The best free payment gateway plugins for WooCommerce all come with one catch worth understanding first: for a payment plugin, “free” means the plugin costs nothing — you still pay your provider’s processing fees on every transaction. A free plugin is not free payments. With that straight, here are the options and how to choose between them.
1. WooCommerce built-in (bank transfer, cheque, cash on delivery)
Free, ships with WooCommerce, no card processing. Useful for manual or offline methods, or as a fallback — not for taking cards online.
2. Stripe (official free plugin)
A free, well-maintained plugin for cards and wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay). Excellent if Stripe supports your country and currency. You pay Stripe’s per-transaction fee.
3. PayPal (official free plugin)
Free, widely trusted by shoppers, quick to set up. Provider fees apply. Often worth offering alongside cards rather than instead of them.
4. Regional provider plugins
Most regional gateways — Paystack, Payfast, Razorpay, Mollie, and many others — publish their own free WooCommerce plugins for their market. If you sell in one region, the local provider’s official plugin is usually the simplest route.
5. PaymentHood (free, open-source, multi-provider)
Instead of a plugin per gateway, one free open-source plugin connects WooCommerce to 36+ providers at once, with routing and automatic failover. This is the option to look at when you expect more than one provider, a fallback, or multiple markets.
How to choose
- One market, one provider → that provider’s official plugin (Stripe, PayPal, or your regional gateway).
- Multiple providers, markets, or a fallback → a multi-provider plugin, so you’re not re-integrating each time.
- Only offline/manual payments → WooCommerce’s built-in methods.
Watch the fine print on “free”
Two things quietly turn “free” into paid:
- Processing fees — always charged by the provider, not the plugin.
- Paid add-ons — some free plugins gate features like subscriptions, extra gateways, or fraud tools behind a premium tier. Check what’s included before you commit.
Where PaymentHood fits
PaymentHood is free and open-source, connects WooCommerce to 36+ providers through one plugin, and handles routing, failover, webhook verification and reconciliation for you — with no per-transaction fee from us (you pay only your chosen provider’s processing fees). An optional plan adds white-label checkout branding.
See the WooCommerce integration, the pricing, or the full provider directory.