DePay vs Plisio

Chains against coins#

DePay names ten blockchains — Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Solana, Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, Gnosis, Avalanche and World Chain — and no asset count. Plisio names twelve assets across seven networks including Bitcoin.

One is organised around where value moves; the other around what value is. Both descriptions are incomplete in the opposite direction.

Bitcoin is the clearest consequence: present on one card and absent from the other, which for a merchant with Bitcoin-holding customers ends the comparison immediately.

Layer twos are the argument for the dearer card#

Base, Arbitrum and Optimism are named individually rather than folded into an Ethereum entry, which is rare here and matters because the cost to the payer differs by an order of magnitude.

A customer holding USDC on Base pays cents in network fees and cannot use a provider that only settles Ethereum mainnet.

The cheaper card carries Ethereum and Tron and no layer two at all, so that particular payer is served by exactly one of these two.

Three times the rate, with a free tier underneath#

One publishes 1.5% managed, with a self-hosted open-source tier at zero percent and platform features explicitly excluded. The other publishes a flat 0.5%.

Naming what the free tier leaves out is candid and unusual. It also means the zero is a real option rather than a marketing line, for a business with an engineer.

The managed ladder runs down to 0.5% at enterprise level, unlocked by volume or by holding the provider's own token. A rate conditional on holding an asset is not a rate every merchant can choose.

Privacy assets sit on the cheaper side#

Monero, Dash and Zcash appear on one card. Almost nothing else in this index carries all three, and most providers refuse privacy assets outright.

That is a genuinely differentiated position and it has no counterpart on the other card, whose token support runs through decentralised liquidity rather than through curated listings.

If any revenue arrives in Monero, this pair has one option and the rest of the page is background.

Five plugins against three#

WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart and WHMCS on one side; Shopify, WooCommerce and WordPress on the other.

Shopify appears on only one of them, which for a Shopify merchant settles the question regardless of anything else on this page.

Both shelves are workable, and both providers clearly expect a proportion of their merchants to run a storefront rather than a custom build.

Custody is identical and disclosure is not#

Both settle to a wallet the merchant controls with no provider balance, so the failure mode that separates most providers is common ground here.

Disclosure is where they diverge: sixty-eight percent on one card against forty-two on the other, which is one of the lower figures in this index.

The blanks on the weaker card include the asset count, verification, fiat settlement, invoicing and every product line beyond the checkout itself.

Product surface beyond the payment#

Mass payouts, white label and hosted invoicing are documented on one card and unpublished on the other. That is three product lines to nothing.

For a platform that intends to pay users as well as charge them, only one of these has a documented answer, and the other would need a second vendor.

Recurring billing is unpublished on both, so a subscription business is not served by either without asking first.

Where each company sits#

One says it is made in Switzerland without naming an entity or registration. The other publishes a founding year of 2018 and no jurisdiction.

Two non-custodial providers, two incomplete corporate answers, and no merchant balance at risk in either case. The question is real and its consequences are smaller here than elsewhere.

A compliance reviewer will still ask, and neither website will answer it.

What the scores do and do not capture#

Cost and integrations favour the cheaper card; onboarding favours the chain router, whose model requires less of a merchant at signup.

Coverage sits at five against five, which is a fair verdict on two narrow catalogues and tells you nothing about whether they are narrow in the same direction.

They are not. Read the network rows before the coverage numbers, because that is where this pair is actually decided.

Choosing between them#

A merchant selling to browser-wallet customers holding stablecoins on cheap chains takes the router, and pays 1.5% or runs the free tier.

A store on WooCommerce, Magento or PrestaShop whose customers hold Bitcoin, Ethereum or Tron takes the other, pays 0.5%, and gets payouts and white label with it.

A Shopify store or a merchant receiving Monero each has exactly one option here, and those two constraints resolve most cases without further reading.

Wallets are part of the checkout here#

A router that pays from browser wallets depends on the customer already having one connected, and the card claims hundreds are supported. A processor that generates an address depends only on the customer having funds somewhere.

Those are two different conversion funnels. Wallet connection removes the copy-paste step and adds a compatibility step, and which one leaks more depends entirely on who is buying.

Test both against real customers rather than against a demo. It is the one difference on this page that no published field captures and it decides revenue rather than cost.