22 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.
Fresha is the London-based booking and business platform for salons, barbershops, spas and wellness studios, founded as Shedul in 2015 by William Zeqiri and Nick Miller and renamed in 2019. It became a unicorn in May 2026 when KKR invested $80 million at a valuation above $1 billion, at which point it said it served more than 130,000 businesses, handled 35 million appointments a month and about $15 billion a year in gross merchandise value, and was profitable on a $140 million revenue run-rate. Payments are embedded in the software through Adyen for Platforms: as of September 2026 the US rate card is 2.29% plus $0.20 in person (plus $0.10 per Tap to Pay authorisation), 2.79% plus $0.20 online, 3.30% plus $0.20 for manually keyed cards and 5.99% plus $0.30 for Klarna instalments, with payouts the next business day, no contract and no early-termination fee. The software itself stopped being free in 2025 — plans are $19.95 a month for one person or $14.95 per bookable team member — and clients who find you on the Fresha marketplace cost a one-off 20% commission with a $6 minimum. Trustpilot rates it 4.8 from more than 7,000 reviews. It grades B+ on clear pricing and terms, with the marks held back by the marketplace fee, the 2025 pricing shift and the payout holds that come with any aggregator.
Jobber is field-service management software for home-service businesses — lawn care, cleaning, HVAC, plumbing, electrical and about fifty other trades — with card and bank processing built in as Jobber Payments. The company, legally Octopusapp Inc., was founded in Edmonton, Alberta in 2011 by Sam Pillar and Forrest Zeisler and is still run by them; it raised US$100 million from General Atlantic in February 2023 and says more than 400,000 service professionals use the product. Jobber does not hold a merchant agreement itself: Jobber Payments is processed by Stripe, Inc. under Stripe's connected-account terms, which is what makes the rate card flat and the onboarding fast. As of September 2026 the published rates are the same on every plan — 2.9% + 30¢ for cards paid online through the client hub, 2.7% + 30¢ for Tap to Pay in the field, 1% for US bank payments (ACH), and an extra 1% for an instant payout — with a chargeback fee (amount unpublished) that is refunded if you win and no monthly processing charge beyond the software subscription, which runs from $49 a month (Core, one user, no commitment) to $199 a month (Grow) at list. Payouts run on a rolling two-business-day window after a five-day authorization period on the first payment; ACH takes about four business days. The processing is available in the US, Canada and the UK; ACH, the card reader and the Jobber Money account are US-only. The trade-off is the software: its subscription is the real cost, it auto-renews, and prepaid annual fees are non-refundable, which is the substance of most of the complaints on record.
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.
Boulevard is booking, point-of-sale and client-management software for appointment-based salons, spas, barbershops and medspas, built by Boulevard Labs, Inc. in Los Angeles. Card payments run through its own Boulevard Payments, which uses Adyen for Platforms underneath and is sold only to Boulevard software customers. As of October 2026, Boulevard's pricing page lists plans from $143 to $416 a month per location, depending on tier, billing period and whether you run a salon or a medspa. It says card processing starts at 2.65%, and the exact rate is set in your order. With its Offset surcharge program, the business's share falls to about 1%, because clients pay a 3% credit-card fee. Deposits arrive in about two business days, and Instant Payouts cost 1.75%. The catch is the contract. Boulevard's Main Services Agreement defaults to a 12-month term that renews automatically. If you leave mid-term, you owe the rest of the term, and fees are non-refundable. Software reviewers rate it highly, at 4.6 from 390 reviews on Capterra. However, its small Trustpilot profile is mostly one-star reviews about technical and checkout problems, support and the one-year commitment.
Clio Payments is the payment processing built into Clio Manage, the legal practice-management software from Clio (Themis Solutions Inc.), which was founded in Vancouver in 2008. Clio first sold a payments add-on powered by LawPay from 2015, then launched its own native Clio Payments in the US in October 2021 and in Canada in November 2022. Card processing is provided by Stripe: each firm accepts Stripe's Connected Account Agreement, and Clio handles enrolment, fees and support. There is no separate monthly fee, but you need a Clio Manage subscription, which starts at $49 per user per month. As of October 2026 Clio's own pages list a flat 2.95% for standard credit and debit cards with no per-transaction fee, and 1% for US eCheck and direct ACH payments. American Express is 3.75% on Clio's current comparison page, or 3.5% for firms switching from the LawPay integration. Clio does not publish Canadian rates on its Canadian site. The trust-account handling is the main reason to use it: trust payments are deposited in full, and processing fees, chargebacks and the $15 (US) or $20 CAD dispute fee always come out of the operating account. Card funds take one to two business days in the US and three in Canada, and eChecks five to seven. Clio itself is well rated on Capterra, but its BBB file is rated F for unanswered complaints, mostly about subscription billing. Clio ended its LawPay integration on 31 August 2026, which leaves Clio Payments as Clio's own way to take payments inside Clio Manage.
GlossGenius is booking, point-of-sale, marketing and staff software for US salons, barbers, spas, medical spas and wellness and fitness studios, built in New York by twin sisters Danielle Cohen-Shohet, the chief executive, and Leah Cohen-Shohet. The company was incorporated in August 2015, raised a $44 million Series D at a $1.15 billion valuation in July 2026 and at the same time renamed itself Genius AI, with GlossGenius kept as its main product; it says more than 125,000 businesses use the platform. Card processing is built in and runs on Stripe: GlossGenius is the platform, Stripe is the processor, and every business gets a Stripe connected account rather than its own merchant ID. The published price is one flat 2.6% with no per-transaction fee, and it is the same whether the card is tapped, keyed, stored on file or used to pay a deposit online, which is unusual among salon platforms. Invoices cost 2.9% + $0.30 and buy-now-pay-later 6% + $0.30. A setting lets the business pass some or all of the fee to clients as a 2.5% or 3.5% convenience fee. The software costs $24, $48 or $148 a month billed annually ($28, $56 or $168 billed monthly), is month to month, and standard payouts are free, sent each evening Sunday to Thursday, and usually arrive the next day. The weak spots are the service record: a D- BBB rating for failing to respond to 24 complaints, and recent complaints from businesses whose payouts were held for verification.
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.
Vagaro is booking, point-of-sale and marketing software for salons, spas, barbers, medical spas, gyms and studios, sold from Pleasanton, California since 2009 by founder and chief executive Fred Helou. Card processing is built in through Vagaro Merchant Services, a registered ISO of PNC Bank, N.A., and priced on two published plans: small merchants under $4,000 a month pay 2.6% + $0.10 for swiped, dipped and tapped cards with no monthly fee, and large merchants above that pay 2.29% + $0.19 for $10 a month. Every keyed, online, card-on-file and membership charge is 3.5% + $0.19 on either plan, card-brand FANF and Mastercard location fees pass through, buy-now-pay-later through Affirm costs 6% + $0.30, and surcharging is not allowed. Deposits arrive the next business day after a batch, with same-day and instant payouts at 1.75%. The software is $30 a month for one calendar (currently $23.99 for the first six months) plus $10 a calendar up to seven, month to month with no cancellation fee, and the US marketplace listing is free — Vagaro only takes a 20% cut when you opt into its Fill My Books promotions. The rate card is clear and competitive in person; the weak spots are the keyed rate, a BBB review score of 1.09 out of 5 with recurring complaints of duplicate charges and hardware warranty disputes, and the lack of any way to pass fees on to clients.
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.
Zenoti is cloud software for salons, spas, medspas, barbershops and gyms, covering booking, point of sale, memberships, marketing, payroll and a growing set of AI agents. It was founded in 2010 in Hyderabad, India, as ManageMySpa and is now based in Bellevue, Washington. Card payments run through Zenoti Payments, which Zenoti integrates on top of Adyen or Stripe. In the US and Canada, Zenoti's help centre lists Zenoti Payments as the only supported payment gateway. As of October 2026, Zenoti publishes no software prices and no processing rates: both are quoted, and the processing rate is agreed when you register. US payouts arrive one or two business days after the sale, and the faster schedule adds 0.03% to your rate. The contract term is whatever your order form says, and it then renews for a year at a time unless either side gives 60 days' notice. Zenoti can raise fees by up to 20% at renewal, or at any time on 60 days' notice. Software reviewers rate it well, at 4.4 from 1,291 reviews on Capterra and 4.4 on Trustpilot. However, the BBB gives it an F and lists nine complaints in three years, several about sales promises, onboarding and refunds.
Housecall Pro is field-service software for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, cleaning and other home-service trades, with card, ACH and consumer-financing acceptance built in as HCP Payments. Codefied Inc., which trades as Housecall Pro, was founded in San Diego in 2013 by a team including Ian Heidt and Roland Ligtenberg, took $125 million from Permira Growth Opportunities and Vista Credit Partners in June 2022, has since moved its headquarters to Denver, and says more than 200,000 home-service professionals use the product. The processing is Stripe's: the terms of service bind every customer to Stripe's Services and Connected Account agreements, and Stripe applies the $25 dispute fee. The rates, published in the help centre as of September 2026, are percentage-only with no per-transaction cents — 2.59% for cards dipped, tapped or swiped in the field (Tap to Pay adds $5 per active device a month), 2.99% for cards paid online against an invoice, 3.49% for keyed, card-on-file and scanned cards and for American Express and business cards, 1% for ACH, 2.99% for PayPal and Venmo, and 4.99% for PayPal Pay Later and Klarna — with mobile check deposit free. Standard payouts take two business days, with up to seven for the first and Instapay in about 30 minutes for 1%. The software runs $79 a month (Basic, one user) to $329 a month (MAX, eight users) billed monthly, or $59 to $299 billed annually, with no long-term contract. The record is the problem: a 2.4 TrustScore from 638 reviews, 76 BBB complaints in three years and a steady stream of reports about held funds, surprise price increases and cancellations that require a phone call.
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.
Mindbody is booking, scheduling and point-of-sale software for fitness studios, gyms, salons and spas, founded in San Luis Obispo, California in 2001 and now the best-known brand in wellness software. Payment processing is sold as Mindbody Payments, built on Stripe Connect, and takes cards, ACH, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna and Tap to Pay in more than forty countries. The pricing picture is unusually lopsided: Mindbody's own support documentation publishes card-present and card-not-present rates for around twenty regions — Canada at 2.89% + $0.25 CAD online and 2.39% + $0.10 CAD in person, the UK at 2.19% + 20p and 1.99% + 10p, most of the EU at 2.4% + €0.25 — and for the United States and Australia prints an email address instead. Software runs from $79 a month per location on the Starter plan, with the Accelerate and Ultimate tiers quoted rather than listed. Bookings that come through the consumer Mindbody app via its marketing tools are charged 3.5% plus a 20% marketplace fee, capped at $30 and applied only to a new client's first purchase. The terms of service, updated 20 March 2026, make early exit expensive: fees are non-refundable, thirty days' notice is required, and a customer who leaves before the end of a subscription term remains liable for the rest of it. The corporate context changed twice recently — the brands were gathered under a parent called Playlist in June 2025, and that business completed a merger with the German connected-fitness company EGYM in March 2026 at a combined valuation of $7.5 billion.
Instamojo is a Bengaluru company, founded in 2012, that sells online stores, landing pages and payment links to small Indian businesses, with payments built in. As of October 2026 its pricing page lists 2% + ₹3 per payment by UPI, Indian cards, netbanking, wallets and pay later, and 3% + ₹3 on corporate cards, with 18% GST charged on top of the fee. The free store and landing-page plans charge 5% + ₹3, and digital goods cost more. Money reaches your bank three business days after the sale unless you pay extra for faster payouts. Instamojo used to run its own payment aggregation business, but on 27 September 2023 the Reserve Bank of India returned its application for an aggregator licence, and RBI's own list, dated 1 October 2026, still shows it that way. The company says it moved merchants' payment accounts to licensed aggregators, with fresh KYC. Merchants told the press their payouts were stuck for weeks during the switch. Its Trustpilot page is dominated by one-star reviews about delayed payouts, KYC and unanswered support. Instamojo is a cheap, simple way for a very small Indian seller to start taking payments, but choose it for the store software, and get written answers on who holds your money before relying on it.
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.