Restaurant POS: full-service and QSR
Restaurant POS is the deepest-feature category in the cohort. Beyond payment processing, restaurants need course-pacing, modifiers, KDS routing, tip pooling, table mapping, allergen tracking, and often integration with reservation systems and delivery aggregators. Software depth matters more than absolute price.
The vendors that fit.
The reasoning.
Toast is the volume leader in US restaurants and the safest first choice on product depth, though you will have to read its prices on its own site because it does not serve them to us. Lightspeed Restaurant is the mid-market alternative with stronger multi-location features. SpotOn is the one here that publishes the software fee and the card rate on the same page, which makes it the easiest to cost honestly: its $55/station Essentials plan beats its free All-In plan above roughly $10,200 a month of card volume per station at a $25 ticket. TouchBistro is the full-service specialist for table-management depth, with both published prices stated as floors. Square works for quick service and hybrid operations but is thinner than Toast on full-service workflow.
Vendors that don't fit this vertical.
Clover for restaurant unless you have worked out both of its published payment paths over the full 36 months (see /lease-lockin/). Heartland Restaurant if pricing transparency matters, since it publishes nothing we can read. Shopify POS unless ecommerce is the primary channel.
The cost most buyers underestimate here.
Kitchen display screens. None of the vendors here publishes a per-screen price, and the entry-tier bundles mostly do not include one: Clover lists a Kitchen Display System as a separate device across its restaurant range, and Toast sells kitchen screens as their own line. A kitchen running two or three stations is buying two or three of them. Get each screen priced by name on the quote, and ask whether it carries its own software fee, because a per-device monthly charge on a screen is easy to miss in a bundle.