Square for Restaurants scores highest for full-service restaurants when someone answers at 9pm on a Saturday is the thing you care about most. The default answer for anyone who wants to be selling this afternoon.
This page is the best support cut of our full pos and payments comparison for full-service restaurants. Same data, weighted differently. Change the weighting below and it re-scores in front of you.
Step 3
Pick one or two. Everything below re-scores instantly, and we show you the maths.
Winner on best support
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.
| # | 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 | 0 | 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 | 0 | 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 | 0 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 04 | Lightspeed Restaurant Strong reporting and stock control, priced for somewhere above the small independent. | From $69 | month to month available | 2.6% + 10¢ on Starter, negotiable on higher tiers | 0 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 05 | 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 | 0 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 06 | 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 | 0 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
A dining room POS is really two jobs wearing one badge: it has to run the floor, tables, courses, splits, tabs held open through a three-hour dinner, and it has to talk cleanly to a kitchen that is firing dishes in sequence rather than all at once. Most comparison lists score POS systems on generic features and miss that seam entirely, which is where full-service operators actually lose time.
Toast built the deepest version of that link: table management, kitchen display and course firing all read from the same order, and the KDS module talks to it natively rather than through a workaround. The cost of that depth is real, though. The advertised $69/month plan is not what a full-service site pays; once you add the modules a dining room actually wants, the bill lands closer to $200 to $400 a month, on their hardware, on their processing, on a multi-year contract.
TouchBistro takes a different bet: the iPads run a local network rather than depending on a data centre, so an internet outage during a Friday dinner service does not take the till down with it. That architecture is worth more than most buyers realise until the night it matters. It comes at $69/month for the POS bundle, annual contract, and KDS and inventory are separate add-ons rather than included.