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Poster vs Toast POS
March 20, 2025 | Author: Sandeep Sharma
0★
Point of Sale and Inventory Management for cafes, restaurants, and stores. All-in-one cloud POS system software that combines solutions for front-office, inventory, finances, analytics, CRM. Set up in 15 minutes.
18★
One Platform to Power Your Restaurant Operations. Simplify your operations by combining POS, front of house, back of house, and guest-facing technology on a single platform.
In the vast and confusing world of restaurant point-of-sale systems, both Poster and Toast have somehow managed to emerge as reasonably competent, cloud-based solutions. They both claim to make life easier for restaurant owners by handling inventory, sales analytics and customer loyalty, which is a bit like saying a spaceship is designed to "help you get places." Both are mobile-friendly, integrate with third-party apps and offer all sorts of reporting tools that promise to make your financial woes at least slightly less woeful. In essence, they do much the same thing—keeping track of orders, payments and whether or not Jeff from table six has finally paid his tab.
Poster, which hails from Ukraine and has been around since 2013, is the scrappy, affordable, multi-lingual contender that works on iOS, Android and just about anything with an internet connection. It’s perfect for small-to-medium-sized cafes and bars that don’t want to sell their souls (or their profits) to expensive hardware. If you like your POS system to be flexible, budget-friendly and not demand that you mortgage your espresso machine, Poster is a decent bet. It doesn’t, however, come with built-in payroll features, so you might still have to remember to pay your staff, which they tend to appreciate.
Toast, on the other hand, is an all-American affair that’s been around since 2012 and is aimed at restaurants that take themselves very seriously. It insists on using its own proprietary Android-based hardware, which is great if you like uniformity and not so great if you were hoping to use that old tablet gathering dust in a drawer. It does come with built-in payroll and HR tools, which means it can not only tell you how much money you’ve made but also gently remind you that you owe it all to your employees. Toast is heavily optimized for U.S. businesses, which is fantastic unless you happen to run a charming little bistro in, say, rural Spain, in which case it will simply smile at you and refuse to understand what you're saying.
See also: Top 10 Restaurant software
Poster, which hails from Ukraine and has been around since 2013, is the scrappy, affordable, multi-lingual contender that works on iOS, Android and just about anything with an internet connection. It’s perfect for small-to-medium-sized cafes and bars that don’t want to sell their souls (or their profits) to expensive hardware. If you like your POS system to be flexible, budget-friendly and not demand that you mortgage your espresso machine, Poster is a decent bet. It doesn’t, however, come with built-in payroll features, so you might still have to remember to pay your staff, which they tend to appreciate.
Toast, on the other hand, is an all-American affair that’s been around since 2012 and is aimed at restaurants that take themselves very seriously. It insists on using its own proprietary Android-based hardware, which is great if you like uniformity and not so great if you were hoping to use that old tablet gathering dust in a drawer. It does come with built-in payroll and HR tools, which means it can not only tell you how much money you’ve made but also gently remind you that you owe it all to your employees. Toast is heavily optimized for U.S. businesses, which is fantastic unless you happen to run a charming little bistro in, say, rural Spain, in which case it will simply smile at you and refuse to understand what you're saying.
See also: Top 10 Restaurant software
