COMPARE · AUGUST 2026
The software fee
is not the decision.
Everyone compares hospitality systems on the monthly price. For a pub taking £45,000 a month on card, the gap between the cheapest and dearest software here is £1,344 a year — and the gap between a good card rate and a poor one is £2,970. Here is the shape of the decision, worked from published prices.
- £1,344
Software, year one
Total spread between the six systems we could price.
- £2,970
Card rate, year one
Spread between a 1.75% and a 1.2% rate on the same turnover.
- 2.2×
The ratio
The payments decision is worth more than twice the software decision.
Worked for a 25-staff, two-bar pub with one kitchen screen, £45,000 a month on card. Vendor prices observed 25 August 2026 on each vendor’s own UK pricing page; we re-check quarterly.
FIRST DECISION
Three shapes of system.
Pick the shape before the brand.
Almost every bad software purchase in this trade is a shape error, not a brand error — buying an all-in-one to solve one problem, or bolting a fourth specialist tool onto three you already re-key data between.
01Rota-only
RotaCloud · Deputy · Rotaready · Planday · Bizimply
Scheduling, and usually clock-in, holidays and shift swaps. Priced per head almost without exception, which is the thing to understand about this shape: the bill grows every time you hire. Some charge time-and-attendance as an extra on top.
Buy this if your till is fine and the rota is what eats your week. It is the cheapest way to fix one specific problem, and the specialists are genuinely good at it.
The catch: it does not know what you took. Labour cost percentage needs a sales figure, so either you type takings in by hand every day or the number is a guess. And payroll is an export, not a run.
02Till-only
Square · Lightspeed · Toast · Tabology · SumUp POS Pro · ICRTouch · Akru
Point of sale, and increasingly kitchen display and stock. Priced per venue or per terminal — and which of those it is matters more than the headline. Several of these make most of their money on card processing rather than software, which is why some of them are cheap or free.
Buy this if you are opening, or your till is genuinely the problem. You cannot trade without one, so it is the non-negotiable purchase.
The catch: of the eleven till systems we compared, only two advertise compliance records at all, and most hand rota and payroll to a third party. You will be buying something else as well.
03All-in-one
Kobas · Hospitality App · parts of Zonal and Access at estate scale
Till, rota, clock-in, payroll, stock and compliance from one system. Priced per venue, which is the structural argument for it: the second till and the twenty-sixth staff member do not add to the bill.
Buy this if the joins are what is costing you — re-keying hours into payroll, not knowing last week’s labour percentage without building a spreadsheet, compliance records in a folder nobody opens.
The catch: if you only need one thing, you are paying for eleven. A specialist will usually beat an all-in-one at any single job. And integration risk concentrates: one vendor’s outage is now all of your systems.
THE WORKED EXAMPLE
What a 25-staff, two-bar pub
pays in year one.
Two tills, one kitchen screen, 25 staff, £45,000 a month on card. Built only from prices the vendor publishes on its own site — where a vendor publishes nothing, the row says so rather than guessing.
Square and SumUp state their VAT position. Tabology, Kobas and Lightspeed do not — a 20% swing on every figure in those rows. We are the dearest row here because the kitchen screen puts this spec on Complete Plus; that is the trade, and it is the reason to read the next section before the table.
THE LINE THAT DWARFS ALL OF IT
On the same
£45,000 a month.
- £9,450 a year on Square’s published 1.75%.
- £5,706 a year on Akru’s published 0.89% + 3p (£4,806 plus about £900 of transaction fees at an £18 average).
- £6,480 a year if you hold your own acquirer at 1.2%.
Every software figure in the table above sits between £1,044 and £2,388. The card line moves by nearly three thousand pounds. If a till locks you to its payment processor, that lock is the expensive part of the deal — in either direction, because a low rate you cannot leave is still worth having.
DO IT FOR YOUR OWN PUB
The arithmetic,
so you can check ours.
Three sums. Do them before you shortlist anything, because they usually reorder the shortlist.
- Card processing, per year. Monthly card turnover × 12 × the rate, plus (turnover ÷ average transaction) × any per-transaction fee. Take that figure to every vendor and ask them to beat it, or to confirm you can keep your existing deal.
- Software, per year, for your device count. Not the headline. (Base + per-terminal fee × extra devices + per-head fee × chargeable staff) × 12. Count the kitchen screen and any handhelds as devices, because several vendors do.
- Cost of leaving in month six. Ask for it in writing. On a 36-month contract at £99 a month, an accelerated exit clause makes £2,970 payable immediately — more than a year of software.
Then add hardware once. A one-bar setup is roughly £575–£865 ex VAT, and two bars with a kitchen printer about £1,476–£2,073 ex VAT. It is a real cost but it is the smallest of the four and it is paid once. Those figures assume a tablet; our till also runs on a touchscreen EPOS terminal or a PC running Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), so if you already own one it can stay on the counter.
AT THE DEMO
Bring these questions
to every vendor.
The table above prices the shortlist. These are the questions that tell you whether a system fits the work.
TEST IT AGAINST YOUR DAY
Use a real shift
as your checklist.
Bring your current workflow.
List the places you enter the same information twice, the tasks people miss and the reports you prepare by hand.
Try it with your team.
Use the trial to test a rota, daily checks and the service tools you need. Ask the people who will use it every day.
Check before you commit.
Confirm device compatibility, integrations, staff allowances, support and cancellation terms with each provider.
A NAMED COMPARISON
Weighing us up
against Epos Now?
A long, sourced comparison for UK pubs — what they are genuinely good at, the five things to check in their contract before you sign, and when they are the better buy.
Epos Now alternativeWritten by a competitor, and we say where to buy someone else.
Read the comparison ↗11 UK pub till systemsPublished pricing, cost of a second till, contract length and card-processing lock-in.
Compare the prices ↗What till hardware costsPrinter, drawer, terminal, tablet and stand — real prices, and what you already own.
Read the guide ↗Labour-cost percentageThe formula, UK benchmarks by venue type, and the green/amber/red banding.
Work out yours ↗Free rota templateNot ready to buy anything? Start with the spreadsheet. Ungated, no email.
Download it ↗ FULL DISCLOSURE
We are one of
the options on this page.
Hospitality App is our product, and this page exists partly to sell it. So the useful thing we can do is be precise about when we are and are not the answer.
The shape wins on two axes only
One: per-venue pricing does not grow when you hire or add a till, whereas per-head and per-terminal pricing does. Two: the joins — hours flowing from clock to payroll without re-keying, labour percentage against real takings rather than a typed-in guess, compliance riding the shift checklist. If neither of those is your problem, a specialist will serve you better and probably cheaper.
Where we genuinely lose
We have no integrated card payments, so your staff key the amount into your own terminal. On a busy counter that is a real cost in seconds and in mis-keys, and if it matters most to you then Square, SumUp, Toast or Lightspeed are the better buy. We are a small company against incumbents with decades and thousands of reviews. We have no engineer who drives out to you. And our integration marketplace is thin.
Where the shape genuinely wins
A second till costs £0 in software, we are processor-agnostic so your card rate stays yours to negotiate, and the till, rota, payroll and compliance are one system rather than four that need reconciling.
And where to read the argument against us
The full version, with our own weaknesses listed under our own name and a table of the situations where a competitor is the better buy, is in the eleven-system comparison.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Choosing
a shape.
Do I need a rota system, a till, or an all-in-one?
Start from what you are actually short of. If your rota eats your week and the till works fine, buy a rota tool and keep the till. If you are opening and have nothing, buy the till first — you cannot trade without one. Buy an all-in-one when the joins start costing money: re-keying hours into payroll, not knowing last week’s labour percentage without a spreadsheet, compliance in a folder nobody opens. The mistake is buying an all-in-one to solve one problem and paying for eleven modules you never open.
What actually costs the most in year one?
Card processing, and it is not close. For a pub taking £45,000 a month, the spread across every software option we could price is about £1,344 a year. The spread between a 1.75% card rate and a 1.2% one is £2,970 — more than twice the software decision. If a till locks you to its own processor, that lock is worth more than the monthly fee.
Is an all-in-one always cheaper?
No, and in the worked example above we are the dearest row, because a kitchen screen puts that spec on Complete Plus. If you only need one thing, a specialist is usually cheaper and often better at it. All-in-one wins on two specific axes: you stop paying per-head or per-terminal fees as you grow, and you stop re-keying between systems. Square plus a per-head rota tool is £1,548 a year against our £2,388 — but that £1,548 still leaves payroll and compliance unbought, and its per-head part grows every time you hire, while £199 a venue does not.
What is a per-terminal fee and why does it matter?
Some vendors charge once per venue; others charge per till, per kitchen screen and sometimes per handheld. Published figures in this market run from about £15 to £39 a month per extra device. A two-bar pub with a kitchen screen has three screens, so the second and third can add several hundred pounds a year to an otherwise identical setup. It is the question most likely to reorder your shortlist, and it is almost never on the pricing page in plain terms.
How do I compare systems that will not publish a price?
Ask for the total contract value rather than the monthly figure — monthly fee times the full term, plus setup, plus any support plan on its own separate clock. Then ask what you pay to leave in month six. Vendors that do not publish pricing are not being disorganised; it is a commercial decision, and it means the first number you see will have been chosen for you after they know your turnover.
Where do these figures come from?
Vendors’ own live UK pricing pages, read on 25 August 2026, plus their published contracts where they have one. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the table says “not published” rather than repeating a review site’s number. The full methodology, including what we threw out and why, is on the eleven-system comparison. We re-check quarterly.
One venue.
Four starting points.
Choose Essentials for team organisation, Professional for fuller operational control, Complete for till and stock, or Complete Plus for connected ordering, kitchen and table management.
See the plan comparison ↗