Understand the difference

Lithic vs Marqeta

Marqeta’s aging infrastructure slows operations and muddles observability. Lithic's modern platform is built from first principles so you can make real-time changes and understand performance at every level.

Read the Docs
Talk to Sales
Businesses that partnered with Lithic over Galileo.

Compare key capabilities

The capabilities that inform your reliability, control, and reconciliation speed.

Reconciliation
Lithic’s Settlement API delivers real-time reconciliation data via webhooks.
Settlement data arrives as end-of-day CSV batch files.
Co-brand & Platform Needs
Built for multi-network and multi-bank card programs. Lithic is compatible 25+ sponsor banks.
Complex businesses run into limitations with constrained funding and sponsor bank relationships.
Authorization Intelligence
Offer SMS challenges outside of just 3DS and access 25+ attributes to create authorization controls custom to your program.
Challenges are limited to 3DS transactions and rule attributes are sparse. No opportunity to shadow or backtest controls outside of sandbox simulations.
Developer Experience
SDKs in multiple languages with self-serve sandbox and embedded PAN rendering.
No official SDKs. Developers build integrations from raw API docs.

Why clients choose Lithic over

Marqeta

Three places where the difference between Lithic and Marqeta shows up directly in Program operations, reconciliation, and overall partnership.

01

If you want program visibility down to every level

Marqeta’s dashboards combine data from across programs into the same view, making it time-consuming and difficult to track performance on the program and account levels. Manual processes on Marqeta’s platform create overhead that bogs down your team and slows your ability to move fast. Lithic’s modern architecture gives you a snapshot of each distinct program with the ability to view activity at the card and account-holder level.

02

If you need reconciliation data you can rely on

Marqeta’s infrastructure has critical gaps that complicate reconciliation and finance due to inconsistently labelled CSV files. That can make it challenging to trust data and track disputes accurately against network status. Lithic delivers structured settlement data via API with consistent structuring so your team doesn't have to decode and normalize reports.

03

If predictable pricing and partnership is a priority

With Marqeta, critical information about costs, priorities, and overall support responsiveness is unavailable or slow. Delayed network fee adjustments to transactions lead to surprising settlement summaries. Lithic’s transparent partnership gives you the clarity to plan for the long term, with direct access to US-based support teams with 1 hour median  time to first response.
Why our clients love Lithic. From lean startup teams to mature enterprises, businesses choose Lithic for best-in-class payments infrastructure.
Mercury

“

Card programs look simple on the surface, but there's a lot of complexity underneath. What stood out with Lithic was the depth of their card expertise. They understand the edge cases, the tradeoffs, and the downstream impact of decisions, which makes it much easier for us to move quickly and build with confidence.”

John Mason
Senior Product Manager
Atlas

“

From day one, the Lithic team felt like an extension of ours. Their platform handled the complexity, so we could focus on designing the best possible card experience. It's been a true partnership built on reliability and trust."

Zane Salim
Co-Founder and CEO
Order.co

“

Lithic has been a huge part of what makes the Order.co platform work as smoothly as it does. We're issuing hundreds of thousands of single and multi-use virtual cards annually via the Lithic API.”

Zane Salim
Co-Founder and CEO

Still deciding between Lithic and

Marqeta

?

Explore Sandbox
Contact us