How we compare POS systems
We list 18 tills and EPOS platforms sold to UK businesses, and a published rate card exists for 13 providers. The rest quote, which applies to 5 providers, and where a vendor refuses to publish we show that rather than invent a figure on its behalf.
This vertical is costed on rates, not on plan tiers. The estimate is a software fee, plus card processing on the volume you enter, plus whatever the vendor charges for extra tills or extra sites. Ranking is arithmetic on published figures at the numbers you type in. We do not sell prominence, and commission never moves a provider up or down.
Prices are what each vendor publishes to a UK buyer. Some are monthly, some are the monthly equivalent of an annual commitment, and hardware is priced separately almost everywhere, so the billing basis matters as much as the figure.
Integrated payments or bring your own processor: the POS system split that makes prices incomparable
This is not the same question as which fees a card machine charges: that is one processor's schedule. This is whether the price in front of you contains a processing rate at all.
Roughly half this table sells software and payments as a single bundle. The other half sells the till and expects you to arrive with a merchant account, or to be sold one by a partner. Read the rate row and the split is obvious: Epos Now reads Quote (from 0.8%), Loyverse reads Third-party, TISSL reads Third-party and Zonal reads Quote (partner processing). Against those, Dojo reads 1.2%, Zeller reads 1.3%, SumUp reads 1.69% and Lightspeed Restaurant reads ~2.6% + 8p.
The consequence is that a software-only system can look inexpensive and finish more expensive than a bundled one, because the largest line in a busy venue's payment costs is the percentage, not the subscription. That is why the calculator asks for your own rate. Enter it and a system that leaves processing out stops being compared on a number that excludes its largest cost.
Two other things follow from the split. First, a processor-agnostic EPOS is a genuine feature if you already have a rate you like or expect to renegotiate, because you can change processor without changing till. Dojo sits on the other side of the same fact: its integration row reads 450+ EPOS systems, accounting, which is a payments business plugging into other people's EPOS rather than an EPOS business selling payments.
Second, a bundled rate is a headline rate, quoted on the card mix the vendor expects. Commercial cards, international cards and keyed transactions sit outside it almost everywhere, so ask for the non-standard schedule before you sign.
Pub, bar and restaurant POS systems built in Britain
Hospitality EPOS is the part of this market where UK vendors are strongest, and where an imported retail system will fight you every service.
Zonal, Tevalis and TISSL are British hospitality specialists, built here and sold almost entirely here. Their focus rows read Hospitality (enterprise estates), Hospitality (enterprise) and Hospitality, and their support rows say where the phone is answered: Zonal UK-based (Edinburgh, 8am-midnight), Tevalis UK-based (East Yorkshire) and TISSL UK-based (Milton Keynes); 24/7. Toast, which is restaurant-only and newer to this market, reads 24/7 (UK support scaling).
What separates hospitality from retail here is the order lifecycle: a table is opened, added to over an hour, split between people, and paid in parts. Read the table management row and the line through this table is sharp: TISSL Yes (core strength), Zonal Yes (order & pay, bookings), Tevalis Yes (full-service + QSR), Lightspeed Restaurant Yes (floor plans, courses) and Epos Now Yes (hospitality mode). Then compare Lightspeed Retail, which reads No (use Restaurant), and Zettle, which reads No.
The integrations row is the second hospitality tell, because a venue's till has to talk to things a shop's never does. Zonal lists Bookings, loyalty, kiosks, delivery, hotel PMS, Tevalis lists 150+ (PMS, accounting, delivery, kiosks) and TISSL lists Hotel PMS, accounting, delivery, 1,000+. Hotel property management, bookings and the delivery apps are the ones that decide whether your evening runs through one screen or four.
Be honest about scale, though. The estate-grade end of this list is built for managed groups, and it is priced and contracted that way: Zonal lists its term as 36 months and its setup as £1,100 deployment. A single freehouse or a one-room restaurant almost certainly does not need it yet, and the money is better spent on a system you can leave.
One thing to raise in every hospitality demo, because we do not carry a row for it: allergen handling. Food businesses selling items pre-packed for direct sale have had to carry full ingredient and allergen labelling since Natasha's Law, and many kitchens now expect allergen data to live in the same place as the menu, flow onto the kitchen screen and print with the label. Ask each vendor to show you that path on their own system rather than taking a yes.
Shop floor POS systems: stock, barcodes and the online order
Retail asks a different question of the same box. There is no table, there is a queue, and the thing that has to be right is the stock number.
Lightspeed Retail is the deep end of that: its focus reads Retail and its integrations read Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, built-in eCom, 100s of apps, with stock depth and reporting the reason established shops buy it. Shopify comes at it from the website inwards, reading Retail (omnichannel), which is the right shape when the shop and the online store must never disagree about how many of something you have. Epos Now sits between them as a UK-origin till with a back office, listing Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, WooCommerce, Deliveroo, 100+.
At the small end, Loyverse runs on hardware you already own and reads Both (micro business), Square reads Both, and myPOS reads Retail/services (micro) with a stock row of Limited (basic catalogue). That last row is the honest boundary: a reader with a catalogue attached is not a stock system, and if you are counting variants and reordering against lead times, it will not carry you.
The expensive mistake is buying across the line rather than up or down it. A shop that buys a hospitality platform pays for floor plans and courses it will never open. A venue that buys a retail till discovers at the first busy Saturday that it cannot hold an open tab. Neither shows up in a price comparison, and both are irreversible for the length of the contract.
Per site, per till and per user: how a POS system bill multiplies
The figure most people compare is for a single till in a single place, which is a configuration many buyers do not have.
Sites multiply first. Epos Now lists £54/location (subscription per site), Lightspeed Retail £75/location (another subscription), Lightspeed Restaurant £59/location (another subscription), Shopify £69/location (POS Pro) and Takepayments £45/location (per site). A second address is a second subscription almost everywhere here, so a two-site operator should read the per-site row before the headline one.
Tills multiply second, and they multiply differently by vendor. Lightspeed Restaurant charges ~£39 per register and Lightspeed Retail ~£35 per register, while Loyverse reads £0 (free app on any device) and Zettle reads £0 (free app per device). Square lists £0 (free plan); Plus £49-69/location. In a venue with a bar, a floor handheld and a kitchen pass, that row is the difference between one subscription and three.
TISSL prices on a third axis again, listing Per-user bundle (5 from £60/mo), which is a per-user bundle rather than a per-device charge. Read what the meter actually counts before you compare two monthly figures.
Then the commitment. Loyverse, Square, Zettle, SumUp, myPOS and Zeller all read No lock-in or close to it, while Epos Now reads 12-month minimum (care plans longer), Lightspeed Retail Annual (12-month term), Takepayments 12 months and Clover 18-36 months (reseller). Clover in the UK is sold through bank resellers, so the paper you sign is the reseller's and the term is theirs to set.
If you are one person behind one counter, the useful conclusion is that you probably do not need to be in the paid part of this table yet. A free app on a tablet you own, plus a reader, is a real answer, and it stays a real answer until you need rotas, a second till or table service.
VAT, tips and surcharges: what a UK POS system has to get right
Three UK rules land directly on the till rather than on the accountant, and they are worth checking in a demo rather than after go-live.
VAT is item-level and sometimes service-level. Food is the hard case: the same item can be zero-rated cold and taken away, and standard-rated hot or eaten in. That means your till has to hold a VAT treatment per product and, in hospitality, switch it on the eat-in or takeaway choice rather than on the product alone. Get it wrong and every return inherits the error. Ask to see how a system handles a single menu item carrying both treatments before you migrate a menu into it.
The takings have to reach the ledger. Under Making Tax Digital your VAT records must be kept digitally with a digital link through to the return, so a daily Z-read retyped into a spreadsheet is the thing you are trying to remove. Check your own accounting package by name in the integration row: Epos Now lists Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, WooCommerce, Deliveroo, 100+, Lightspeed Retail lists Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, built-in eCom, 100s of apps, Square lists Xero, QuickBooks, Square Online, 200+ apps and Zeller lists Xero, Zeller ecosystem.
Tips are no longer yours to hold. Since the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 took effect on 1 October 2024, qualifying tips must be passed to workers in full and allocated fairly, with a written policy and records kept for three years. Card tips arrive inside your settlement, so the till and the reporting behind it are where the evidence comes from. A system that reports tips by employee and by service period makes that policy administrable. One that lumps them into gross takings does not.
You cannot recover the card fee from the customer. Surcharging consumers for paying by debit or credit card has been banned in the UK since 13 January 2018 under the Payment Services Regulations. So the processing rate is a margin cost, permanently, which is exactly why the integrated and third-party split above is worth resolving before you compare monthly fees.
Offline mode: what a POS system does when the internet drops
Every vendor's demo runs on good broadband. Your Saturday might not, and a till that stops taking money is a different class of failure from software that is slow.
The row to read says how much the system can do disconnected, and it separates this table cleanly. Zonal, Tevalis, TISSL and Epos Now all carry offline mode, which is part of why on-premise resilience is still a selling point in British hospitality rather than a legacy quirk. At the other end the row qualifies itself: Shopify reads Limited, Dojo reads Limited, myPOS reads Limited and Zeller reads No.
Be precise about what offline means, because vendors use the word loosely. Can you take a card payment, or only record a cash sale? Are orders still routed to the kitchen? Does the stored transaction settle when the line comes back, and who carries the risk if one is declined later? A system that keeps ringing sales but cannot authorise a card has moved the problem rather than solved it.
Support hours are the other half of the same question, since a failure at eight on a Friday evening is worth more attention than one at ten on a Tuesday. Zonal lists UK-based (Edinburgh, 8am-midnight), Epos Now lists UK-based (Norwich); 24/7 on care plan, Square lists UK phone (business hours) and Loyverse lists 24/7 chat (no phone). Chat-only support is perfectly reasonable for a market stall and a poor fit for a hundred-cover restaurant mid-service.
The practical order is to settle whether you are buying hospitality or retail, then whether the price you are reading includes processing, then how many sites and tills the meter will count. Compare monthly figures last, and the table narrows itself long before price does.