A platform with seventy gateways and one with fifteen are identical to you if both support yours. The four questions that actually decide this, and the regional methods that outrank total count.
Ilinca Bostan7 min readPayment gateway support is the feature most often compared by counting, and counting is close to useless here. A platform with seventy gateway modules and a platform with fifteen are identical to you if both support the one gateway your merchant account is with. What separates them is not the size of the list — it is whether the integration does automatic recurring charges, whether it stores a reusable token, and how it behaves when a payment fails.
Here is what the vendors publish, read on 18 August 2026, and the four questions that actually decide this.
How this was sourced. FluxBilling publishes this comparison and sells one of the products in it; sources are linked at the end. Gateway catalogues change with every release and third-party developers publish modules no vendor page lists, so this is a map of vendor documentation, not a census. Where a vendor does not publish a definitive list, this post says so instead of estimating a number.
WHMCS documents around 70 payment gateway modules, spanning card processors, hosted checkouts, bank transfer, direct debit and cryptocurrency: 2CheckOut, Authorize.net and its CIM and eCheck variants, Bank Transfer, BitPay, BluePay, Boleto, CCAvenue, Direct Debit, eWAY, Forte, GoCardless, Mollie, Moneris, PayPal in six configurations, SagePay in four, SecurePay, Skrill, Stripe with ACH and SEPA variants, WorldPay and many others. It is the largest documented catalogue in the category by a clear margin, and for a provider selling into an unusual market that breadth is the whole argument.
HostBill, Blesta and Clientexec all publish gateway module systems and are extended by third-party developers; none publishes a definitive count on its pricing page, so this post does not print one. HostBill's pricing page gates integrations by edition, but the integrations it names per edition are provisioning and monitoring systems rather than payment gateways — if a specific gateway matters to you, confirm which edition contains it before purchase rather than assuming the entry edition does.
FluxBilling publishes fifteen payment gateway plugins: 2328.io, 2Checkout, Authorize.Net, Bank Transfer, BitPay, CCAvenue, CoinGate, CoinPayments, GoCardless, Mollie, Paddle, PayPal, Skrill, Stripe and WorldPay. That is a fraction of WHMCS's documented set and we are not going to dress it up as anything else.
1. Does it charge automatically, or does it just take a payment? This is the single largest distinction inside any gateway list and it is rarely marked on one. A hosted checkout that redirects the customer to pay an invoice is not the same integration as a merchant gateway that charges a stored token on the renewal date without the customer being present. Hosting is a recurring business; if the gateway cannot charge unattended, every renewal becomes a dunning email and your involuntary churn is structural rather than accidental. Ask specifically: does this integration support automatic recurring charges, or only customer-initiated payments?
2. Where does the card live? Modern integrations store a token with the processor and keep card data entirely out of your platform, which is what keeps your PCI scope small. Older ones — and any "offline credit card" style module — do not. The difference is not a feature preference; it is the difference between a self-assessment questionnaire and an audit. We went through the detail in the PCI DSS checklist for hosting billing.
3. Does it handle strong customer authentication cleanly? If you sell into Europe, cards routinely require additional authentication, and a recurring charge on a card that was never set up with the right exemption or mandate will simply fail. The gateway module has to support the flow that establishes the agreement at the time of first payment, not just the charge afterwards. This is the most common cause of "the gateway is supported but renewals keep failing".
4. What happens on a decline? The gateway returns a reason. The billing platform decides whether to retry, when, how many times, and what the customer sees. That retry logic lives in the billing platform, not the gateway, and it is worth more to your revenue than ten extra gateway modules. Our earlier post on dunning management covers what good looks like.
A useful exercise before comparing platforms: write down the payment methods your customers actually use, by market, and check those specifically.
If your market is served by Stripe and PayPal, gateway count is not a differentiator for you and should not influence the decision at all. If it is not, gateway count is the only thing that matters and WHMCS's catalogue is the strongest in this post.
Gateway modules are usually free with the platform; the gateway is not. Processing fees are set by the processor and are typically the largest recurring cost in this entire stack — larger than the billing licence by an order of magnitude for most providers. A platform decision that saves twenty dollars a month while pushing you onto a processor a fraction of a percent more expensive is a bad trade at any meaningful revenue.
Two further line items worth checking: whether the platform vendor takes any percentage of the payments you collect (most in this category do not, but freemium platforms are the ones to ask), and whether multi-currency settlement is handled by the gateway or by your platform's exchange rate handling, which affects reconciliation more than it affects billing.
Fifteen gateways, all available on every tier — Lite €4.95/month, Starter €24.95/month, Professional €34.95/month, Business €44.95/month. There is no edition to upgrade into for a payment gateway and no per-gateway fee. Every gateway plugin forwards the processor's decline reason back into the platform rather than collapsing failures into a generic error, which is what makes dunning decisions possible rather than guesswork.
The honest comparison: WHMCS's documented catalogue is roughly four to five times the size of ours, and if you need a regional acquirer we do not list, WHMCS is more likely to have it and we cannot help you today. Where our approach differs is that gateways are built as visual plugins rather than PHP modules, so an API-driven processor with no existing integration can be wired up without shipping code — which is a route rather than a guarantee.
See the plugin catalogue, billing features and current pricing.
Take your merchant account, your top three markets and your renewal volume. Ask each vendor three questions: is my processor supported, does that integration charge automatically on renewal without the customer present, and does it support the authentication flow my acquirer requires. Three yeses from a fifteen-gateway platform beats seventy modules that miss one of them.
All product names are trademarks of their respective owners. This comparison is published by FluxBilling for evaluation purposes and is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or reviewed by any of them.
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