Multi-site operator / Online ordering
Online ordering across multiple sites
Scored and compared prices dated
The short answer
The multi-site version of this category is really a menu management problem: a price change or an item pulled from the menu needs to reach every location's ordering page at once, not get updated four times by four different people at four different speeds. Lightspeed and Toast both handle centralised menu propagation across sites; picking between them mostly comes down to which one you are already running for POS.
Reviewed by the editorial team · updated 11 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
Toast
The one built for restaurants only, with the lock-in that implies.
The trade-off
You are locked to Toast payment processing. There is no bringing your own processor.
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 | 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 |
| 02 | 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 | 3.2 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
What's different about buying this for multi-site operators
Online ordering for a single site is a straightforward purchase. Across several sites it becomes a consistency problem: if a menu item is 86'd at one location and someone forgets to pull it from the ordering page at another, that is a customer complaint and a refund waiting to happen, multiplied by however many sites are running slightly out of sync.
Lightspeed and Toast both let a menu change made centrally push out to every connected site's ordering page, which is the feature that actually matters here more than anything about the ordering page's design itself. Since both are also viable multi-site POS choices, the practical decision usually gets made once, at the POS level, rather than shopped separately for ordering.
Questions people actually ask
- How fast does a centralised menu change actually propagate?
- On both platforms it should reach every connected site close to immediately, though it is worth confirming in a demo rather than assuming, since the exact behaviour can depend on how each site's menu is configured locally.
- Can individual sites still run local specials?
- Typically yes, with the right permission settings, so a site manager can add a local special without needing head office to push a change across the whole group for one location.