Takeaway / delivery-only / POS and payments
The best POS for takeaway and delivery
Scored and compared prices dated
The short answer
Square is the faster, cheaper way to get a takeaway kitchen running, taking cards within the hour and charging nothing until you do. Toast is the stronger pick once volume is real and you want kitchen display, inventory and online ordering under one system rather than three separate logins.
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 | 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 |
What's different about buying this for takeaway / delivery-onlys
A takeaway kitchen never needs a floor plan, a course-firing sequence or a reservation diary, all things a lot of restaurant POS marketing assumes you want. What it does need is speed at order entry and a single point where phone orders, walk-ins and app orders all land as one queue rather than three.
Square covers this well at small scale: no upfront cost on the free plan, fast setup, and an app that runs on a phone or a basic tablet rather than dedicated hardware. It stops being the obvious pick once volume is high enough that a negotiated processing rate would beat the fixed 2.6% + 10¢, or once you want deeper kitchen and inventory tooling under one roof.
Toast is the stronger system at that point, with kitchen display, inventory and staff scheduling all part of the same ecosystem, at the cost of their hardware, their processing and a multi-year contract. For a takeaway kitchen running real volume across delivery, collection and phone orders, that consolidation is worth more than it is for a smaller site.
Questions people actually ask
- Do I need a full POS for a small collection-only shop?
- A card reader and a phone app can be enough at very small scale. A proper POS earns its keep once you need item-level sales data or more than one person taking orders at once.
- How should phone orders fit into the system?
- Look for a POS that lets staff key a phone order straight into the same queue as app and walk-in orders, rather than writing it down and entering it separately, which is where mistakes creep in during a rush.