The Best Fiserv Competitors: 6 Great Alternatives to Fiserv (Formerly First Data) Payment Processing

Square’s comprehensive and robust software helps you analyze your sales, manage your employees, keep up with your inventory, and more. If you like Fiserv’s Clover equipment, you should look into Square (in fact, Clover was probably inspired by Square, if you look at the product design.)

Some of Square’s features come with its basic service, others you’ll have to pay extra for. Square offers a variety of hardware options for mobile or store use. You can purchase the terminals and point-of-sale stations outright instead of dealing with equipment leases. However, Square hardware is proprietary, so you won’t be able to reuse it if you change processors.

Here’s some of what Square offers:

• Payment processing with easy setup
• Free virtual terminal
• Online store builder
• Money transfers
• QR code payments
• Online ordering for restaurants
• ACH processing
• Inventory
• Invoicing
• Industry-specific POS systems

• In-person (card-present) transactions: 2.6% + $0.10 (2.5% + $0.10 with an $89/month Square POS Plus subscription)
• Online transactions: 2.9% + $0.30/online transaction (2.6% + $0.30 with a $79/month Premium Square Online subscription)
• Keyed-in transactions: 3.5% + $0.15
• Invoiced transactions: 3.3% + $0.30
• ACH transactions: 1% (minimum $1 charge)
• No monthly fees for a basic account

Square’s flat rates make it easy for a business to figure out profit margins for every sale. However, this simple pricing must cover Square’s costs for each transaction, so, depending on your monthly volume and average ticket size, you could be paying Square more than you need to and might be able to get a better deal from a merchant account provider.

In general, we find Square better suited for stores with physical locations than purely eCommerce businesses (particularly high-volume ones).

Square’s third-party processing model means that you’ll need to do what you can to minimize the chance of an account hold or termination.

Here’s some of what you’ll get with PaymentCloud:

• Your choice of payment gateways
• Virtual terminal
• Numerous online store integrations
• ACH/eCheck processing
• Contactless payment requests
• PCI compliance
• Data migration
• Dedicated account manager

PaymentCloud provides no pricing information for high-risk merchants on its website. High-risk processing rates are exceedingly variable and will differ from one merchant to the next, so it is impractical to disclose any numbers publicly. However, we do know that if your business is high-risk, you’re more likely to be offered tiered pricing.

If your business is standard-risk, you might be able to get transparent interchange-plus pricing from PaymentCloud.

If your business falls in with the highest-risk categories, you may have to accept tiered pricing, and you might have to accept a multi-year contract with an early termination fee (ETF) as well. Unfortunately, these are the only terms under which most processors are willing to work with high-risk business types.

It never hurts to request interchange-plus pricing, however! Just keep in mind that you may not get it.

Stripe has long been one of the top players in eCommerce processing (international eCommerce in particular). As of late, Stripe is making inroads into retail payments as well with its Stripe Terminal.

With Stripe, you’ll get these features and more.

• Industry-leading developer tools
• Payment gateway
• Cryptocurrency processing
• ACH processing
• Accepts payments in 135+ currencies
• Dynamic currency conversion
• Recurring billing and subscriptions
• Invoicing
• Mobile smart terminal for card-present sales

• Online transactions: 2.9% + $0.30 (+0.5% for manually entered transactions)
• In-person transactions: 2.7% + $0.05
• +1.5% for international cards
• +1% for currency conversion (if required)
• ACH direct debit transactions: 0.8% ($5.00 maximum)
• No monthly fees for a basic account

High-volume businesses may be able to get a custom package with interchange-plus pricing.

Stripe is a third-party processor, so you’ll need to do your due diligence to minimize the chance of an account hold or termination.

Additionally, if you think Stripe would be ideal for your business but your team lacks any kind of developer expertise, you should get some!

With Helcim, US and Canadian businesses will get access to the following:

• Interntional payments
• Hosted online store builder
• Hosted payment pages
• Online food ordering
• Helcim API
• Virtual terminal
• Recurring billing
• Tokenization
• Product/inventory management
• Optional surcharging program available
• A mobile card reader and an all-in-one smart terminal with a touchscreen

Helcim’s pricing is similar to Square, with no monthly account fee, no monthly minimum, and no PCI compliance fee. Interchange-plus pricing is used exclusively, with discounted rates available to higher-volume businesses.

• Online transactions: From interchange + 0.15% + $0.15 to interchange + 0.50% + $0.25
• In-person transactions: From interchange + 0.15% + $0.06 to interchange + 0.40% + $0.08
• ACH transactions: 0.5% + $0.25 ($6 maximum)

Low-volume businesses probably won’t find the cheapest processing deal with Helcim. These sellers will often find the likes of Stripe and Square to be a better fit.

Chase Payment Solutions offers the following features. Note that some features require you to have a Chase business bank account.

• Full merchant account
• Authorize.Net payment gateway
• Virtual terminal
• Chase Point of Sale (POS) app and Chase Card Reader for mobile payments
• Next-day funding for Chase business bank account holders
• Choice of processing hardware, including Chase Card Terminal or Ingenico models
• Level II/Level III credit card processing for B2B payments
• Support for international payments

• Monthly fee: Starts at $0
• Online transactions: 2.9% + $0.25
• In-person transactions: 2.6% + $0.10
• Keyed-in transactions: 3.5% + $0.10

Again, interchange-plus pricing is available to higher-volume sellers. These rates are not disclosed.

With Chase payment processing, you have the option of including a “free” terminal with your account, but you’ll have to sign a long-term contract in exchange. We recommend not doing this! We always recommend month-to-month agreements whenever possible.

• Full merchant accounts
• A hybrid risk structure lowers the chance of a held transaction
• High-risk processing for some high-risk business types
• Free terminal with each account (requires $79 annual maintenance fee)
• Offers proprietary Quantum payment gateway or Authorize.Net
• PastePay Cloud POS software
• Virtual terminal

What’s more, CDGcommerce offers excellent customer service and will likely go above and beyond the service provided by its competitors to help you work through issues.

For merchants processing between $10,000 and $200,000 per month, CDGcommerce offers an interchange-plus pricing plan. Large businesses processing over $200,000 per month can get a membership-based pricing plan that eliminates the per-transaction percentage fee in exchange for a single monthly subscription fee. CDGcommerce does not charge account setup fees, PCI compliance fees, or monthly minimums.

New businesses just starting out won’t pay a monthly fee and will have access to the following rates:

• In-person transactions: 2.9% + $0.30 (+0.6% for keyed-in transactions)
• Online transactions: 3.5% + $0.30

While we love that CDGcommerce offers a combination of simple flat-rate processing and full merchant accounts to new businesses, its rates are on the high side. Thankfully, for these sellers, there’s no monthly fee.