Quick service / counter / Online ordering
Online ordering for counter service
Scored and compared prices dated
The short answer
Pick the ordering add-on sold by whoever runs your POS first, because the deciding factor is whether an online order lands on the same kitchen screen as a counter order rather than a second tablet nobody is watching. Otter is worth a specific look if third-party delivery apps are a meaningful share of volume and juggling four tablets has become the actual problem.
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
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 | Otter Pulls DoorDash, Uber Eats and the rest onto one screen, sold as a hardware bundle rather than a subscription. | From $198 | not published, sales-quoted | separate, plus a per-order transaction fee on every bundle | 3.4 | Pricing checked 11 Aug 2026 |
| 05 | 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 |
| 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 | 3 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
What's different about buying this for quick service / counters
Counter service lives on throughput, and that does not stop being true just because the order came from a phone instead of the till. The single biggest failure mode is an online order arriving on a separate tablet that sits unwatched during a rush, so it gets missed or fired late while the counter staff are heads-down on the line in front of them.
Square, Toast, Clover, SpotOn and Lightspeed all sell ordering as a module against their own POS, and in every case the ticket reaches the kitchen the same way a counter order does when you buy it from the same vendor. That single-screen behaviour is worth more than any feature comparison between the ordering pages themselves, which all do roughly the same job for the customer.
Otter takes a different angle: instead of just your own ordering page, it pulls DoorDash, Uber Eats and similar into one screen alongside your own orders, which solves the exact tablet-pile-up problem some counters run into once they are on three or four delivery apps at once. It is sold as a hardware bundle from $198/month plus a per-order fee rather than a simple subscription, so it only pays for itself once delivery volume is real.
Questions people actually ask
- Does online ordering need its own printer at the counter?
- Not if it is bought from the same vendor as the POS; the order should route to the same kitchen printer or screen. A separate ordering platform bolted on afterwards is where a second printer tends to appear.
- Is it worth being on third-party delivery apps as well as my own page?
- For extra reach, often yes; for margin, the roughly 30% commission is steep. Many counters run both and treat the marketplace apps as paid discovery rather than a primary channel.