Selcom vs ClickPesa vs Pesapal vs Direct API in Tanzania: Which Should You Use?

Every developer building a payment integration in Tanzania faces the same question: do I use a payment aggregator, or do I integrate directly with each telco?

In Tanzania, this decision is more consequential than in Kenya. Kenya has one dominant provider (Safaricom M-Pesa) and a relatively accessible API (Daraja). Tanzania has three providers, each with its own API, its own approval process, and its own quirks. Direct integration means doing everything three times.

Aggregators exist to solve this. They have already established connections with Vodacom, Tigo, and Airtel. They give you one API that routes to all three. You integrate once, and your checkout supports every Tanzanian mobile money user.

The tradeoff: aggregators charge a fee on top of the telco's processing cost. At low to medium volume, this fee is worth the development time you save. At high volume, the per-transaction savings from direct integration compound. The breakeven depends on your specific fee agreements and development costs, but as a rough guideline: if you process fewer than 10,000 transactions per month, the aggregator fee is almost certainly cheaper than the developer time to build and maintain three separate integrations.

Selcom is the largest and most established payment aggregator in Tanzania. If you ask a Tanzanian developer which aggregator to use and they have no strong preference, the default answer is usually Selcom.

What Selcom offers:

• Support for all three mobile money rails (Vodacom M-Pesa, Tigo Pesa, Airtel Money)
• Visa and Mastercard processing
• Bank integrations
• USSD payment collection
• QR code payments
• Disbursement APIs (send money to customers)

Developer experience: Selcom's API documentation is adequate. It is not the most modern or polished, but it covers the use cases and has code examples. Sandbox is available. SDKs exist for common languages. The API has been around long enough that you can find community resources, Stack Overflow answers, and blog posts from other Tanzanian developers who have integrated it.

When to choose Selcom: If you want the safest default for a Tanzanian project. The widest feature set, the longest track record, and the most community knowledge. If you are building a project for a Tanzanian client and need to recommend one aggregator, Selcom is the low-risk choice.

Azampay

Azampay is a Tanzanian aggregator that has grown quickly with a focus on developer experience. Their API is modern, well-documented, and designed with current best practices (RESTful, JSON, clear error messages). If you are a developer who values clean API design and responsive support, Azampay is worth evaluating alongside Selcom.

Azampay supports M-Pesa, Tigo Pesa, and Airtel Money. Their pricing is competitive, sometimes lower than Selcom for certain transaction types. They are newer, which means less community knowledge but also more willingness to help early adopters.

ClickPesa

ClickPesa is Tanzania-based and focuses on a broader payments picture: mobile money, bank transfers, and cross-border payments. If your use case involves B2B payments, payroll, or bank integrations alongside mobile money, ClickPesa covers more ground than a pure mobile money aggregator.

Their API documentation is solid, and they have been around long enough to be trusted for production workloads. ClickPesa is a strong choice for fintech projects that need more than just C2B mobile money collection.

Pesapal

Pesapal is an East Africa-wide aggregator with operations in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and other markets. If you are building a product that needs to accept payments across multiple East African countries, Pesapal lets you use one integration for all of them.

In Tanzania, Pesapal supports all three mobile money rails plus Visa and Mastercard. The developer experience is consistent across countries, which reduces the learning curve if you are already using Pesapal in Kenya. The tradeoff is that Pesapal is not Tanzania-focused, so their support and feature development may prioritize other markets.

Direct integration means going to each telco separately: Vodacom for M-Pesa, Tigo for Tigo Pesa, Airtel for Airtel Money. You get API credentials from each, build three separate integrations, and maintain them independently.

Advantages:

• Lowest per-transaction cost (no aggregator margin)
• Full control over the payment flow for each provider
• No dependency on a third-party aggregator's uptime or business continuity
• Access to provider-specific features that aggregators may not expose

Disadvantages:

• Three separate API integrations to build, test, and maintain
• Three separate business approval processes (weeks per telco)
• Three separate callback formats to normalize
• Three separate error handling strategies
• When any telco updates their API, you handle the migration yourself
• Direct access is genuinely hard to get, especially for small businesses and solo developers

Direct integration makes sense when: you process high volumes (thousands of transactions daily), you have a dedicated payments developer or team, you need custom payment flows, or per-transaction cost is a critical business metric. For most startups and SME projects, the aggregator path is more practical.

A common hybrid approach: start with an aggregator, prove your business model, grow volume, then migrate to direct integration for the provider that accounts for the most transactions. Design your payment layer with abstraction so this migration is an implementation swap, not an architecture rewrite.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. How quickly do I need to be in production?

If the answer is "this month," use an aggregator. Direct telco approvals will not happen that fast.

2. Do I need multi-country support?

If yes, Pesapal is the default choice. Selcom and Azampay are Tanzania-focused.

3. Do I need bank integrations or B2B payments?

If yes, ClickPesa covers that ground better than the others.

4. Is API design and documentation quality important to my team?

If yes, evaluate Azampay alongside Selcom. Sign up for both sandboxes and compare the developer experience.

5. Am I processing more than 10,000 transactions per month?

If yes, direct integration starts to make financial sense. Calculate the fee savings against the development cost. If no, the aggregator fee is almost certainly cheaper than the developer time for three separate integrations.

6. Do I have no preference and just want to move forward?

Use Selcom. It is the safe default for Tanzania. You can always evaluate alternatives later once you understand the payment landscape better.

Regardless of which aggregator or direct integration path you choose, the underlying architecture is the same: REST APIs, request-callback patterns, webhook handling, idempotent callbacks, error management.

McTaba's M-Pesa Integration for Developers course (KES 9,999 / ~TZS 200,000) teaches this architecture using Safaricom Daraja, which has the best developer sandbox experience. The skills you build, including initiating payments, handling callbacks, managing transaction states, and building a checkout flow, apply directly to any Tanzanian aggregator or direct telco API.

The adaptation from what you learn in the course to a Tanzanian aggregator is: change the API credentials, update the endpoint URLs, adjust the payload format. The architecture stays the same. That is the value of learning the pattern rather than memorizing one specific API's documentation.

For the full-stack skills to build the web application around the payment integration, the Full-Stack Software + AI Engineering course (KES 120,000 / ~TZS 2,400,000) covers React, Node.js, databases, and deployment.