Restaurant POS Comparison: Five Systems on What They Actually Publish

The single most useful sort in this category is not by feature. It is by transparency, because it tells you how much of your evaluation can be done before a sales call — and because the number that is most often withheld is the one that costs you the most.

**Publishes plan prices and processing rates: Square and Clover.** Square lists $0 Free, $49 Plus, and $149 Premium per location, with in-person processing at 2.6% + 15¢, 2.5% + 15¢, and 2.4% + 15¢ respectively, and online at 3.3% + 30¢ on Free or 2.9% + 30¢ on the paid plans. Clover lists restaurant bundles at $179, $239, and $354 per month on 36-month terms, or with upfront hardware of $1,799 to $4,447 plus $89.95 to $129.85 monthly, and publishes processing at 2.3% + 10¢ for tapped, swiped, or inserted cards and 3.5% + 10¢ for keyed entry.

**Publishes plan prices only: Lightspeed and TouchBistro.** Lightspeed lists Starter at $69, Essential at $189, and Premium at $399 per month, with an Enterprise tier by quote and kitchen display at $30 per screen per month — but no processing rate. TouchBistro lists Point of Sale at $69 and an Essentials Bundle at $119 per month, with payments and every other add-on routed through "Get a Quote".

**Publishes entry prices, no rate: Toast.** A $0/month Starter Kit with a hardware kit at no upfront cost, Point of Sale "starting at $69/month", and a custom Build Your Own tier. Card processing is described only as a "simple, flat rate", with no percentage given.

None of this means the quote-only vendors are more expensive. A negotiated rate can beat a published one, especially at volume, and quote-based pricing is normal in payments. It means the comparison work is asymmetric: with Square and Clover you can model a year of cost from a web page; with Toast, TouchBistro, and Lightspeed you cannot finish the comparison without three sales conversations. Plan your evaluation accordingly, and treat the processing rate as the number the whole quote turns on.

Restaurants routinely spend weeks comparing $69 against $149 and sign a processing rate they never modelled. The arithmetic is worth doing once, because it reorders the entire decision.

Take a restaurant doing $80,000 a month in card volume — a fairly ordinary independent. Every 0.1% of processing rate on that volume is roughly $80 a month, or about $960 a year. That single tenth of a percent is larger than the gap between Square's Free plan and its Plus plan, and it recurs every month regardless of which software tier you chose.

A half-point difference in rate on the same volume is around $400 a month, or $4,800 a year — more than the entire annual software cost of most plans on this page.

Three consequences follow.

**First, the plan that looks expensive can be the cheap one.** Square's Premium plan costs $100 a month more than Plus but drops the in-person rate from 2.5% to 2.4%. At $100,000 of monthly in-person card volume, that 0.1% is $100 — the plan pays for itself and the extra capability is free. Below that volume it does not. The crossover is arithmetic, not opinion, and you can calculate yours in five minutes.

**Second, "free" software is not free.** Square's $0 plan carries the highest processing rate of its three tiers, and its online rate of 3.3% + 30¢ is well above the 2.9% + 30¢ on the paid plans. For a restaurant with significant delivery or pickup volume, the free tier is the most expensive option on the menu.

**Third, an unpublished rate is an unfinished comparison.** For Toast, TouchBistro, and Lightspeed the rate is the missing variable, and no amount of feature comparison substitutes for it. Ask for it in writing, for in-person, online, and keyed transactions, and ask whether it is fixed for the term.

POS vendors change plans, hardware bundles, and processing rates regularly, and what you actually pay varies by location count, terminal count, contract term, and negotiation. Confirm current pricing and processing rates directly with the vendor in writing before signing rather than relying on any third-party summary, including this one.

Once cost is modelled, fit comes down to how your restaurant actually operates. These five sort cleanly.

**Full-service with a real kitchen line and multiple locations.** Toast is the deepest option — coursing, seat-level ordering, complex modifier trees, kitchen routing, and multi-location menu governance are native, and its hardware is built for the environment. Lightspeed is the alternative if inventory precision and recipe costing matter more to you than floor-level workflow.

**Counter service, cafés, bars, food trucks.** Square is usually the answer. High throughput, simple menus, a free tier to start on, published costs, and hardware that is easy to add or remove.

**A restaurant that is also a shop.** Bakeries with retail shelves, breweries with merchandise, coffee roasters selling beans online — Square handles food and retail in one account, which a restaurant-only system does not.

**Small to mid-size full service on a budget.** TouchBistro at $69/month gives restaurant-specific workflows on iPad hardware, which keeps the front-of-house cost down. Just price the add-ons, because most capability beyond the core POS is quoted separately.

**Buying through your bank.** Clover is distributed heavily through banks and merchant-services providers, and if your existing banking relationship is offering it, the bundle pricing and published processing rates give you something concrete to hold the reseller to. Verify the rate you are offered matches the published one, and be clear-eyed about the 36-month term.

**Inventory- and margin-focused groups.** Lightspeed's reporting and cost-control depth is the argument, at a steeper price ladder.

One closing note that applies to all five. Worth being explicit about when comparing any of these: a POS manages transactions. It takes the order, fires it to the kitchen, splits the check, and settles the card. None of them create demand. A restaurant whose real problem is empty tables on a Tuesday will not fix it by switching POS, and that is the most common mis-diagnosis in this category. Choosing well here saves money and removes friction from service, both of which are worth doing. But if the underlying problem is that not enough people in your city know you exist or find you when they search, no entry on this page addresses it — that is a visibility problem, and it is the subject of our restaurant marketing benchmarks.