Both take card payments for a South African online store, and both plug into WooCommerce, Shopify or a system built for you. Yoco suits a business that also sells in person, because shop and website sales land in one place. Payfast suits a store whose customers want more ways to pay, such as Instant EFT, store cards or buy now, pay later, and one that needs subscriptions.
Everything below comes from Payfast’s and Yoco’s own pages, read on 19 October 2026.
Which payment methods does each one offer?
Payfast lists 15 ways to pay. Beyond cards and the phone wallets, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay, they include Instant EFT, Capitec Pay, SnapScan, Zapper, Scan to Pay, Mobicred, RCS store cards, MukuruPay for cash, and two buy now, pay later options, Payflex and MoreTyme.
Yoco online takes cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and EFT. It also sends payment links you can share on WhatsApp, Instagram or email, so you can take a payment without a website at all.
If a real share of your customers pay with a store card, in cash or in instalments, Payfast’s list settles it.
How do payouts work?
Payfast pays out on a schedule or when you ask, and offers an Immediate Payout once the bank’s 48-hour clearing time has passed. Yoco pays out automatically, and money from a sale reaches your account within two business days. Yoco offers faster payouts as well.
Can either one run subscriptions?
Payfast can. Its recurring billing charges stored card details on a schedule, with an API to pause, update or cancel a subscription. Yoco did not list an equivalent product for online payments on 19 October.
What if you sell in person too?
Then Yoco has the edge. With a Yoco card machine in the shop, your shop and website sales arrive in one payout, with one sales history and one set of reports. That also makes the books simpler: there is one source to connect to Xero, Sage or QuickBooks instead of two.
What does connecting each one take?
Both have plugins for WooCommerce and Shopify, and for most stores the plugin is enough.
For a custom system, both work the same way. The customer pays on the gateway’s page, and the gateway then sends your server a message to confirm the payment: Payfast calls it an ITN, Yoco sends a webhook. Mark the order as paid only when that message arrives and checks out. A customer landing back on your thank-you page proves nothing, because that page can be reached without paying.
Both companies document the checks that make that message trustworthy. With Payfast, the signature has to match one you generate with your own passphrase, the amount has to match the order you stored, and the data is confirmed with Payfast’s server before you act on it. Yoco signs every webhook: you recompute the signature from the webhook ID, the timestamp and the raw body using your secret key, and you reject any message with an old timestamp, so a captured one cannot be replayed later.
Nothing stops you running both, Yoco for cards and Payfast for EFT and instalments. You get each one’s strengths, along with two dashboards and two payout schedules to reconcile.
So which one should you choose?
| If you | Choose |
|---|---|
| sell in a shop as well as online | Yoco |
| have customers who prefer Instant EFT, Capitec Pay or a store card | Payfast |
| need subscriptions or recurring billing | Payfast |
| want buy now, pay later at checkout | Payfast |
Either one can be connected to your store, booking system or accounting. If you would rather not wire it up yourself, tell me what you are running.
Sources
- Payfast, payment methods, Immediate Payout and Subscriptions
- Payfast, Developer documentation
- Yoco, Online payments and Gateway
- Yoco, Checkout API webhooks and Verifying the events
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