There are dozens of restaurant POS systems and most comparison articles are affiliate-ranked lists that tell you very little. Rather than another ranking, here is how the category actually divides, so you can work out which group you are shopping in before comparing anything.
The five groups
Payments companies that added a POS. The software is free or nearly free and the business is the card processing. Genuinely the right answer for low card volume, and the most expensive option at high volume. The rate is the product.
Restaurant-specialist platforms. Built for restaurants specifically — floor plans, coursing, kitchen displays, deep reporting. Strong capability, priced per terminal, and usually a contract. The market leaders sit here.
General small-business POS. Retail-first systems with a restaurant mode. Cheap and simple, and they tend to strain on the restaurant-specific parts: coursing, split checks, modifiers.
Legacy on-premise systems. Installed servers, a local dealer, long relationships. Robust, expensive, and difficult to leave. Still common in older rooms.
Combined systems. The register plus something else in the same subscription — booking, the phone, marketing. Fewer vendors, and the trade is breadth against depth in any single area. Sonorch sits here, with the register and the AI receptionist in one price.
Working out your group eliminates most of the market immediately, which is more useful than a ranked list.
Which group fits which restaurant
Low card volume, simple menu, price-sensitive — a payments-funded free system. Do the arithmetic on your rate, but at low volume it is frequently right.
Full service, complex menu, multiple terminals, needs coursing and deep reporting — a restaurant specialist. Expect per-terminal pricing and a contract, and negotiate both.
Counter service, few items, one or two tills — general small-business POS is often enough and considerably cheaper.
The phone is a real problem as well as the register — a combined system, or you will buy two things and integrate them yourself.
The four questions that actually differentiate
Feature lists all look the same. These do not.
What is the effective processing rate, by card type? Over a year this is usually the largest line and the least compared. Half a percentage point on fifty thousand a month in card volume is about three thousand dollars a year.
Per terminal or per location? This changes the ranking for anything but the smallest room.
What happens when the internet drops mid-service? Listen for a specific answer about orders, cash and card payments, and about how it reconciles afterwards.
Can you export everything, easily, for free? If not, price in never leaving.
What to ignore while comparing
The feature count. Everyone has hundreds. You will use twenty.
Award badges and "best of" rankings, most of which are affiliate placements. We say that as a company that publishes two of its own roundups — ours disclose that Sonorch is one of the options compared, which is the minimum standard and not a common one.
The demo of their menu. Make them enter yours.
The one-year total
The only comparable number. Twelve months of software at your real terminal count, plus hardware or the full lease total, plus processing at your real card volume and effective rate, plus setup.
Build it for three vendors and the ranking usually differs from the monthly-fee ranking. What a restaurant POS system costs has the detail on each line.
The thing every comparison leaves out
All of the above is about serving people who are already in the building. None of these systems answer the phone.
For a restaurant that matters more than it sounds, because the phone rings hardest during service and most of those calls are reservations. A POS comparison that never mentions the phone has evaluated half the front of house.
Decide about both at once. Buying the register first and discovering the phone gap later usually means paying twice, which is the argument for a combined system and the reason ours is one. Sonorch POS and the pricing page have the specifics.