Key Features of a Restaurant EPOS: What Actually Matters in 2026

First, the bias, out in the open: we make Seamless, a UK EPOS built for hospitality, and one of the six systems below is ours. We have put our own prices, our own contract terms and our own weak spots in the same table as everyone else's, and every figure here was checked on the providers' own pages in July 2026. We would rather you buy the right till than buy ours for the wrong restaurant, so each section below includes a plain note on when that system is the wrong answer, including ours.

Our verdict in one line: most single-site UK restaurants are best served by an EPOS that lets them keep their own card machine and their own rates, which rules out more of this list than you would expect, and the software subscription matters far less than the payment contract stapled to it.

That is the thing operators find out too late. The monthly software fee is the number on the website. The card processing deal, the contract length and the exit terms are the numbers that actually decide what a restaurant EPOS costs over three years. This comparison leads with those.

The six compared at a glance

Prices below are the published headline prices as at July 2026, taken from each provider's own UK pages. They exclude VAT unless the provider states otherwise, and hardware is extra in every case. If you want the generic, all-sectors version of this table, we keep one at our UK EPOS comparison; this page stays restaurant-specific.

Rates and prices verified July 2026. Providers change pricing without much warning, so confirm before you sign anything.

Seamless

Ours, so read this section with the appropriate scepticism. Seamless is a UK hospitality EPOS that runs on iPad and Android, with table plans, modifiers, kitchen printing by station, split bills, offline mode and delivery integration for Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats and Storekit. The design decision that shapes everything else is that we do not process your card payments. You keep your terminal and your rate, and the till talks to it.

Pricing is £0 a month if you take an approved payment provider we introduce you to, which currently means Teya, Zettle or Dojo, and £24 a month if you would rather not. Pro is £39 a month per terminal. There is no contract and there is a 14-day trial. Full detail is on our pricing page.

Best for: single-site UK restaurants, 1 to 4 terminals, that already have a card machine on a rate they are happy with and do not want a new payments contract bundled into a till purchase.

When not to choose Seamless: if you run a multi-site group and need centralised menu management, cross-venue stock and consolidated group reporting as a daily working tool, we are not the deepest option on this list and Lightspeed genuinely is. If you need kitchen display screens rather than kitchen printers, we print, we do not do screens, so buy elsewhere. If you are outside the UK, stop reading, we are UK only. And if you actively want one supplier who owns your till, your card machine and your merchant account so there is only ever one phone number to ring, our whole model is the opposite of that and Square or Epos Now will suit you better.

Epos Now

Credit where it is due: Epos Now has the broadest product footprint of anyone here. It covers retail and hospitality, it has a large app store, and it has been selling into UK independents for long enough that most accountants and stocktakers have seen it before. If your requirement list is long and unusual, there is a decent chance Epos Now has an app for it.

The commercial structure is the thing to understand. The eye-catching hardware prices, a Complete Solution bundle from £199 against a £849 headline, are tied to a subscription. Their own pricing page states it plainly: the discounted bundle price requires a 12-month payments, care and support subscription starting at £54 a month. That is a real commitment, and the software price on its own is not published, so you will be getting a quote rather than reading a number.

The bigger change for 2026 is on payments. Epos Now withdrew its integration with Dojo and Paymentsense in April 2026, which left merchants who had bought the till partly because it worked with their Dojo terminal needing to either change card provider or run the terminal unintegrated, keying totals in by hand. If you are in that position, our Dojo integration page explains what an agnostic setup looks like.

Best for: operators who want a single supplier with a wide app ecosystem and are genuinely content to take that supplier's card processing as part of the deal.

When not to choose Epos Now: if keeping your existing card machine matters to you, or if a 12-month tie-in on a till you have not used yet makes you uneasy. Also if you want to compare the software cost against anyone else's before you commit, because you cannot do that from published prices.

Square

The free tier is real and it deserves the credit it gets. Square for Restaurants Free is £0 a month, it includes table service, and you can be taking orders the day the hardware arrives. There is no long-term commitment. For a first restaurant with a tight opening budget, that is a genuinely strong offer and we say so even though it competes with us.

The trade is that Square makes its money on your card volume. In-person UK cards are 1.75%, and you cannot use another processor. That rate is fine at low volume and gets expensive as you grow: the gap between 1.75% and a negotiated rate is small on a Tuesday lunch and material across a year of full Saturdays. Square for Restaurants Plus is £69 a month per location if you need the fuller feature set. Our EPOS cost calculator is the quickest way to see where that crossover lands for your turnover.

Best for: new, seasonal or lower-volume restaurants that value a zero software bill and fast setup over the last few basis points on card fees.

When not to choose Square: once card turnover is high enough that processing is one of your larger monthly costs, because you have no lever to pull on it. Also if you have already negotiated a good rate with another provider, since you would be giving it up to move in.

Lightspeed Restaurant

Lightspeed is the most capable system on this list for groups. Multi-venue menu management, stock down to ingredient level, and reporting built for someone whose job is looking at reports rather than expediting a pass. If you run several restaurants and the head office view is the point, it earns its price.

Read the plan table carefully before you compare the headline price to anything else on this page, because Lightspeed prices by licence rather than by site. Basic is £79 a month and covers one terminal. Core is £149 for two, Pro is £219 for three, and extra registers are £39 a month each. A restaurant with three tills is therefore starting at £219 a month, not £79.

The bigger thing to check is what the entry plan excludes. On Basic, your one licence is a stationary or tablet till. Mobile ordering at the table, a kitchen display system, QR ordering and pay, reservations, inventory management, click and collect, and third-party online ordering integrations are all paid add-ons rather than included features. If you take Deliveroo or Uber Eats orders, the integration that puts them on your till is not in the £79. Card processing is Lightspeed's own on every tier, and their table shows the rate as "default" on Basic and "custom" on Core and Pro, which is a polite way of saying the rate is negotiable once you are spending more.

Best for: multi-site groups, and single restaurants with genuinely complex stock and menu engineering needs, where the reporting layer is somebody's actual job.

When not to choose Lightspeed: a single site doing straightforward covers will pay for a lot of capability it never opens. If your requirement is "take orders, print to the kitchen, split the bill, sync the delivery apps", price up the add-ons you would need on Basic before you compare it to anything else, because the entry plan on its own does not do that list.

SumUp POS

SumUp has built out properly from card readers into till software. Free POS is £0 a month, POS Plus is £29 and POS Pro is £49 excluding VAT, with no long-term contract and no onboarding fee. Hardware is cheap to start with: Tap to Pay costs nothing, a Solo Lite is £25 and a Solo is £79, all excluding VAT.

Two caveats. First, the modules add up. Kitchen display, advanced stock, the hospitality module and several others are £19 a month each, so a restaurant that needs three of them is not paying the headline number. Second, payments are SumUp's, at 1.69% pay as you go, or 0.99% on domestic consumer cards if you take the £19 a month Payments Plus subscription. Do that sum against your actual card mix rather than the advertised rate.

Best for: small restaurants, bistros and café-restaurants already running SumUp hardware, where the till is an extension of a payments setup that is working.

When not to choose SumUp POS: if you want to keep a non-SumUp card machine, or if you need several paid modules, at which point stack the true monthly total against the alternatives before deciding.

ICRTouch, the legacy option

Every honest UK comparison needs one traditional system in it, because plenty of good restaurants still run one and are right to. ICRTouch is sold through a network of authorised partners rather than direct, so there is no published price: you get a quote from a local dealer, and the dealer is also who installs it, trains your staff and comes out when the printer stops talking to the till on a Friday night. For operators who value that relationship, it is worth real money and no cloud provider replicates it.

It is also payment-agnostic in the way that matters here, with integrations listed for Stripe, Dojo, Barclaycard and Elavon among others, so you are not forced onto anyone's processing.

Best for: established restaurants that want a named local engineer and are happy to pay for on-site service.

When not to choose ICRTouch: if you want to compare prices before you talk to a salesperson, you cannot. If you want same-day self-setup, delivery-app syncing as standard and app-store style updates, a cloud system fits better. And the quality of your experience depends heavily on which dealer you get, which is a variable you cannot assess from a website.

What actually matters in a restaurant EPOS

Once you have narrowed the list, these are the things that decide whether service runs well. This is the part of the old version of this article that was worth keeping, condensed.

A table plan that matches your room. Not a grid of numbered squares. If your floor has a bar, a mezzanine and eight outside tables, the till should show that, so a new starter can find table 14 without asking. Every system here does table plans; the question at demo is how long it takes you to rearrange one.

Modifiers that capture the whole order. Steak temperature, allergen swaps, no onions, sauce on the side. If your staff end up writing on a pad as well as tapping the screen, the till has failed and you will get printed tickets that are missing the important half of the order.

Kitchen printing by station. Starters to the larder, mains to the grill, desserts to the pass. This is the single feature that most reliably separates hospitality EPOS from retail EPOS wearing a hospitality badge. Ask to see a live ticket print during the demo, not a screenshot. Note the distinction between kitchen printers and kitchen display screens: they are not the same product and not every system does both, so check which one you are actually being sold.

Tabs and splitting bills the way customers really pay. Split by cover, split by item, move a round from the bar tab to the table, four cards and a bit of cash. If splitting is awkward, it will be awkward at 9pm on a Saturday with a table of twelve.

Offline mode that actually works. Broadband goes down. The question is what happens next: does the till keep taking orders and printing to the kitchen, or does service stop? Ask the salesperson to unplug the router. The answers vary more than the marketing does.

Delivery integration. If you take Deliveroo, Just Eat or Uber Eats orders, having them land in the till and print to the kitchen automatically removes a tablet, a re-keying step and a category of mistakes. Check which platforms are included and what each one costs, because this is frequently a paid add-on rather than a feature.

Payments flexibility. The one we would argue is most underrated. Some systems on this list process your cards themselves and will not work with anyone else's terminal. Others do not care whose machine you use. That single design choice determines whether you can renegotiate your rate in two years without also replacing your till. The Epos Now and Dojo split in April 2026 is what this looks like when it goes wrong for the merchant.

How to actually choose

Work in this order. Get a quote for the card processing first, before you look at any till software, because it is the larger number over three years. Then pick the software that will work with that processor. Then check kitchen printing, splitting and offline mode in a live demo rather than on a feature list. Then, and only then, compare monthly software prices.

If you want the restaurant-specific detail on what we build, it is on our restaurant EPOS page. If you want the wider, all-sectors picture, our UK EPOS comparison covers the same providers without the restaurant lens.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a restaurant EPOS cost in the UK?

Software runs from £0 a month to around £219 a month as at July 2026. Free tiers exist at Square, SumUp and Seamless, though each carries a condition: Square and SumUp make their money on your card processing, and the Seamless £0 tier applies when you take an approved payment provider we introduce you to, such as Teya, Zettle or Dojo, and is £24 a month otherwise. Check how each provider counts, because some price per site and others per terminal or licence: Lightspeed's £79 entry plan covers one terminal and £219 covers three, and Seamless Pro is £39 per terminal. Then add hardware, which starts around £199 for a bundle and rises quickly, plus any paid modules and add-ons. For most restaurants the larger cost is card processing, not software.

Can I keep my current card machine?

It depends entirely on the system. Seamless and ICRTouch work with a range of providers, so you can keep an existing terminal and rate. Square, SumUp and Lightspeed process payments themselves. Epos Now withdrew its Dojo and Paymentsense integration in April 2026, so merchants on those providers lost integrated payments. Ask this question first, in writing, before you buy anything.

What is the difference between EPOS and POS?

Nothing meaningful. EPOS, electronic point of sale, is the term used in the UK and Ireland. POS, point of sale, is the American term and is increasingly used here too. Providers use them interchangeably, so search both when you are comparing.

Is an iPad EPOS good enough for a busy restaurant?

Yes, in 2026, provided two things are true: the system has a genuine offline mode so service continues when the broadband drops, and the kitchen printers are wired rather than depending on the same wifi as the tills. Plenty of high-volume UK restaurants run tablet tills. The failures we hear about are almost always network design failures rather than tablet failures.

Do I need a kitchen display screen or are printers enough?

Printers are enough for most single-site restaurants and are more robust when things get busy, because paper does not crash. Screens earn their place in high-volume kitchens with several stations and a lot of order modification, and in delivery-heavy operations. Check carefully which one a provider actually supplies, as they are often listed together and sold separately.

How long does it take to switch restaurant EPOS?

The technical part is usually a few days: menu build, printer setup, staff training on a quiet shift. What determines the real timeline is your existing contract. Systems with a 12-month or longer tie-in mean you either wait for renewal or pay to leave, so check your notice period before you start getting quotes, not after.

The bottom line

For a single-site UK restaurant, the honest shortlist is short. If you already have a card machine you are happy with, choose a system that lets you keep it. If you are opening from scratch on a tight budget, Square's free tier is a good place to start and you can move later. If you run a group, Lightspeed is built for the problem you have. And if you want a local engineer more than you want an app store, find a good ICRTouch dealer.

We would rather lose a sale than sell a restaurant a till that does not fit its room. If you want to talk it through, or just want the numbers checked against your own turnover, that is what the cost calculator is for.

All prices and card rates in this article were taken from the providers' own UK pages and verified in July 2026. Providers change terms regularly, so confirm current pricing with the provider before you buy.