytm for Business is the merchant-side product from Paytm, the wallet that introduced an entire generation of Indian consumers to digital payments. Headline pricing is 0% for UPI and 1.99% for cards, with the usual full menu of UPI, cards, netbanking, wallets, and EMI.

Two structural notes. First, RBI's restrictions on Paytm Payments Bank in early 2024 reshaped the group's banking infrastructure; Paytm's gateway business is not the same legal entity as the now-restricted PPB. Second, the Paytm consumer wallet remains the second-most-downloaded payment app in India after PhonePe, and a Paytm-as-gateway integration unlocks one-tap checkout for that user base.

Best for: Merchants whose customer base skews towards Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities and uses Paytm as a primary wallet.

Watch out for: The post-2024 regulatory turbulence has scarred merchant trust. Several merchants we see in the directory dual-route through Paytm + a second gateway specifically to mitigate concentration risk. That's a reasonable posture, not a reason to avoid Paytm entirely.

11. Pine Labs — Omnichannel and POS

Pine Labs is the omnichannel exception on this list. While the others are primarily online gateways, Pine Labs sits across POS terminals, online payments, and merchant lending for more than 150,000 merchants. Pine Labs is also the dominant POS terminal vendor in Indian retail, which means a merchant running both physical stores and an online presence can consolidate on a single provider with reconciliation across channels.

Pricing is custom, settlement is T+1 to T+2 business days, and Pine Labs is one of the few Indian providers with operations in Malaysia and Singapore in addition to India.

Best for: Omnichannel retail, restaurants, and merchants with POS as their primary channel.

Watch out for: Online-only merchants don't need the POS heritage and will get a thinner online-payments product than the pure-online gateways above.

International Players Worth Considering

Three categories of merchant should look beyond the Indian-headquartered list.

Stripe operates in India under an authorisation issued by RBI and supports cards, UPI, netbanking, and wallets for Indian merchants. The developer experience is the global Stripe experience, the documentation is best-in-class, and merchants who already use Stripe in other markets get unified reporting. The catch is breadth of acceptance: Stripe's coverage of Indian payment methods is good but not as deep as a domestic PA, and certain merchant categories that pass elsewhere on Stripe will be declined in India. For developer-first SaaS selling to Indian businesses, Stripe is a sensible first choice.

Adyen is the enterprise alternative for Indian merchants with significant international card volume. Adyen has a local Indian acquiring entity and supports UPI through partnerships, but the strongest case is for Indian merchants whose customer base is global and who want a single processor across India, Europe, and APAC.

PayPal in India is a more constrained product than in most other markets. PayPal does not support domestic Indian transactions; it's used by Indian merchants exporting services to global customers (think freelancers and digital exporters) where PayPal is the buyer-preferred method. Inbound cross-border into INR via PayPal is the use case.

Airwallex and dLocal are the cross-border specialists for foreign merchants who want to take INR from Indian customers without setting up an Indian entity. dLocal in particular operates across emerging markets globally and handles the FEMA / RBI compliance plumbing on the merchant's behalf.

Amazon Pay deserves a mention as a one-tap acceptance method merchants enable alongside their primary gateway. It's not a gateway in itself; it's a checkout button.

A Decision Tree

Here's the shortest version of "which gateway should I use" for a typical merchant.

If you're a developer-first SaaS or D2C startup selling to Indian customers, start with Razorpay or Cashfree. Razorpay if you value the ecosystem; Cashfree if you also need payouts.

If you're mid-to-large e-commerce with a customer success-rate problem, evaluate PayU India for direct issuer relationships, then add Juspay on top once your volume justifies orchestration.

If you're a marketplace or platform with multi-party splits, Easebuzz handles native splits; Cashfree handles complex payouts.

If you're a solo operator or freelancer, Instamojo is the lowest-friction option in the market.

If you're an enterprise with recurring bill payments, BillDesk is the incumbent.

If you're an omnichannel retailer, Pine Labs is the only option on this list that genuinely covers POS and online together.

If you're a foreign merchant taking INR, you likely want Stripe, dLocal, or Airwallex — depending on whether you need a developer-first flow or a full local-entity-free emerging-markets stack.

If you have a global customer base and serve Indian customers as one of many, Adyen or Stripe consolidate the most providers.

Compliance Notes for Operators

A few practical points that catch first-time entrants by surprise:

PA-PG license status matters. Confirm your gateway holds a current RBI Payment Aggregator licence or is operating under a clear banking partnership. The list of authorised PAs is public.
Tokenization is non-negotiable for cards-on-file. Merchants cannot legally store raw PANs. If you're migrating from another market, your stored-card data needs to be re-tokenized via your new gateway and the schemes.
AutoPay and e-mandate caps. UPI AutoPay has per-transaction limits set by RBI (currently ₹1 lakh on most categories, with a higher cap on regulated bills). E-mandate has its own framework. Don't design subscription pricing without consulting your gateway's product docs on these caps.
GST applies on top of MDR. All MDR figures quoted by Indian gateways are pre-GST. Add 18% GST to get the all-in cost.
TCS and TDS on merchant payouts. Marketplaces facilitating sales between third parties may have TCS obligations; payouts to Indian residents may attract TDS. This is an accountant question, not a gateway question, but the gateway's reporting needs to support it.
Cross-border requires IEC. If you intend to take international cards or pay out in foreign currency, you need an Import-Export Code from the DGFT and a banking partner that supports the relevant FEMA flow.

For the broader European compliance picture — relevant if you're an Indian merchant selling into the EU — see our PSD3 and PSR guide.

How to Think About Your Stack

Most successful Indian merchants we see in our directory of 1,200+ providers run two gateways in parallel, not one. The economics are simple: a 1–2 percentage-point improvement in card success rate, achieved by routing to the better issuer-acquirer combination, more than covers the modest engineering overhead of running a second integration. Juspay automates this; smaller merchants do it by hand with feature flags.

A typical 2026 stack for an Indian D2C brand looks like:

A primary domestic gateway — Razorpay or Cashfree — handling the bulk of UPI, cards, netbanking, and wallets.
A secondary gateway for routing — PayU India or PhonePe — turned on for specific BINs or as failover when the primary declines.
Direct UPI deep-linking to PhonePe and Google Pay where the merchant has the engineering capacity to integrate intent flows directly.
A payouts gateway — Cashfree's payout product or Razorpay X — handling vendor payments, refunds, and any disbursement-side flow.
A foreign-currency rail — Stripe, Airwallex, or a banking partner — only if the merchant exports.

The structural insight from our other guides applies here too: a payment stack is a composition, not a single product. The right question is not "which is the best Indian gateway" but "which two or three of these provide the best coverage for my specific customer base, ticket size, and risk profile."

Sources & Further Reading

NPCI — UPI Product Overview — authoritative UPI documentation and statistics from the operator of the rail.
RBI — Payment Aggregator and Payment Gateway Guidelines — the foundational regulatory document that shapes which entities can operate as gateways in India.
RBI — Tokenisation of Card Transactions — the basis for the card-on-file tokenisation mandate.
RBI — Recurring Online Transactions Framework — the e-mandate and AutoPay rules that subscription merchants must follow.
RBI — List of Payment System Operators — the public register of authorised PAs and PSOs.

Explore More

The Indian payment landscape is evolving faster than almost any other market — UPI's monthly volume doubled in roughly two years, RBI's regulatory framework continues to mature, and new entrants are launching every quarter. Our directory tracks more than 1,200 payment providers across every major jurisdiction, with structured data on fees, payment methods, settlement times, and regulatory licensing.

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