The right restaurant POS depends on how food leaves your kitchen.

Before the comparison, the conflict. I resell payment equipment: I sell Clover, Square, Valor, PAX and Dejavoo, and I earn money when a restaurant buys one. I do not sell Toast and I earn nothing if you choose it. Toast is here anyway, because leaving it out of an honest restaurant roundup would be dishonest.

The second rule is that pricing moves. Processor and POS pricing changes, so treat every figure here as a snapshot and confirm current rates with the provider before you commit. Square raised its online rate in January 2026. Valor, PAX and Toast carry no prices on this page on purpose: those are quoted by a reseller or the vendor, and a plausible invented number is worse than an empty space.

This is the long version: how service model, kitchen workflow, tips and ordering should drive the decision. If you just need the equipment shortlist, my restaurant pick-list is linked below.

Counter service lives or dies on how many taps it takes to ring a customized order at eleven-forty on a Friday. What matters is one fast screen, modifiers no more than two taps deep, and a customer-facing display that handles the tip prompt without a conversation. Square is excellent here, and Clover's counter-service plan is built for it. Table maps and coursing are software you pay for monthly and never open.

Full service inverts the priorities. The check is open an hour, moves between staff, splits four ways, and a server should not be walking to a terminal to fire a course. That makes handhelds the deciding feature rather than a nice extra, alongside seat-level ordering and a manager screen that can void and comp. Clover's table-service plan and Toast both do this properly.

A truck or a pop-up is a different animal. The constraints are power, signal and the fact that it all folds up at closing, so a Valor or PAX smart terminal on battery over cellular, or a Square reader on a phone, beats a station that needs a power strip. There is no kitchen to route to, so kitchen software is paying for a problem the layout already solved.

Bars look like counter service and behave like neither: what matters is opening a tab against a card in seconds, re-firing the last round, and a tip flow that never makes a bartender reprint mid-rush.

Choosing between a kitchen display and printers is a question about your line, not a technology preference. A display earns its place when tickets route to more than one station, when you want timers on how long an order has been up, and when you want a bump instead of a spike of paper nobody can reconstruct after a complaint.

If you stay on paper, the detail nobody mentions at the demo is which printer goes where. Thermal printers are the fast, quiet ones you want at the counter, but thermal paper is heat-sensitive by design, so steam, grease and the heat over a line will darken, curl or fade a ticket. Impact printers — slower, with a ribbon, usually two-ply — belong on the hot line, because heat does not erase them.

Whatever you choose, insist on one flow. Ask any vendor where an online order appears: in the same queue as the counter orders, in the order it arrived — or on a separate tablet somebody has to remember to watch. That tablet is how a delivery order sits untouched for twenty minutes.

The card rate is not the biggest number on a restaurant's bill. Third-party delivery marketplaces take a commission commonly quoted in the 15% to 30% range depending on plan tier, higher once promotions are counted. That can be worth it for genuinely new customers. It is a leak on the regular who would order direct if there were somewhere to do it.

So compare what each system gives you for direct ordering. Ask whether online orders run on your own processing at your own rate, whether the customer's details land in your list or the vendor's, and what an order costs through the system's own channel.

Tips are where restaurant systems quietly differ. Counter service wants the prompt on a customer-facing screen at payment. Full service needs tip adjustment after the card is authorized, because the number is written on a slip after the card has run. If you pool, ask whether the system distributes by role and hours and produces a report payroll can use. Tip credit and pooling rules vary by state, so settle those with your accountant.