The read · 12 Oct 2026
The WooCommerce name still owns checkout
Payments on WordPress is a WooCommerce market, and the plugins carrying the WooCommerce name sit at its center. WooPayments, the WooCommerce Stripe gateway and WooCommerce Tax account for roughly 2 million of the category's 2.9 million installs. WooPayments alone holds 27%.
The leaders are actively maintained. All three shipped an update in the past week. Where they're weak is user sentiment. WooCommerce Tax carries an adjusted rating of about 2.2 out of 5, and the Stripe gateway sits near 3.1. Plugins with that much reach and that much discontent usually hold their position because they come bundled with the store setup, and users don't seem to pick them on merit.
Better-rated rivals have already broken through
The proof that the top can be challenged is already in the top ten. Payment Plugins for Stripe WooCommerce has passed 100,000 installs with a rating close to 4.8, well above the official Stripe gateway it competes with. Its PayPal counterpart from the same Payment Plugins line has reached 80,000 with a similar score, and FunnelKit's Stripe gateway is at 20,000 with ratings above 4.7.
That makes this category a moat on distribution and an opening on quality. A newcomer won't displace WooPayments, but merchants clearly look past the defaults when something better exists. The harder problem is how thin demand gets past the leaders. Across 1,621 tracked plugins, the average draws about 1,700 downloads a month. Category downloads more than doubled over the last 90 days, a real jump whose cause isn't visible in the data yet.
Local rails up, crypto down
The growth further down is coming from regional and card-network gateways. Mastercard Merchant Cloud and Authorize.net Payments for WooCommerce both grew from a few hundred installs to over 1,000 this quarter. Parsigate went from 200 to 700, and Paysera Smart Checkout from 70 to 300. The numbers are small, but they all point the same way, which suggests merchants are filling gaps for specific countries and processors the big gateways don't cover well.
Crypto is moving the other way. Pay With MetaMask slid from 600 to 400 installs, and WC Solana Pay dropped from 100 to 60, with several smaller crypto gateways shrinking too. The biggest closure of the quarter was crypto as well. elegro Crypto Payment, which had more than 20,000 installs, was closed on 25 September 2026 with no recorded reason. Elite crypto checkout followed on 28 September, also with no recorded reason, and PayForge Crypto Payments was closed at its author's request on 27 September.
