The Best POS System – The Market’s Top 10 Compared for 2023

The best POS system is a must-have for smooth in-person payments. It will do everything from taking orders, tracking inventory, table management, and collecting payments. Modern POS systems also help businesses with curated loyalty programs, tracking employee performance, and generating meaningful sales and employee reports so businesses can make quick, informed decisions.

With so many POS systems available, singling one out for your needs can be a daunting task. That’s why we’ve found and reviewed the 10 best POS systems on the market based on criteria like pricing, transaction fees, features, integrations, and customer support. Stick around to learn why platforms like Square, TouchBistro, and Toast are among the best in the business.

Ranking the Top 10 Best Point of Sale Systems

Let’s take a quick sneak peek into what our top 10 best POS software options have to offer your business to help you choose the perfect one for you.

1. Square — Overall, the best POS system, with a feature-rich free plan. It’s also super secure, with features like dispute management and payment fraud protection.
2. TouchBistro — The best POS system for restaurants, with great table management features. It not only helps you take reservations but also gives you insight into the time and money a group will spend at your table.
3. Toast — Highly recommended for its complete offline mode, where you can process payments, take new orders, and print receipts without WiFi.
4. Lavu — Perfect for creating a dual pricing program, allowing you to offer discounts to people who pay in cash and charge slightly more for card payers to make up for the processing fee.
5. Clover — The best-in-class shift management tool. Measure your employees’ performance, manage permissions, and simplify tip management all in one place.
6. Vend — Helps you build long-term relationships with your customers by allowing you to take payments in installments and hold on to their purchases until they’re ready to pick them up.
7. Shopify — The best mobile POS system with its POS GO solution. It’s highly recommended if you’re starting your own online business, as every plan comes with a free online store.
8. Lightspeed — A retail-focused POS system best known for its powerful reporting tool. Your data will be represented through charts, and the tips you get on what to do next are a huge plus.
9. Epos — A great POS system for retail thanks to its custom barcodes for fast processing. Unlike other POS systems, it charges a flat transaction rate of just 1.7%.
10. Revel Systems — Known for its concierge services, where an expert will set up the entire POS system for you. It also offers handy Kitchen and Customer Display Systems.

Why You Nееd POS Softwarе

Point of Sale (POS) software offers numerous benefits for businesses, ranging from improved customer experience to revenue growth and streamlined operations. Here are the key advantages:

• Improves Customer Experience: POS systems enable faster and more efficient transactions, reducing wait times for customers. This improves overall customer satisfaction and encourages repeat business.
• Engages Customers: Many modern POS systems double up as robust CRM tools to help businesses collect and analyze customer data. This information can be used to personalize promotions and recommendations, fostering customer loyalty.
• Offers Ecommerce Capabilities: Some POS software integrates with online sales platforms, allowing businesses to manage their physical and online stores from a single system. This seamless integration enhances the omnichannel shopping experience.
• Allows for Multiple Payment Types: POS software accepts various payment methods, including credit cards, digital wallets, and mobile payments. This flexibility accommodates customer preferences and increases the chances of completing a sale.
• Boosts Revenue: POS systems can optimize pricing strategies, track inventory levels, and suggest upsells or cross-sells to customers, increasing revenue and profitability. By streamlining the sales process, POS software can boost average transaction values and overall revenue.
• Provides Real-Time Data: POS systems provide real-time insights into sales, inventory levels, and customer behavior. This data helps businesses make informed decisions about pricing, restocking, and marketing strategies.
• Automates Tasks and Generates Accurate Reports: POS software automates routine tasks like inventory management and order processing, reducing the risk of human error. It also generates detailed and accurate reports, helping businesses track performance, identify trends, and plan for the future.

Key Features You’ll Find With the Best POS Systems

The best POS systems offer many features to help businesses streamline their operations and enhance customer service. Here are some key features commonly found in top-notch POS systems:

Sales Reporting

The best POS systems offer robust sales reporting capabilities, providing detailed insights into daily, weekly, and monthly sales trends. These reports help businesses analyze performance, track best-selling products, and make data-driven decisions to optimize their offerings.

Table Management

For businesses in the restaurant and hospitality industry, table management features are crucial. The top POS systems enable efficient table assignments, order tracking, and bill splitting, improving the overall dining experience for customers and streamlining operations for staff.

Inventory Management

Effective inventory management is essential for retail businesses. The best POS systems include features for tracking inventory levels, managing stock replenishment, setting reorder levels, and monitoring product variations.

This ensures that businesses can maintain optimal stock levels and reduce instances of understocking or overstocking.

Customer Orders and Supplier Orders Management

Many POS systems facilitate the management of both customer orders and supplier orders. Businesses can efficiently process customer orders, track order statuses, and manage payments. They can simultaneously create and manage supplier orders, ensuring a steady supply of products and materials.

Integrated Supplier Purchasing

Integrated supplier purchasing is a feature that allows businesses to place orders with suppliers directly through the POS system. This streamlines the procurement process, reduces manual data entry, and helps maintain accurate supplier records.

Consistent and Customizable Reports

Top-notch POS systems offer a wide range of consistent and customizable reports. Users can generate reports for various purposes, such as sales analysis, inventory valuation, employee performance, and more. Customization options allow businesses to tailor reports to their specific needs.

Multi-Store Management

For businesses with multiple locations, multi-store management capabilities are essential. The best POS systems enable centralized inventory control, sales, and reporting across all stores. This ensures uniformity in operations and allows for efficient management and expansion.

Employee Management

The best POS systems offer employee management features that enable businesses to track staff performance, set user permissions, and manage access levels. This includes clock-in/clock-out functionality, sales commission tracking, and employee scheduling, helping improve workforce efficiency and accountability.

Returns, Store Credit, and Refunds

Effective POS systems provide a streamlined process for handling returns and refunds, allowing businesses to manage customer returns and seamlessly issue refunds and store credits. This feature ensures a positive customer experience while maintaining accurate records of transactions.

Low-Stock Notifications and Auto-Order Suggestions

To maintain inventory levels, the best POS systems offer low-stock notifications and auto-order suggestions. When inventory reaches a specified threshold, the system can automatically generate purchase orders and alerts for reordering.

This helps businesses avoid lost sales due to insufficient stock and minimizes excess inventory costs.

The Market’s Top POS Solutions Compared

Here’s a table highlighting the key differences between all of our top picks so you can quickly choose the best POS system, depending on what matters the most to you.

The Best POS Systems Reviewed

Eager to find the right POS system for your business? Read our POS system reviews, where we’ll discuss in detail each of our top picks, including their best features, pros, cons, and pricing.

1. Square — Overall, the Best POS System with a Free Plan

Square POS is one of the best POS for small businesses owing to its free plan – there are no hidden charges or setup fees. The only thing you need to pay is the processing charges on each transaction. Other plans that are tailor-made for particular industries come with both free and paid plans.

Square POS’s retail plan is one of our favorites. Not only does it have a free plan, but it also offers a free online store and unlimited item listings with the free version. If you’re just starting your business, you won’t have to worry about finding a good website builder anymore.

It also has a dedicated POS system for restaurants with tons of exciting features. Order-Ready Text, for example, allows you to collect your guest’s phone number so you can send them an automated order-ready text once their food is ready.

You can use this feature for online deliveries or in setups where the customer has to collect their food.

Square is also very commited to its customer’s online safety. Its world-class account takeover protection feature protects you from hackers.

It restricts your access to your account if the Square team notices any unusual activity. They’ll then send you an email to verify your profile before restoring your access. For additional protection, you can turn on two-factor authentication.

Finance management is made easier with Square Banking. Opening a new account is easy because there isn’t any opening deposit, minimum deposit, or monthly account fee.

You’ll also get your Square Debit Card and a special savings folder where you can put money in for unforeseen expenses. Since you’ll be using Square POS with Square banking, every sale you make will be instantly reflected in your Square account.

2. TouchBistro — Best POS System Software for Restaurants

TouchBistro’s POS solution is focused on restaurants and eateries. Its features are currently optimized for 13 types of food businesses, from fine dining to bakeries and food trucks.

Its handheld POS systems make tableside ordering a breeze. Sure, almost every restaurant POS platform supports table management, but TouchBistro is focused on the details.

For instance, once you seat a customer at a table, it’ll give you information on their arrival time, the total time they spent at the table, and the total bill as and when they place orders. You can use this information to roll out instructions to your servers on how to handle them.

With TouchBistro’s comprehensive Menu management, you’ll also be able to manage multiple menus at once – and you can break it down into a breakfast, lunch, or dinner menu rather than just a food and drinks menu.

You can make changes to these menus remotely at any time. Furthermore, with the mobile POS devices, your customers can order directly from their table with no server required.

TouchBistro’s payment processing service is equally seamless. It comes with its own native payment processing solution –TouchBistro Payments. If you wish to use it for your business, it’ll be integrated with your POS system so the bill amount is automatically synced between devices.

You’ll benefit in two ways – it saves you the hassle of manually entering the numbers, plus there will be fewer chances of typing errors. This sort of automated processing makes TouchBistro the best POS system for bars with heavy footfall.

Plus, you get access to 50 pre-made reports – from factors driving sales to staff performance. You can monitor a lot of metrics with these analytics and make sound decisions in no time.

3. Toast — Known for its Offline POS Functions

Toast goes a step above TouchBistro and provides a complete offline mode. Under this, you can not only process payments but also accept orders and print tickets or receipts. Once the internet connection is back on, all this new information is synced with your existing databases.

The platform also offers a handy free plan for single-location restaurants and food trucks, offering features like order, table, and menu management on a single device and other basic POS solutions.

Takeout is a huge part of the restaurant business. Toast offers a commission-free Toast TakeOut app that lets your customers order from anywhere. The best part? You don’t have to pay any third-party commissions while maximizing off-premise sales.

Toast takes payment collections a notch higher. All transactions are secured with Toast’s real-time payment fraud monitoring feature. Payment fraud happens when a hacker steals someone’s online banking credentials and uses them to shop from you.

The bigger problem is that if the transaction is proven to be illegitimate, the payment will be reversed, and you’ll be paid nothing for your product/service.

To prevent fraud, Toast hardware comes equipped with EMV or NFC technology, which identifies suspicious transactions and blocks them in real time.

From the moment a transaction is initiated to the final step when the receipt is printed out, everything happens inside an encrypted tunnel so you and your customers won’t have to worry about identity theft when processing via Toast.

If your restaurant is ever hired to cater for an event, you’ll be happy to know that Toast also offers an invoicing tool built right into its POS system. You can monitor your event expenses and send out digital invoices, all from one place.

It also comes with a built-in calendar where you can mark all your upcoming events. You can also accept tips on these invoices and distribute them evenly among your employees through Toast Payroll, which is available as an add-on.

4. Lavu — Set a Dual Pricing System for Online and Offline Transactions

Lavu is the ideal POS system for those restaurants that want to maintain separate pricing for their online and offline transactions. This feature is called Dual Pricing. As the name suggests, when you enter an order number in your system, two prices are generated – one for cash payment and another for online payment.

This is usually done because cash payments are free, whereas card payments carry a processing fee. You can mark up prices for card transactions to accommodate processing fees and, at the same time, offer a lower price to customers paying in cash. This is just one way Lavu helps you scale your business.

Another way is the Best Seller report – a very handy tool for restaurants and food businesses to identify the best-selling products from their menu. Once you open the report, you’ll find a color-coded bar graph representing the sales of each item.

Below that, you’ll find more details in a table view with the item’s name, category, price, and much more.

Lavu is really much more than a payment processing platform. Another one of our favorite features is MenuDrive Ordering. Just like Toast, it’s a platform where you can build your own online delivery site so that you don’t have to share profits with DoorDash and Uber Eats anymore.

What’s more? Lavu offers 80+ integrations with restaurant-specific third-party apps to make business simple for you. For example, you can integrate with Up’ngo to simplify QR code management or with apps like DigitalPour, BevSpot, Bar-i, and more for inventory management.

5. Clover — Best POS System for Small Restaurants, with Robust Shift Management

Clover, unlike the previous three tools, is not exclusively designed for restaurants. It also caters to professional services, home and personal services, and retail.

The first thing that caught our eye was its Shift Management tool. The Time Clock helps you check the entire team’s availability in one place so you can easily schedule shifts. Plus, right before their shift, you can send out automated shift reminders and reduce the number of no-shows and late arrivals.

Plus, you can also record the tips that come with each bill in one place and divide it equally among your servers based on their shift duration at the end of the day. This will ensure that everyone gets equally rewarded and there are no grievances within the team.

You’ll also find the standard bill splitting to handle complicated food orders. But what adds an extra touch to this standard feature is its dashboard. You can split it by “Custom Amount” or by “Item.” Clover will do all the calculations – no bill’s too complicated for Clover.

If you’re selling items by weight, you’ll definitely appreciate Scale Integration. All that you have to do is take a digital weight machine and connect it with your Clover POS.

So each time you’re selling an item by weight, say groceries, you can put the order on the scale to weight. Then, since it’s connected, your Clover POS will automatically capture the weight, calculate the final amount, and prepare the bill automatically.

Clover also has a long-term equipment protection feature. As long as your POS plan is active, Clover will offer full cover for your equipment against accident, theft, or any other kind of loss. Most other platforms, like Shopify, only offer a one-year warranty, so Clover’s protection plan is far better.

6. Vend — Offers Useful Features like Parked Sales and Layaway

Vend is the perfect POS system for businesses that sell expensive items and want to build long-term relationships with their customers, thanks to its Layaways feature. Using this, you can book a sale without receiving the entire payment.

You can generate a customer receipt after receiving just a deposit amount of your choice or even without it. It’ll only take one click to access their payment history and check their outstanding payments.

Vend also helps you save products for your customers through its Parked Sales feature. It lets you ring up the customer as usual and then hold onto their purchase until they are ready to take it. They might need to grab more items or get their wallet from the car.

Whatever the case is, Vend will ensure you cannot ring up the same item again, preventing you from selling that parked item to someone else.

With its Quick Keys feature, you can speed up routine transactions. These will show up on your selling screen in colored tiles. For example, if you run a cafe, you could add your most commonly ordered drinks to the quick keys.

Then, the next time someone has a similar order, you don’t have to go through the entire process of adding the item. Just click on the colored tile, and it’ll enter all the item details into the bill.

If you prefer dealing in cash, you’ll definitely appreciate Vend’s cash management feature. It records every small cash transaction throughout the day, helping you reduce the chances of thefts and discrepancies. Plus, at the end of each day, you can also print our closure reports highlighting your total sales of the day.

If you have more than one employee handling the register, consider creating separate user accounts for them. This way, you can increase their individual accountability and ensure that the blame for one’s mistake doesn’t fall on another.

7. Shopify — Cheap POS System Perfect for Building Online Stores

Shopify is one of the cheapest POS systems on our list, with a focus on online businesses. And that’s why, on every plan you choose, you also get a free sample or custom online store where you can start a new business from scratch. This saves you the trouble of managing a separate platform for your store.

What makes these websites even better is that you can sell from multiple channels by connecting your social media platforms to them. All purchases made through these linked accounts will be handled by the same POS you use for your main site – and no additional equipment is required.

There are three main shopping modes that Shopify supports – buy online and then pick up from the store, buy in-store and then ship elsewhere, or shop in-store products online. The first two methods are pretty simple – no matter how they shop from you, their transactions can be handled through the same central POS.

The third option is a little interesting. Under this, you can email virtual carts to your customers containing store products. It’s ideal for those buyers who want to discover store-exclusive items online.

One main POS system can process purchases and handle inventory stocking, returns, refunds, pickups, and deliveries for both offline and online channels.

The hardware gives you the flexibility to design the store of your dreams. You can either choose a minimalist look with its portable iPads with stands or create a more professional look with the whole set, including a receipt printer, a shop cash drawer, and a card reader along with the iPad.

The devices are easy to use, and you’ll get multiple sizes to choose from, both for the iPad and the stand.

If you don’t like iPads, you can choose Shopify POS GO – a mobile-like portable POS device with a built-in card reader. Its POS systems also come with a one-year guarantee, which can be extended for years if needed – another reason to choose Shopify.

8. Lightspeed — Popular Point-of-Sale Software with a Focus On Robust Reporting

Lightspeed is another POS system that’s heavily focused on retail businesses and is best known for its powerful reporting tool that can give you better insight into your business. For example, its Customer reports help you know your customers inside out so that you can run customized marketing campaigns.

These reports include their purchase history along with tags about the size, gender, and age of the person so that you know who you’re targeting.

Similarly, its Revenue analytics help you identify your top revenue stream along with a comprehensive view of all your store locations or sites at one glance.

LightSpeed can create a variety of reports featuring illustrative graphs. To help you interpret them, you’ll find two sections below each chart. One is “Things To Know,” covering what the graph tells you about your performance, and the other is “Things To Do,” on what your next course of action should be.

It also gives you direct access to B2B Catalogues, where you’ll find thousands of trending products to be synced directly into your POS system. You can use it to showcase all your best products in one place, meet customer expectations, and reduce the pressure of manually managing your inventory.

If you need more expert assistance understanding its POS service, we recommend the Enterprise plan since it comes with personalized consulting service. You’ll be in touch with Lightspeed experts who’ll help you choose the right plan.

All the other plans also come with personal onboarding assistance, 24/7 support, and a dedicated customer success manager who’ll ensure you make the right moves. In short, a whole team from Lightspeed will have your back.

9. EPOS — Recommended Payment POS System for Retail Businesses, with Flat Transaction Fees

Epos serves two major market segments – retail and hospitality. Only a few POS systems can handle as many business types as EPOS. Their POS system is individually optimized to handle the unique needs of businesses like gift shops, barber shops, pharmacies, pet stores, car wash, and so on.

For instance, it has the best order management features on the list. It lets you take custom orders by offering multiple-choice menu items. In simple terms, suppose you’re selling burgers. This multiple-choice menu will let you quickly add fries, nuggets, or coke as an add-on to the main order and calculate the total bill accordingly.

If your customer has any dietary restrictions, your servers can easily add notes for the kitchen in the same ordering interface.

Epos’s retail POS system is just as good. You can create your own custom barcodes to speed up processing, and its automated sales reports will tell you which are your best or worst-performing products.

Plus, if you’re selling age-sensitive items such as liquor, you can use Epos’s built-in age verification tool to remain compliant.

To keep payments simple, Epos Now maintains a single cheap, flat rate of 1.7% for every type of card. Usually, when you process card payments, you have to pay a certain percentage of the transaction fee. This percentage varies depending on the type of card you use and can go as high as 3.15% for credit cards.

Epos discards this variable pricing system and imposes a uniform processing fee on every transaction. The benefit of using this feature is you’ll save a few extra bucks and, more importantly, know exactly how much you will make from each sale.

10. Revel Systems — Great for Businesses Outsourcing POS Terminal and System Setup

Revel System’s POS solution is ideal for businesses looking to outsource the job. You’ll still be the one processing the payments at the store, but under Revel Concierge Services, you’ll be connected with industry experts who will set up and maintain the POS in a way that best serves your business.

Simply put, that expert will set up the device, change the settings as per your needs, enter business information, enable payment processing, and make it ready for you to use. It’s worth noting that you’ll have to separately apply for this feature through a form on Revel Systems’s website.

If you are running a bigger restaurant with a kitchen at the back, we definitely recommend trying out Revel’s Kitchen Display System. Instead of sending paper tickets for new orders, you can simply connect your POS system with the Kitchen Display. It’ll automatically notify your chefs at the back with all the new orders.

You can use this display integration to calculate your chef’s current capacity and the average order processing time so the next time a customer walks in, you can give accurate information about the wait time.

To further impress your customers, you can also add a Customer Display System at every table where they can check their order progress in real-time. You can also engage with them through this screen, getting them to sign up for your Loyalty Program or upgrade their order with add-ons.

One feature that caught our attention is conversational ordering. You might have already experienced this in Starbucks. Once you’re at the register, you start with the drink you want, followed by the drink size, milk type, and extra add-ons.

The benefit of having conversational ordering for your business is you can automate the flow so that these questions automatically pop up one after the other, and your team can seamlessly take complicated orders.

Kеy Factors to Considеr Whеn Choosing POS Softwarе

With hundreds of POS options on the market, selecting the best one isn’t easy. Here are some of the key factors to consider when choosing POS software, whether you want the best POS system for a food truck or the best small business POS system overall:

Business Type

By choosing POS software that fits your business type, you can ensure it caters to industry-specific functions and features. For instance, a restaurant may require table management, menu customization, and kitchen order printing capabilities, while a retail store may prioritize inventory tracking and barcode scanning.

Integrations 

Integrations allow your POS system to communicate with the best accounting software, ecommerce platforms, inventory management systems, and more. This connectivity streamlines operations by eliminating manual data entry, reducing errors, and providing updates across functions.

It also enables you to leverage the full potential of your existing tech stack and adapt to future changes, making your business more efficient, competitive, and better prepared to meet evolving customer expectations.

Ease of Use

A user-friendly POS system reduces the learning curve for your staff, allowing them to quickly adapt to the software and serve customers more effectively.

This not only enhances the overall customer experience but also minimizes errors at the checkout, ensuring accurate transactions. Additionally, an intuitive interface means that tasks like adding products, processing sales, and generating reports become more accessible and less time-consuming.

Pricing 

POS systems have various pricing models, including being subscription-based, one-time purchases, or transaction-based. Understanding and evaluating these pricing structures in the context of your business’s financial resources is essential.

Additionally, you should consider any hidden costs, such as hardware requirements, payment processing fees, and ongoing support or maintenance expenses. Clear and flexible pricing structures ensure you’re in control of your investment and can adapt your POS system to your evolving business needs without financial constraints.

Features 

Each business has unique needs, whether robust inventory management for a retail store, table management for a restaurant, or invoicing capabilities for service-based companies.

By carefully evaluating and prioritizing features, you can choose a POS system that meets your requirements and accommodates future growth and evolving industry trends.

Features like sales reporting, inventory management, and customizable reports enable you to streamline operations, make data-driven decisions, and provide exceptional customer service.

Compliance and Security 

Additionally, robust security features are essential to protect against data breaches and unauthorized access.

By choosing a POS software that prioritizes compliance and security, you minimize the risk of potential breaches and build trust with your customers, who expect their payment and personal information to be handled with the utmost care.

Customer Support 

In the dynamic retail and hospitality environments, issues or downtime with your POS system can result in lost sales, frustrated customers, and decreased productivity. Robust customer support ensures you can access timely assistance when problems arise, minimizing disruptions and potential revenue losses.

As your business grows and evolves, you may need help with system upgrades, training, and customization. A responsive and knowledgeable support team can provide the guidance and solutions needed to maximize the value of your POS software, contributing to smoother and more successful business operations.

Customization 

No two businesses are identical, and a one-size-fits-all approach may not address your specific requirements. Customization enables you to adapt the software to match your workflow, in retail, hospitality, and other industries.

It allows you to seamlessly add or remove features, modify user interfaces, and integrate with other software systems. This flexibility ensures that your POS software aligns perfectly with your business operations, leading to increased efficiency, improved customer service, and the ability to stay competitive in your industry.

Device Compatibility 

This adaptability enables you to serve customers seamlessly, whether in-store, online, or on-the-go, enhancing their overall experience. Additionally, device compatibility ensures that your POS software can scale and evolve with your business, accommodating new technologies and customer preferences.

Business Scalability 

As you expand, so do your requirements for inventory management, sales reporting, and customer engagement. A scalable POS system can seamlessly adapt to a growing range of products, customers, and transactions without needing an overhaul or expensive system migration.

This ensures you can continue to provide efficient and high-quality service to your customers while maintaining a streamlined and cost-effective operation. A forward-thinking approach helps future-proof your infrastructure and ensures your POS system continues to support your success in the long run.

More Financial Guides and Resources

If you’re interested in additional information on financial tools for your business, check out our other resources and materials:

• Best Accounting Software
• Best Accounting Software for Small Business
• Best Construction Accounting Software
• Best Restaurant Accounting Software
• Best Accounting Software for the UK
• Freshbooks Review – Is it the Best Accounting Tool?

Conclusion – What is the Best POS System to Use in 2023?

Whether you’re looking for a comprehensive POS system for your restaurant or one to manage your online retail store, you’ll find something on our list.

However, we rate Square as the best POS system, no matter your specific needs. Its robust free plan offers everything a new business can ask for, such as inventory management, a free online store and website builder, integrated payments, and detailed sales reports, among other features.

It also has tons of paid business tools for payroll and marketing, transforming it from a POS system into a central business management hub. Get started with its free plan today.

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