Last updated: August 2026 

If you’re searching for alternatives to Stripe Connect, then chances are you’ve outgrown Stripe and are looking for a flexible embedded payment solution that will grow alongside your SaaS.

Convenient solutions like Stripe Connect are great when you first start out, but as you scale, you’ll likely encounter more and more issues, some of which could permanently damage your reputation.

At Fiska, many of our prospects get in touch as they’re seeking an alternative to Stripe.

Here are some of the most common problems we’ve heard from our clients:

• Your account keeps getting frozen, and you can’t process new transactions until Stripe Connect completes an investigation. You’re losing money for every minute that you’re stuck waiting, and customer support is taking days to respond.
• Stripe Connect’s blended rate of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction is expensive. This makes it borderline impossible to make revenue from payments. If you price above Stripe’s fee, you risk putting off merchants from using your platform.
• You can’t properly customize your platform’s onboarding, branding, or UX. Since Stripe Connect’s standard account is one-size-fits-all, your merchants might be forced to submit information they don’t have.

If these challenges sound familiar, then you’re in the right place.

To help you find another embedded payments provider that suits your SaaS better, this article will compare five Stripe Connect competitors.

We’ll cover:

• Comparison table: Five alternatives to Stripe Connect
• Fiska
• Rainforest
• Tilled
• Cardknox (Sola Payments)
• Stax Connect

Fiska is an embedded payments solution that gives you fast support, flexible pricing, and full customization options. Reach out to us to see how we can level up your payments today.

Comparison table: Five alternatives to Stripe Connect

Below is a quick comparison table that highlights key features for each Stripe Connect alternative:
Scroll to see more information.

*All information presented in this blog has been sourced from provider websites and is accurate to the best of our knowledge at the time of writing (June 2026). However, providers may update their offerings, and details are subject to change over time.

** Learn more here: Stripe Connect pricing explained: Costs, features, and alternatives

Fiska: specifically built for SaaS SMBs with a 50/50 revenue-share agreement

Since we’re writing this article, we’ll tell you a bit about ourselves. Fiska was founded as a SaaS-focused alternative to Stripe after we saw software companies struggling to make payments profitable. We saw them dealing with:

• High fees on every transaction made it impossible to turn a meaningful profit, and it became harder to manage as payment volume grew
• Legacy payment providers use old technology that was difficult to integrate with and had hard-to-follow documentation.
• The technical side of payments was becoming increasingly demanding, but they lacked the budget to hire an in-house payments expert.

We set up Fiska to help SaaS companies turn payments from a burden to a growth driver. We help software companies scale through payments, improve product stickiness, and launch embedded payments without needing to hire an entire payments team.

Our team comprises experts who’ve come from both the software and payments worlds, bringing decades of experience in helping SaaS companies monetize payments.

Here’s how we differ from Stripe Connect:

Set your own flexible pricing and turn payments into a recurring revenue stream

Stripe Connect uses the same blended rate for everyone: either accept the 2.9% + $0.30 on every transaction, or go elsewhere. There is little room for negotiation unless you are a huge enterprise.

These rigid fees make it difficult to add your own markup. You could charge above 2.9% + $0.30 to earn a profit, though you’ll risk pushing your merchants towards more affordable competitors.

Fiska takes a different approach. We operate on a true revenue-share model, which helps you monetize payments whilst keeping your pricing competitive. It works like this:

• We use the interchange rates set by Visa and Mastercard as our cost basis.
• We add a small percentage markup as a processing fee.
• Every time one of your merchants processes a payment, you earn a portion of that revenue.
• We don’t charge platform fees: we only get paid when you do

This gives you the freedom to set your own pricing based on your customers. We won’t dictate how you set your pricing, although we can offer strategic advice.

Read more: Why Fiska doesn’t charge fees (and how our partnership model works)

Access fast, multi-channel technical support for you and your merchants

Stripe Connect offers excellent documentation and self-help guides, but when something goes wrong and you need to speak to a human, you’re stuck waiting. You’ll have to rely on the same ticket-based support system as Stripe’s main platform (where it can take days just to receive a response).^1d

This means that when a merchant faces a time-sensitive payment issue, you may be left without help. One bad experience can damage trust and reputation: sometimes irreparably.

Fiska doesn’t have a ticket-based system; we take a more human and user-friendly approach. You simply reach out to our team via Slack, email, or phone, and we’ll respond within 24 hours (usually much faster). We’re a small team, and you’ll know us already.

If you encounter an urgent payment issue that you can’t resolve, we’ll contact your merchants directly to resolve the problem.

Imagine a busy coffee shop that uses your platform opening for the morning rush: the line’s out the door, customers are ready to pay… but suddenly their payment system crashes, and you’re unable to help them directly.

That’s where we come in. In urgent situations like this, we’re available to speak directly to your merchants and walk them through their issue; you don’t have to struggle through dense paperwork or sift through self-help guides.

“Stripe gives you all the tools, and they’re really good tools. But they don’t give you the blueprint. This is how we differ: we’ll walk you through each part of the process and actively help you build your payment strategy.”  Patrick Huynh, CEO of Fiska

Read more: Why Fiska is a good fit for SaaS platforms

Launch omnichannel payments quickly

For many SaaS platforms, standing up even basic omnichannel payment flows can be surprisingly complex. Stripe Connect, for example, often involves months of back-and-forth with support, extensive developer time, and digging through dense documentation. Adding in-person payments typically means another integration. Expanding into Canada requires acquiring licenses and navigating regional limitations, and Stripe Terminal is not supported there.

Fiska removes that friction. Our single omnichannel API gives your platform everything it needs to launch card-present and card-not-present payments quickly across both the US and Canada. There is no need for multiple integrations, license applications, or region-by-region onboarding.

Because we are already pre-integrated with payment terminals, certified with major networks, and compliant with local regulations, you can go live fast and scale confidently. A single integration unlocks every channel, including online, in-app, and in-person, so your merchants can deliver a seamless checkout experience wherever their customers are.

We also provide fully embedded merchant onboarding forms. This gives you complete visibility into the onboarding journey, helping you diagnose issues quickly and reduce drop-off rates without sending merchants to an external portal.

Finally, our developer experience is designed for SaaS teams. Fiska’s APIs are clear and intuitive, so your engineers do not need deep payments expertise to get started. Because everything runs through one unified system, any updates you make apply automatically across every channel. This reduces time spent maintaining infrastructure and allows your team to focus on building features that matter to your customers.

Ready to partner with Fiska? Book a no-obligation call with our CEO today.

Rainforest:

Rainforest is an embedded payments provider that was purpose-built to serve both subscription and software platforms. Rainforest uses a fixed markup and does not share this revenue with SaaS clients. Instead, they allow SaaS companies to mark up their pricing (on top of Rainforest’s fixed markup).²

The platform supports omnichannel payments and offers a fully white-labeled experience, but doesn’t clearly state if it provides level 2 merchant support or universal tokenization. Additionally, they offer tokenized payments, though it’s unclear from their website whether this is universal.²

Tilled

Tilled is a PayFac-as-a-Service startup that helps software platforms monetize payments without becoming payment facilitators. Its API enables easy, low-code integration and offers customizable merchant onboarding, revenue sharing, and omnichannel payment features.³

They offer flexible pricing with no long-term contracts or lock-in penalties. Plans include fixed-rate or interchange-plus models, with revenue shares of 70% or 90% on fixed-rate options. Their monthly subscriptions start at $2,500 for SaaS processing under $10 million and rise to $10,000 for higher volumes.^3a

However, Tilled’s website does not specify whether Level 2 merchant support or universal tokenization is part of their service. Additionally, Tilled imposes a High Volume Dispute fee on all merchants with elevated dispute rates (regardless of the outcome of these disputes), though the exact cost of this fee is not publicly disclosed.

Read more: PayFac-as-a-Service VS PayFac-in-a-Box

Sola payments (formerly Cardknox)

Sola Payments, formerly Cardknox, is a payment gateway and processing platform that serves VARs and software platforms.

SaaS companies can partner as Independent Sales Organizations (ISOs) and refer merchants to Cardknox to earn commissions. This allows SaaS to share payment processing revenue, and they can also add their own markup on top of Cardknox’s processing fees. Alternatively, SaaS platforms can become payment facilitators (PayFacs) using the Cardknox Go PayFac-as-a-service offering.⁴

Pricing transparency is limited since their website doesn’t publicly list fee structures, which may complicate budgeting for some clients.⁴

They support both in-person and online payments with various terminals and mobile POS options. Though they support tokenization for securing payment data, their website does not explicitly confirm whether this is universal across all payment channels. Additionally, there is no clear mention on their website of Level 2 support for merchants.

Read more: PayFac VS ISO: What’s right for your SaaS platform?

Stax Connect

Stax is both a PayFac-as-a-Service and an embedded payments platform (Stax Connect) that serves retail and e-commerce businesses, alongside SaaS solutions.

For business, they charge a fixed monthly fee based on annual processing volume; however, they don’t publicly state how much they charge for SaaS platforms. Instead of paying a percentage markup on interchange, you pay true interchange, plus a small per-transaction fee. Stax has zero hidden fees and zero cancellation fees.^5a

Stax is fully white-labeled and supports both in-person and online payments with a variety of terminals and mobile POS options, including smart terminals and Bluetooth mobile readers.

They use tokenization to secure payment data, but similarly to Cardknox, Tilled, and Rainforest, their website does not explicitly confirm if this is universal.

While Stax offers Level 2 payment processing (providing extra transaction details such as sales tax, customer code, merchant postal code, and invoice number), there is no clear mention of dedicated Level 2 merchant support on their website.^5a

Turn payments into a recurring revenue stream with Fiska

When you add Fiska to your team, you don’t just get a payments provider: you gain a fractional Head of Payments whose success is directly tied to yours.

We become an extension of your team, helping you set flexible pricing that allows you to earn income from payments alongside your SaaS subscriptions. We stay involved long past onboarding, providing hands-on support and strategic advice whenever you need it. We help you scale by giving you full ownership of the payments experience; from onboarding to pricing, everything is fully customizable to fit your platform and your customers.

To learn how our embedded payments solution can fully support your business, get in touch with one of our experts today.

FAQs: Finding the best Stripe Connect competitor for SaaS platforms

1 | How do I move away from Stripe?

Moving away from Stripe is as simple as booking a call with Fiska’s embedded payments experts. We’ll get to know your business, then you’ll be assigned a dedicated support team that’ll guide you through integration and onboarding. We handle the technical setup to help you launch as soon as possible.

2| Does Fiska offer better support than Stripe Connect or other competitors?

With Fiska, you benefit from Level 1 support (for your SaaS) and Level 2 support (for your merchants). If a merchant’s payments stop working during an emergency, Fiska is available to step in and directly resolve the issue with your merchants.

3 | How does Fiska’s pricing model compare to other Stripe Connect alternatives?

Fiska operates on a true revenue share pricing model, where all profits above interchange are shared with our SaaS partners. This means that you’ll earn a margin on every transaction whilst paying zero fixed platform fees. Other alternatives charge high fixed fees each month, and only offer rigid markup structures that might not align with your business. In contrast, Fiska’s revenue share model is simple, predictable, and flexible.

4 | How can SaaS platforms automate payouts for their merchants?

A strong Stripe Connect alternative should let you automate payouts across multiple channels without complex manual workflows. With Fiska, payouts are handled in real time, including global payouts, so your merchants can receive funds quickly and reliably. This removes operational friction and improves the overall merchant and customer experience.

Sources:

1. https://stripe.com/connect
   1. https://stripe.com/gb/connect/features
   2. https://stripe.com/connect/pricing
   3. https://support.stripe.com/questions/view-support-cases-for-connected-accounts
   4. https://docs.stripe.com/connect/embedded-support
2. https://www.rainforestpay.com/
3. https://www.tilled.com/
   1. https://www.tilled.com/pricing
4. https://solapayments.com/
5. https://staxpayments.com/stax-connect/
   1. https://staxpayments.com/pricing/saas/