What Is the Best Restaurant POS System in 2025?

As a restaurant owner, you constantly have to make decisions to further your business. On top of choosing your niche and crafting the perfect menu, you also have to settle on an answer for: What is the best restaurant POS system?

There are countless options out there, but not all of them will be a good fit for your restaurant. In this article, we look at the main restaurant POS system features you must look out for and our suggestion for the best POS system out there.

Taking orders by writing them down and only accepting cash will limit the number of customers you can serve and will also make your speed of service slower, leading to unhappy clients.

On the other hand, the best restaurant POS system will:

• Improve operational efficiency: using a POS system, you can open a check in just a few clicks and immediately send it to the kitchen. No mistakes and no unnecessary waiting times;
• Improve speed of service: especially during rush hours, POS systems enable you to open checks and accept payments in seconds, so you can serve as many customers as possible;
• Allow you to accept a variety of payment methods: be it cash, card, smartphone, or smartwatch. Each customers gets to choose their preferred payment method, leading to increased customer satisfaction;
• Make it easy to improve your business: by using the Reports module of the POS system, you can identify dishes that don’t sell well or slow hours when you can use promotions to attract more customers.

To decide what is the best restaurant POS system, you must know how to rank them. The best way is to look at the features they provide and how they can help your business.

Check out these restaurant POS system features that will take your restaurant to the next level:

Imagine the following situation: a hungry customer is looking forward to eating at your restaurant, but when they arrive, they notice they only have their phone on them.

Without a POS system that accepts multiple payment methods, you would have to refuse service and lose a customer.

Therefore, the best restaurant POS system will allow you to accept various payments, such as:

• Cash
• Debit or Credit Cards
• Smartwatch
• Mobile payments

Moreover, depending on the type of service that you provide, you will need a POS system that enables you to accept payments both:

• At the table: for fine-dining or casual spots that focus on table service;

• At the counter: for fast-food restaurants or other restaurants with counter service only.

When you are trying to settle on what is the best restaurant POS system, you should look for solutions that are customized for your type of business.

For example, a customized dashboard with color-coded menu categories and easy to spot specials will help employees work faster.

Team members will be able to spot any operation or menu item at a glance, so they can serve customers faster.

How will you know if your business is moving upwards if you don’t monitor your data?

To ensure you are on your way to success, you must make time to analyze your data at the end of every day, every week, and every month. This will enable you to identify any potential problems and solve them.

Luckily, the best restaurant POS system will give you access to valuable restaurant data that will make monitoring a breeze:

• Daily Property financial report: where you get a quick overview of net sales, offered discounts, order types, cash payments, and much more;

• Employee financial report: which allows you track every employee’s performance and access info on opened checks, ordered menu items, and offered discounts;

• Employee open check report: having open checks dragged from one day to another will lead to inaccurate data. To prevent this, you can just check the report and take the necessary measures to close it;

• Check journal report: enables you to identify any fraud that may have taken place at the workstation;

• Family Group & Menu Item sales reports: so you can easily identify your best-selling dishes and categories. When you find items with a low number of sales, you should consider improving or replacing them.

In this predominantly digital age, online ordering is no longer optional for restaurants. Clients expect to be able to order your food online, and, if you want to increase your sales, you must give them what they want.

Therefore, the best restaurant POS system should provide you with an online ordering integration so you can start selling your delicious menu items online. Moreover, the best part is that you will be able to access both in-store and online ordering analytics from one intuitive dashboard.

Here are some must-have online ordering reports:

• Sales trends: to help you decide on what is the best move to improve sales, such as upselling, promotions, or menu engineering;

• Number of new vs returning clients: to encourage you to come up with better ideas to increase customer loyalty;

• Promotions: to identify what promotions work for your restaurant and which need to be changed;

• Heatmaps: easily identify the areas where you get most of your orders from;

• Online ranking: is your restaurant ranking high in your customers’ searches?

• Website funnel: is your website optimized for sales? Identify where your customers get stuck in the ordering process.

Having a server running from the front-of-the-house to the kitchen to ask for orders is not only inefficient but can also lead to mistakes and even unfortunate accidents.

If you’re wondering what is the best restaurant POS system, it is the one that allows for smooth restaurant printer management.

By simply plugging and playing, you should be able to connect a variety of printers, both for:

• Front-of-house: for client receipts, where you can include special instructions from the customers and even advertise your promotions to get people to come back;

• Back-of-house: you can have a different printer for each area of your kitchen, such as pasta station, bar, or salad station. This will improve productivity and further streamline operations.

Why go looking for another piece of technology when you can have it integrated into your POS system?

A good POS system will allow you to manage your employees with ease from a dedicated dashboard. You can add, remove, and update staff information as often as necessary.

Here are some more staff management features that the best restaurant POS system will have:

• Training mode: which enables you to teach newbies how to open and close checks, without affecting your financial reporting;

• Track employee logs: every employee has a unique ID when logging in, so you can check all the operations they perform on the POS;

• Allow different responsibilities: for example, you can only give cash drawer access to more senior team members;

• Fast POS login: no need for employees to type in long codes to use the POS, they can just scan their RFID card and get to work.

A restaurant is a dynamic business which involves countless challenges you must face on the spot. This is especially true when it comes to menu management.

For example, you may have an inventory problem or a supplier delay which requires you to make changes to the menu item availability.

What is the best restaurant POS system? The one that allows you to make these changes from the POS dashboard, no extra steps necessary. For example:

• Mark items as limited quantity: running out of menu items and being unaware of it can lead to disgruntled customers who leave bad reviews. Prevent this by marking items as limited quantity when you are running low. That number will continue to lower as new orders come in until it reaches out-of-stock.

• Mark items as out-of-stock: if you had a larger number of customers than you predicted and ran out of something, you can mark that menu item as out-of-stock, so you know it’s not available anymore. Look for a POS system where the change will be automatically applied to your dine-in and online menu as well, so customers know they can’t order that item.

Running a restaurant involves spending a lot of money in the hopes that your establishment will be a success and bring in a lot of revenue. To ensure each investment is worthwhile, you need to analyze what you get in return for the money.

When you pick a POS system for your restaurant, look at their pricing page to ensure:

• The cost is transparent: not only the overall pricing per month, but also any fees that may be required;
• The included hardware is listed: so you know exactly what you are getting for the money;
• The advertised features are included in the price: for example, if the integrated online ordering system is free to use.

Internet problems can strike at any time, even during your most busy hours. If you have a POS system that stops working as soon as it loses access to the internet, you won’t be able to provide service, so you will lose money.

Therefore, if you want the best restaurant POS system, you must choose one with an offline mode that enables you to open checks and accept payment even if the internet connection is down.

To make the restaurant POS system set up as easy as possible, it’s important to have a dedicated team of specialists to help you install the POS, answer questions, and guide you through the process.

Moreover, you can benefit from having access to a database of articles and videos to learn how to install and use the POS, such as:

• Playlist with POS operations
• How-to guides & articles

You should never make restaurant technology decisions in haste. We know most restaurants work with a tight budget and are trying to invest their money wisely, so their business remains profitable long term.

GloriaFood is the best restaurant POS system because it offers all of the features mentioned above and more, all for an affordable monthly subscription.

Here’s how your restaurant will benefit from using the GloriaFood POS system, at a glance:

• Customized dashboard for your business: GloriaFood offers a color-coded and customized dashboard for your type of business, be it table-service, quick-service, bar, food truck, ice cream shop, coffee shop, bakery, deli, or brewery;
• Improve customer satisfaction by accepting multiple payment methods: no matter what your customers use to pay with, they know they can rely on a GloriaFood-powered restaurant to accept it;
• Integrated online ordering: so you can exponentially increase your sales with a tool that perfectly integrates with the POS system;
• Data analytics that help your business grow: with access to both in-store and online restaurant data, you are sure to make the best decisions that increase your profit;
• Improve operational efficiency with printer management: by setting up multiple printers in the cooking area and customizing receipts, you speed up service and increase client loyalty;
• Make managing employees a breeze: not only can you check every action employees take using the POS system, but you also have the training mode to ensure each staff member is prepared for the job;
• Update menu from the POS dashboard: you can mark items as out of stock or limit their quantity, all from the comfort of your POS dashboard;
• Free POS hardware starter kit that contains the premium POS workstation with low profile base, ultra-secure countertop payment device, front-of-house receipt printer, employee RFID Cards for instant POS login. This is very good value for money as you get everything you need for free;
• Offline mode that enables you to keep your restaurant working as normal by accepting payments and taking orders even if you don’t have an internet connection;
• Round-the clock support and training materials to help you install the GloriaFood POS system in no time. You can also rely on the responsive support team for any questions.

What is the best restaurant POS system? One that answers your business needs and helps you grow without breaking the bank.

We hope this article has made it clear that the features GloriaFood offers are imperative for running a successful restaurant and will help you increase both profit and client satisfaction.