12 ranked
Software you run the business on that also takes the payments. You are buying the system first; the processing comes attached, and leaving usually means replacing both.
Ranked by grade, then by average category score. Equal grades share a position — where our evidence does not separate two providers, neither does this list.
Square offers simple, transparent payment processing ideal for small businesses. Flat-rate pricing, no monthly fees, and excellent software make it a top choice — but account holds and limited support are key concerns.
Lightspeed Commerce is a global cloud-based POS and commerce platform that provides retail, restaurant, and ecommerce businesses with integrated payments, inventory management, analytics, and omnichannel selling tools.
Clover is a widely used, all-in-one POS platform (hardware + software + app marketplace) favored by small and medium retailers and restaurants and backed by Fiserv, offering broad functionality but with real-world variability in support and reseller pricing.
Toast POS is the leading all-in-one cloud-based restaurant management platform, purpose-built for the food service industry with deep features for ordering, payments, payroll, and analytics, but comes with restrictive multi-year contracts, mandatory payment processor lock-in, and a history of transparency controversies.
PAR Technology Corporation is a New York Stock Exchange company founded in 1968 in New Hartford, New York, originally as a defense contractor, and now a restaurant-technology business that sold its Government segment to Booz Allen Hamilton in 2024 to concentrate on it. Its cloud point of sale began life outside the company as Brink Software, a San Diego business PAR partnered with from 2011 and acquired in September 2014; rebadged PAR POS, it runs in what the company says is more than 140,000 restaurant locations, including large franchise estates such as Burger King and Papa Johns, and around it PAR sells loyalty and engagement, digital ordering, back-office software, hardware and its own payments product, PAR Pay. The payments proposition is unusual for a point-of-sale vendor and is the most interesting thing here: PAR Pay is deliberately gateway-agnostic — its own marketing says to pick your processor, your hands are never tied — with next-day funding as standard, EMV, NFC and EBT support, tip handling, chargeback tooling, P2PE and PCI compliance and machine-learning fraud scoring across more than 110 transaction signals. The business behind it is growing: second-quarter 2026 revenue of $133.4 million, up 19% year on year, with annual recurring revenue of about $338.0 million, up more than 17%. What PAR does not do is publish a price for any of it.
A restaurant-first point-of-sale and payments platform founded in 2017, with published plan rates, next-morning funding and unusually well-regarded support. The catch is the contract: a two-year minimum on its headline plan, a mid-2026 rate increase applied to existing merchants, and cancellation terms it does not publish.
Lavu is an Albuquerque restaurant technology company founded in 2010 by Andy Lim, and it has a genuine claim to being the first restaurant point-of-sale system built for the iPad. It raised a $15 million investment from Aldrich Capital Partners in 2015 — reported at the time as the largest Series A in New Mexico's history — and has since assembled a full restaurant stack around the till: a kitchen display system, online and contactless ordering, a dual-pricing (cash discount) programme, payroll, back office and its own payment processing under the name Lavu Pay. Through 2026 the company repositioned hard around Marty AI, an overnight analysis layer that reads point-of-sale, labour and inventory data and delivers a "Morning Deposit" briefing of recoverable cash to managers before service, published a comparative report on AI capabilities across seven major restaurant POS platforms in March 2026, and now markets itself as an intelligent financial operating system rather than a till. Independent reviewers place its plans at roughly $59, $129 and $279 a month with a three-year commitment; Lavu itself no longer publishes a pricing page.
Ingenico is the French payment terminal manufacturer behind a large share of the card readers on the world's counters, founded in Suresnes in 1980 and today selling terminals, SoftPOS and its Ingenico 360 cloud platform through banks, acquirers and ISVs rather than direct to merchants. Its own site claims roughly 3,000 staff across 52 offices in 32 countries, deployments in more than 120 countries, tens of millions of terminals in the field, over 1,000 bank and acquirer clients and 2,500-plus payment applications. It publishes no merchant pricing, because merchants are not its customers. The story of 2026 is financial rather than technical: after Apollo bought it from Worldline in 2022, Ingenico opened talks with its lenders in April 2026 over an interest bill it could not carry, and in August 2026 announced a recapitalisation that converted part of its debt to equity, brought in EUR 150 million of new money from a PIMCO-led group and removed Apollo from the shareholder register entirely.
A cloud point-of-sale system founded in Norwich, England in 2011 by Jacyn Heavens, now operating in the US from an Orlando office and claiming more than 80,000 business locations across 70-plus countries. The software is well liked — 26,281 Trustpilot reviews average 4.3, and the day-to-day complaints are few. The problems are all at the edges of the relationship: nothing about software pricing is published on the US site, the hardware bundle is advertised behind a discount countdown that never actually runs out, no two independent reviewers describe the same contract length, and the recurring theme in the US complaint record is how hard it is to get out. BBB lists 114 complaints in three years against an A+ accredited profile. Good product, aggressive commercial packaging — get the term and the monthly cost in writing before you sign anything.
The retail and restaurant half of the old NCR. NCR Corporation — founded in 1884 as the National Cash Register Company — renamed itself NCR Voyix in October 2023 when it spun off its ATM business as NCR Atleos, and what remains is a unified commerce platform: Aloha and Counterpoint point of sale, self-checkout, and Voyix Pay processing sold alongside them. The scale is real. NCR Voyix reported 80,000 platform sites and more than 8,500 payment sites at the end of 2025, $1.7 billion of annual recurring revenue, and full-year Software and Services revenue of $1,986 million. The problem is the paper you sign. The published US merchant agreement sets a 36-month initial term that auto-renews for 12-month periods unless you give 60 days' notice, makes cancellation during the term immediately payable for every remaining month, and reserves an annual price increase of CPI plus 5% — with a contractual floor of 5% — that applies during the initial term as well as after it. Buy the platform if the platform is what you need, and negotiate the term before you sign anything.
TouchBistro is an iPad-based restaurant point of sale system from Toronto, used by more than 16,000 restaurants and acquired by Constellation Software's Harris division in July 2026. Operators generally like the software. What sinks the grade is the commercial relationship: annual agreements that auto-renew, an F rating with the Better Business Bureau after dozens of unanswered complaints, and a cancellation process that generates more grievances than any other aspect of the product.