Korapay is a Nigerian payment gateway with similar core features to Paystack: card acceptance, bank transfer, virtual accounts, USSD, and webhooks. Paystack leads on: API maturity, documentation quality, subscription billing (Plans + Subscriptions + dunning), webhook tooling, dashboard features, and ecosystem integrations. Korapay leads on: potentially simpler onboarding for some use cases, competitive pricing. Choose Korapay when: you want a genuine Nigerian fallback gateway for failover, you have specific reasons to avoid Paystack (relationship, pricing, feature match), or you want to reduce single-gateway dependency. Choose Paystack when: you need subscriptions, the full checkout ecosystem, or the most mature Nigerian payment API available.
| Feature | Paystack | Korapay |
|---|---|---|
| Card acceptance | Yes — Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Verve | Yes — Visa, Mastercard, Verve |
| Bank transfer | Yes — virtual accounts, bank transfer acceptance | Yes — virtual accounts, bank transfer |
| USSD | Yes — all major Nigerian banks | Yes — major Nigerian banks |
| Mobile money | Kenya: M-Pesa; Ghana: MTN MoMo, Vodafone Cash | Nigeria-focused |
| Subscriptions | Yes — Plans, Subscriptions, dunning, webhook events for failures | Card tokenization only — no managed subscription lifecycle |
| Split payments | Yes — Subaccounts | Yes — split payment support |
| Checkout widget | Paystack Inline JS — mature, battle-tested | Korapay Inline — functional, less ecosystem |
| API documentation | Excellent — multi-language examples, sandbox, webhook tool | Good — REST API docs, sandbox available |
| Dashboard | Full-featured — webhook test tool, analytics, dispute management | Functional — reporting and payments focused |
| SDK ecosystem | Official Node.js, PHP, Python SDKs + community SDKs | Official SDK, smaller community |
| Settlement | T+1 (NGN) | T+1 (NGN) |
| Pricing (card) | 1.5% + NGN 100, cap NGN 2,000 | Comparable — verify current rates at korapay.com |
| Countries | Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Egypt | Nigeria (primary), expanding |
The most practical reason to integrate Korapay alongside Paystack is failover routing when Paystack has an outage:
var PRIMARY_GATEWAY = 'paystack';
var FALLBACK_GATEWAY = 'korapay';
async function initializePayment(amount, email, reference) {
var primary = gateways[PRIMARY_GATEWAY];
var result = await primary.initialize({ amount, email, reference }).catch(() => null);
if (!result) {
// Primary failed — route to fallback
var fallback = gateways[FALLBACK_GATEWAY];
result = await fallback.initialize({ amount, email, reference + '_kp' });
result.gateway = FALLBACK_GATEWAY;
} else {
result.gateway = PRIMARY_GATEWAY;
}
// Store which gateway was used with this reference
await db.transactions.create({ reference, gateway: result.gateway, status: 'pending' });
return result;
}
// Webhook handlers must cover both gateways
app.post('/webhook/paystack', handlePaystackWebhook);
app.post('/webhook/korapay', handleKorapayWebhook);Key consideration: reference formats differ between gateways. Store the gateway alongside the reference so verification calls go to the right gateway. Your webhook handlers and verification logic must be aware of both.
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See gateway failover design for a complete circuit breaker implementation that routes between Paystack and Korapay.
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