Takeaway / delivery-only / Kitchen display
Kitchen display for a takeaway kitchen
Scored and compared prices dated
The short answer
The job here is consolidation, not course timing: phone orders, app orders and delivery orders all need to land on one screen in one format, or the kitchen ends up watching three different queues at once. Toast's KDS does this natively for anything routed through Toast, at around $25 a month on top of the core plan.
Reviewed by the editorial team · updated 11 August 2026
Scorecard
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.
What's different about buying this for takeaway / delivery-onlys
A takeaway kitchen with no floor to manage has a simpler timing problem than a dining room but a harder consolidation one: orders arrive from several directions at once, and if each channel shows up on its own screen or printer, the kitchen is doing the aggregation work a system should be doing instead.
Toast's KDS pulls orders from every channel running through Toast, phone, app, delivery, onto one screen with consistent formatting, which is the actual value here rather than the bump-bar speed a counter cares about. It only covers channels actually running through Toast, so a delivery app sitting outside that ecosystem still needs its own screen unless you are also running an aggregator like Otter.
Questions people actually ask
- Does a KDS replace the need for an aggregator like Otter?
- Partially. A KDS consolidates orders that are already flowing through your POS; an aggregator like Otter also pulls in orders from delivery apps that never touch your POS at all. Many takeaway kitchens running several delivery apps need both.
- Is paper still worth keeping as a backup?
- Most kitchens keep a printer as a fallback, since a screen going down mid-rush with orders arriving from four directions is worse than the paper you were trying to remove.