Compare the Checkout and Payment Intents APIs

Learn about the differences between the Checkout and Payment Intents APIs and when to use them.

Onerway provides two core payment APIs for different levels of customization and control:

CheckoutRecommended

Covers common checkout workflows and provides extensive built-in capabilities, reducing custom code and long-term maintenance costs. Officially recommended for most developers.

Payment Intents

Provides flexible payment flow control through the Onerway SDK, but requires more integration code and maintenance effort.

How to choose the right API

The choice depends on what features you need and how much custom code you're willing to maintain long-term.

Key points:

Checkout will continuously receive new built-in capabilities, some of which will not be available in Payment Intents (SDK).
If you use Payment Intents (SDK), you can manually build similar capabilities through custom code, but the cost is usually higher.

Use case comparison

Recommended for:

Teams that want less integration code and lower long-term maintenance costs
Teams that want to use Onerway's built-in checkout state management and features (such as product information, saved payment methods)

Integration approach: Use the API to create a session and integrate the checkout page. Many capabilities can be enabled through parameters and Dashboard configuration

UI format: (Onerway-hosted)

Payment method support:

Credit cards
Multiple local payment methods (such as bank transfers, e-wallets, etc.)
Apple Pay / Google Pay

Complexity positioning: Scales smoothly from simple use cases to complex ones, suitable for most business scales and stages.

Feature comparison

Feature	Checkout API	Payment Intents API (SDK)
Best for	Complete checkout flows including product information, subscriptions, discounts, etc.	Complex scenarios requiring custom business logic and fine-grained payment control
Payment methods	Credit cards, multiple local payment methods, Apple Pay / Google Pay	Credit cards, Apple Pay / Google Pay
Branding	✅ Supports custom logo (Dashboard configuration)	❌ Not supported
Save payment methods	✅ Built-in support (enabled in Dashboard)	⚠️ Requires separate Tokenization API integration
Subscription features	✅ Built-in support for creating subscriptions	⚠️ Requires separate Subscriptions API integration
UI flexibility	(Onerway provides complete UI)	SDK provides payment form components, other UI needs to be built by yourself
Address collection	✅ Built-in collection of customer/billing/shipping addresses	✅ Built-in collection of customer/billing/shipping addresses
Session expiration		Automatically expires after 30 minutes
Webhook events		Mainly provides payment status events

Create Payment Links

Learn how to create and share payment links via the Dashboard.

Checkout Overview

Learn about Onerway Checkout hosted payment page capabilities, use cases, and integration options.