Food truck / mobile / POS and payments
The best POS for a food truck
Scored and compared prices dated
The short answer
For most trucks the answer is Square, because it runs on a phone, costs nothing until you take money, and its offline mode will keep a queue moving when the signal goes. Toast is the better system if you are doing serious volume and can live with their hardware and a multi-year contract.
Reviewed by the editorial team · updated 10 August 2026
Step 3
What matters most to you?
Pick one or two. Everything below re-scores instantly, and we show you the maths.
Winner overall
Square for Restaurants
The default answer for anyone who wants to be selling this afternoon.
The trade-off
Offline mode takes the card without knowing if it will clear, so a declined payment surfaces after the customer has gone.
Why it won
- price
- ease of setup
- support
- volume
- integrations
Our scores, 1 to 5, defined on the methodology page.
Everything else, ranked the same way
| # | Product | From | Contract | Card rate | Score | Price checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Square for Restaurants The default answer for anyone who wants to be selling this afternoon. | Free, then $49 | none | 2.6% + 10¢ in person on the free plan, 2.5% + 15¢ on Plus | 4.2 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 02 | SpotOn The one people actually praise for picking up the phone. | Free, then $55 | 2-year minimum on the $0 plan, month to month on Essentials | 2.79% + 20¢ on the $0 plan, 2.45% + 15¢ on Essentials | 3.6 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 03 | Toast The one built for restaurants only, with the lock-in that implies. | Free, then $69 | multi-year is typical | 2.99% + 15¢ on the free Starter Kit, 2.49% + 15¢ on the $69 plan | 3.6 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 04 | TouchBistro iPad-based, runs on a local network, keeps working when the internet does not. | From $69 | annual | through TouchBistro Payments, required for new customers | 3.2 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 05 | Clover Sold through resellers, which is the single most important thing to know about it. | From $59.95 | 36 months is common when hardware is bundled | roughly 2.3% to 2.6% + 10¢ in person, varies by who sold it to you | 3 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
What's different about buying this for food truck / mobiles
Almost every "best restaurant POS" list is written for a building. A building has wifi, a power socket behind the till, and a router somebody else maintains. You have a 4G dongle, an inverter, and a lunch rush that starts the moment three office blocks empty out.
That changes the ranking completely. Offline behaviour stops being a footnote and becomes the first thing to check, and the way each system handles a dropped connection differs more than the marketing suggests. Square will take the card while offline but cannot confirm it will clear, so a declined payment shows up later, after the customer has walked off with their food. TouchBistro keeps running properly because the iPads talk to each other over a local network rather than to a data centre, which is architecturally the right answer, though it costs more and expects an annual contract. Toast holds up well on its own hardware but that hardware is the entire point of Toast, and it is not coming out of a service window at the end of the night without a plan.
The second thing that changes is what "cheap" means. Subscription price is the number vendors compete on, and it is the smaller number. At truck ticket sizes, the card processing rate is where the money actually goes: on $120,000 a year of card sales, the gap between 2.49% and 2.99% is around $600, which is most of a year of subscription on any plan here. So when you compare, add the two together or you will pick the wrong one.
Third, hardware is a liability rather than an asset in a truck. Anything bolted down has to survive being driven around, and anything you bought outright is money you cannot get back if the business shape changes. A system that runs on a phone and a card reader you can put in a drawer is worth a lot more than the spec sheet makes it look.
What almost never matters here, despite showing up in every comparison: table management, floor plans, course firing, reservation diaries. If a system is charging you for those, you are subsidising features for restaurants with rooms.
Questions people actually ask
- Do I need a POS at all, or can I just take cards on my phone?
- A card reader plus a phone app is a POS, and for a single-window truck doing a short menu it is often enough. You want a proper POS when you need item-level sales data, more than one person taking orders, or a kitchen ticket that is not shouted.
- What happens to card payments when I lose signal completely?
- It depends on the system. Square stores the transaction and processes it when you reconnect, accepting the risk that some will decline. TouchBistro and Toast keep the local system running so you can still ring up orders. None of them can authorise a card with no connection at all, so some risk is unavoidable.
- Is the free plan actually free?
- Square and Toast both have $0/month tiers and both charge you more per transaction for it. SpotOn's $0 plan comes with a two-year commitment. Free means "you pay on the way through" rather than "you do not pay".