Best software for restaurants

The kit below covers the four tasks where we can verify tools and pricing structure directly from vendor sites: point of sale, reservations and waitlist, online ordering, and staff scheduling.

Restaurants only have these four catalog-backed tasks in our kit. We did not add a payroll or CRM product to this list, because most restaurants handle guest history inside the reservations tool and payroll inside the POS or scheduling add-ons rather than through a dedicated standalone system.

A restaurant's software stack has to keep up with a single dining-room rhythm, from the first reservation of the night to the schedule that decided who is on the floor. A reservation or a walk-in arrives first: OpenTable holds the booking or adds the party to a digital waitlist, so the host stand can see table status and expected wait time at a glance instead of managing a paper book.

Once a table is seated, the server takes the order on the POS. Toast, SpotOn and TouchBistro all route that order straight to a kitchen display system in the back of house, replacing printed tickets with a screen the kitchen can update as each item fires. At the same time, an online order placed through ChowNow or Owner.com lands in the same kitchen queue, so the line is working off one combined view of dine-in and online demand rather than two disconnected sources.

Checkout runs back through the POS: the same system that fired the order also splits the bill, processes the card, and closes the table so it is ready for the next party. Underneath all of this, the staff schedule set up in 7shifts (or a POS scheduling add-on) determines who is actually on the floor and in the kitchen for that shift, and lets a manager watch labor cost against sales as the rush happens rather than after the shift ends.

None of these systems have to be stitched together manually for that flow to work: TouchBistro, for example, sells its POS, reservations, and online ordering as companion products from one vendor, so a restaurant that standardizes on it can run the whole sequence above without integrating three separate logins.

Restaurant software earns its place in this kit only when a vendor documents a feature built for food service specifically, not a generic retail or scheduling feature repurposed for a dining room.

• Kitchen display system (KDS). SpotOn documents a kitchen display system as part of its restaurant POS, and TouchBistro describes its own KDS as a direct communication channel between front-of-house and kitchen staff so orders are fulfilled accurately.

• Menu and modifier management. SpotOn's restaurant page describes advanced modifiers and an AI menu assistant for building a menu without editing every item one at a time.

• Tableside ordering and floor plan management. TouchBistro documents tableside ordering for taking orders and splitting bills at the table, plus floor plan and table management to assign sections and monitor tables from the same system.

• Commission-free branded online ordering. Owner.com bundles an AI-built restaurant website, a branded ordering system and a branded mobile app with loyalty rewards, positioned specifically against third-party delivery marketplaces that charge a commission on every order.

• Labor cost tracked against sales. 7shifts lists labor cost versus sales tracking alongside shift scheduling, shift swapping, time-off requests and team messaging as core scheduling features for restaurant and hospitality teams.

• Menu, POS and takeout in one support ecosystem. Toast's own support center is organized around menu and item management, POS and location operations, and takeout and catering as core categories, which lines up with a POS meant to run the whole floor rather than payment alone.

Why labor cost and food-safety compliance matter enough to build software around: a food service manager's job already includes hiring and scheduling staff, overseeing kitchen operations, and making sure employees meet health and food-safety standards, on top of managing budgets and payroll, which is exactly the workload that a kitchen display, a modifier-aware POS and a labor-cost-aware schedule are built to support.

For most restaurants, Toast is our pick because it is built for food service from the start, with menus, modifiers and a kitchen display. SpotOn and TouchBistro are the two alternatives worth a side-by-side look before you sign.

The choice usually comes down to which restaurant-specific features you will use every shift. SpotOn documents a kitchen display system and advanced modifiers, while TouchBistro documents tableside ordering, floor plan and table management, and an integrated inventory tool. Toast, SpotOn and TouchBistro all send orders to the kitchen display. For feature-by-feature detail, see SpotOn vs. Toast and Toast vs. TouchBistro, or the full point-of-sale task page.

We do not name a cheapest POS, because the real cost depends on the plan, the hardware, the payment processing arrangement and the number of locations, not on a single sticker figure. Compare current plan details in the pricing tables on each tool page rather than relying on a headline rate.

When you compare, put the same restaurant on each quote: the same number of terminals, kitchen screens and locations, and the same add-ons such as online ordering or scheduling. A system that looks cheaper per month can cost more once you add the pieces your restaurant needs, and a vendor that bundles those pieces can be cheaper overall. Start with the pricing table on this page and the pages for Toast, SpotOn and TouchBistro.

No single product manages a whole restaurant, so the best setup is a small kit: a restaurant POS, a reservations and waitlist tool, online ordering, and staff scheduling. That is exactly the kit in the table above.

Our catalog covers seven restaurant tools: Toast, SpotOn, TouchBistro, OpenTable, ChowNow, Owner.com and 7shifts. That is the full list we can stand behind, so we do not pad it into a ranked top ten. If you want fewer vendors, TouchBistro sells a POS, reservations and online ordering as companion products from one vendor. Start from the POS, then add scheduling with 7shifts once labor cost against sales becomes the number you watch.

For restaurants, order management means getting dine-in and online orders into one kitchen queue. The simplest route is a POS with built-in online ordering, such as Toast, so everything lands in the same system.

If you want a more branded ordering experience, add a dedicated tool: ChowNow is our pick for commission-free branded ordering, and Owner.com bundles a branded ordering system with a restaurant website and mobile app. Either one can feed the same kitchen display as your floor orders. See the online ordering task page for the full comparison.

The right size of restaurant software kit scales with how many hourly staff are on the floor and how many locations you run, not with how fancy a feature list looks. A small single-location restaurant typically needs the fewest moving pieces: one POS for the floor and kitchen, plus a reservations and waitlist tool if the concept takes bookings, is often enough to run service end to end.

A busier full-service restaurant with a larger hourly staff usually adds dedicated scheduling software on top of that same POS and reservations pair, because a spreadsheet schedule cannot show a manager whether a Friday-night shift is overstaffed relative to sales in real time the way purpose-built scheduling can. This is also the point where a restaurant is likely to add a branded online ordering tool alongside its POS, so growing online demand does not depend entirely on a marketplace app.

A small multi-location group generally layers in the same four tools across every location, plus whichever plan tier a vendor offers for multi-unit operations; SpotOn, for example, documents a custom plan aimed specifically at multi-unit restaurant operators rather than a single-location flat rate. At that size, the priority shifts from picking any one tool to making sure the POS, reservations, online ordering and scheduling systems share data across locations instead of running as separate silos per site. A group operator should also weigh how much setup time each additional location adds, since a kit built around one vendor's companion products generally onboards a new location faster than reconnecting four separate systems every time a location opens.

For a closer look at how the two leading POS picks compare feature by feature, see SpotOn vs. Toast and Toast vs. TouchBistro. For more on point-of-sale software across trades, see the point-of-sale task page.