The Best POS Systems of 2024

A POS system is a combination of software and hardware that supports transactions between a customer and a merchant. A POS system can be used in conjunction with a payment processor to accept debit and credit cards at the point of sale, track sales trends over time, manage inventory and support online transactions.

POS system hardware is varied, including simple tools like mobile credit card readers that plug into a smartphone and more sophisticated setups with countertop terminals and connected cashier drawers. The exact configuration your business requires will depend on where and how most of your business is done; some businesses can get by with just virtual e-commerce tools while others need the complete system.

The best POS systems can help new businesses do more without demanding a lot of resources. By helping you create customer loyalty programs drive repeat business and seamlessly sharing data with your accounting software, the right platform can help you get off to a strong start.

Below are some of the key POS system benefits you can expect when choosing the right platform for your small business.

• All-in-one system: A POS system allows you to manage various aspects of your business from a single platform. You can track sales, inventory, customers and reports from your POS application without needing multiple software programs.
• Reporting features: The data your POS system collects will give you details on how your business is performing. Along with your general sales data, you can see detailed information about your customers’ buying habits and identify your best-performing employees. These metrics should inform your business decisions.
• Cloud-based software: Most POS systems are hosted in the cloud, which means you can access your data from anywhere and complete customer transactions on the go. Cloud-hosted systems also bring more reliability and efficiency than on-premises solutions.
• Advanced features: Many POS systems boast advanced features, such as inventory management, e-commerce functionality and customer loyalty programs. These features allow you to provide better and more personalized service for your customers.
• Mobile payments: The most advanced POS systems offer mobile compatibility through apps that can be installed on tablets and smartphones, converting them into portable POS terminals. Retailers can utilize these mobile checkout devices to process customer transactions from any location and restaurants can use them to take orders and process payments at diners’ tables.

The more advanced your terminal setup is, the more you’ll pay in hardware costs. Source: Lightspeed

When you invest in a POS system, you’ll typically incur three primary costs: a one-time hardware fee, a monthly or annual software fee and a payment processing fee. While it might be tempting for new businesses or those on a tight budget to just pick the cheapest solution, it’s important to consider the value per dollar a system provides and its ability to grow with your business over time.

Here’s an overview of what you can expect to pay for each expense:

• Hardware: The average cost for POS hardware is $799, but you could spend up to $1,500. The exact price depends on how many registers and accessories you need. If you already own POS hardware, you could save money by choosing a POS provider that allows third-party hardware integrations.
• Software: Software plan costs range from free to nearly $400 per month. You may have to pay for a higher-priced plan if you have many users, need to track a lot of inventory or want multiple add-on services.
• Payment processing: The payment processing fees range from 1.5% to 3.5% per transaction. The fees often vary slightly based on whether the transaction is in person or is a card-not-present transaction, such as an online payment.

When choosing a POS system, there are some key factors to consider. Before jumping in and scheduling a demo or accessing a free trial of just any system, take a moment to consider your business’s needs and create a shortlist of candidates that may suit them.

We talked to business owners and decision-makers who have been through the process of choosing a POS system and asked them how they made their selections, and what they wish they knew beforehand.

Consider setup and implementation

Setting up a POS system can be a big task, and sometimes it can come with an additional price tag. For new businesses trying to get off the ground, the wrong system could cause unnecessary delays. For small businesses on a budget, expensive setup fees may end up turning a cost-effective system into a cost-prohibitive one.

“While the ongoing costs of a good POS system are usually low, the initial setup costs can be higher than you might expect,” said Dimitri Zobnin, owner and managing director of House of Enki. “You’re not just paying for the software; if your chosen POS isn’t compatible with your current hardware, you might end up spending a lot on new cash drawers, barcode scanners, and other equipment.”

Look for training and learning resources

Your staff will be working in your POS system every day, and they need to be proficient at using it. To avoid disrupting operations, it’s critical to choose a user-friendly POS system with plenty of training support and learning resources. Reducing the learning curve as much as possible will ensure your business can operate unhindered by the new system.

“Another crucial factor for us was simple training procedures. Retail often sees high staff turnover, especially around the Christmas season when you might bring on temporary staff to handle the increased demand,” Zobnin said. “I can say that extensive training can really drain company resources, as experienced staff need to take time away from their usual duties to train new team members.”

By selecting a POS system that is relatively intuitive, you can minimize the need for training, which is especially important when getting a startup off the ground or when running a small business with limited staff. Moreover, if the vendor provides a lot of easily understood self-guided help resources, your staff can reference this information to quickly get up to speed on their own.

Check the reporting tools

When a POS system offers in-depth reporting, it can become a valuable asset that helps you make better decisions about how to run your business. However, not all POS system reporting modules are created equal. Make sure you take a look under the hood at the types of reports you can run and whether a system offers custom reporting. You should also consider whether a system allows you to export your data to an outside source, if you need to make use of it elsewhere.

“We needed a POS that would allow us to export our sales data and reports as a CSV,” said Lev Tretyakov, CEO and sales director of Fortador. “We settled for Loyverse in 2017. Their advanced data export features aligned well with our needs. We export the data and use Excel to check for trends, performance, and patterns and make business decisions.”

Analyzing reports in this way is especially important for new businesses that need to establish a baseline understanding of what their customers want and don’t want. Over time, this data can be used to adjust inventory and make sure you’re providing your customers with the right products.

Find out about customization and flexibility

Some POS systems are highly flexible and allow you to customize the software and configure the hardware in whatever way best suits your team. Others are more rigid and what you see is what you get. During demonstrations of any POS system, be sure to ask clear questions about customizability and what can be tailored to your existing workflow.

“If I could do anything differently, I would explore more customizable solutions to fit our specific needs better,” said Valentin Radu, CEO and founder of Omniconvert. “Investing the time to assess our unique requirements before purchasing could have led to an even more tailored solution.”

Ultimately, a properly customized software can boost efficiency and reduce the learning curve associated with any new system. Look for a system that can be tailored to your business’s needs, and a vendor that will help you configure it in such a way.

Opt for responsive customer support

Check out other customers’ reviews about the customer support team before partnering with any vendor. You are bound to run into issues with your POS system sooner or later, and a helpful, responsive customer support team can make all the difference between a minor hiccup and a major nightmare.

“The customer support experience also plays a vital role; having responsive support can make a significant difference when troubleshooting issues,” Radu said.

Today’s POS systems go beyond ringing up sales — the software can also facilitate customer loyalty programs. Source: Toast

What are Some Features of POS Systems?

The right POS features will make it easier to run your business and streamline your operations. Here are some features you should look for when choosing a POS system.

Software Features

When considering POS software, standard requirements include payment processing capabilities for accepting credit cards, inventory management tools and sales reporting. You should also scrutinize the access management features a POS software offers, so you can be confident that only authorized employees can access the system. In addition, when considering any POS software, make sure it can integrate with your existing business tech stack — especially your accounting software. These are the essential elements of any POS software that we looked for first and foremost in our review.

Once you’ve confirmed a POS software offers these critical features, you can look for the nice-to-have tools. These include components like customer loyalty programs and gift card programs, marketing features that allow you to capture customer information, and built-in employee management tools like time clocks and tip management features.

Hardware Features

When considering POS hardware features, first identify the hardware you’ll need. If you’re running a brick-and-mortar retail store, you’ll likely opt for countertop terminals, cashier drawers and sizable monitors. If you’re often on the go and need a lightweight setup, you may instead consider mobile hardware like a mobile credit card reader or tablet terminal. Ecommerce businesses, on the other hand, can operate with a virtual system and won’t require any hardware at all.

While we’re confident our top recommendations above can meet your company’s POS needs, we understand you may want to know what else is out there. We tested and evaluated a number of other solutions and found some notable strengths in the POS systems highlighted below.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy may be best known for offering custom domains and websites, but it’s also a great POS solution for those who want to set up a site, accept customer payments and track sales. Every plan includes a website builder, custom domain and detailed website and marketing analytics. If you purchase one of the advanced packages, you can also access gift cards, discounted shipping and promotional features. Note that the system doesn’t integrate with third-party payment processors, so you’ll have to use GoDaddy Payments.

Learn more in our GoDaddy POS review.

ePOSNow

Epos Now is one of the best POS systems for businesses concerned about ease of use. The software is intuitive. It should take your staff less than 15 minutes to learn how to use the platform, meaning you’ll save on employee training costs. Plus, you’ll receive one-on-one onboarding when getting started. Epos Now offers excellent hardware options, including a touchscreen POS system, a handheld POS option, receipt printers and cash drawers. You can add the hardware you need to create a custom solution for your business. Epos Now also integrates with various third-party products, giving you many options to adjust the system’s functionality to your liking.

Learn more in our ePOSNow review.

Brilliant POS

Brilliant POS is a Clover reseller that provides additional inventory management features for a wide range of businesses. With Brilliant POS, you can track products at the item level and receive automated alerts when your stock is running low. You can also upload an unlimited number of stock keeping units and leverage your sales data to optimize your reordering from suppliers; that way, you’ll never run out of inventory but you won’t keep too much on hand either. We found Brilliant POS to be highly user-friendly, especially its straightforward dashboard that displays all the most important data a business needs at a glance.

Learn more in our Brilliant POS review.

Wix

Wix is best known for its website building tools, but it also offers POS software that’s particularly suitable for e-commerce businesses. Wix POS comes with flat-rate payment processing powered by Square and is packaged in intuitive software that takes little to no time to learn how to use. We found Wix to be useful for businesses with both e-commerce and brick-and-mortar elements to their business, blending the software and hardware needs that both types of businesses demand. It supports adept inventory management and enables customers to select flexible delivery or pickup options, allowing you to use it in the way that best suits your business and customers.

Revel

The Revel POS system is ideal for retail and restaurant businesses wanting to focus on multilocation growth. With an open API, you can customize and scale the cloud-based software to serve multiple sales channels as your company expands. Thanks to the “Always On” mode, we love that this solution can process sales even if your internet is out, while the vendor’s “payments agnostic” approach gives you the freedom to work with the payment processor of your choosing. You’ll also find tools for inventory management, employee time tracking and loyalty programs.

CardConnect

CardConnect is a merchant services provider that offers virtual terminals for a browser-based POS system, as well as a mobile credit card app, CardPointe retail terminals and Clover hardware for a robust physical setup. With this combination of tools, businesses can ring up sales anywhere and feel secure knowing CardConnect has built-in features for fraud protection, PCI compliance and other security measures. Payment processing costs are based on interchange rates that are optimized with each transaction. We especially appreciate the integration with QuickBooks, allowing you to streamline financial recordkeeping and accounting processes.

Lavu

Similar to Toast, Cake and TouchBistro, Lavu is another restaurant-specific POS solution suitable for food and beverage businesses, ranging from fine-dining establishments to nightclubs to ice cream shops. This cloud-based iPad system can include terminals, self-order kiosks, a kitchen display system and more. We’re particularly fond of the software’s dual pricing feature, which allows businesses to set one price for customers paying by cash and another price for those using credit cards. Cash discounts can incentivize diners while offsetting your credit card processing fees, so this is a smart tool to have.

Helcim

Helcim provides credit card processing services while also offering POS features and tools through its integrated app, terminal and card reader. We love that Helcim doesn’t charge a monthly subscription fee, giving businesses free access to its POS software. As a payment processor, Helcim also eschews monthly fees. Instead, you’ll only pay for interchange-plus processing rates. With a virtual terminal, online checkout and invoicing in addition to the in-person POS hardware, you can accept payments in a multitude of ways.

At Business News Daily, our team of small business sales and technology experts have been researching and testing POS systems for years, comparing some of the leading solutions across more than 25 key metrics.

We considered 112 POS systems as part of our initial pool of candidates. To determine which to test further, we examined pricing plans, core features, reporting tools and the availability of customer support. We also considered setup fees, available integrations with leading accounting software and available training resources. Finally, we weighed reviews from real-world customers to see what business owners who have actually used each platform had to say.

After narrowing down our initial list, we closely reviewed and tested 14 POS systems before selecting our seven best picks above. Our testing began with live demonstrations of each platform, during which we asked pointed questions of company representatives. We also accessed free trial software to get a firsthand sense of what it’s like to set up and use each system. We put ourselves in the shoes of a brand new user starting from scratch and went searching for training resources to see how easy it would be to get up to speed with each system.

Below are the factors we examined when deciding our top recommendations. Each is weighted according to how much the criteria typically influence business owners’ buying decisions.

• Pricing (30%): To determine which vendor provides the most value per dollar, we analyzed not just the base costs of the hardware and software used in each POS system but also the number of pricing plans available, the payment processing rates and any add-on fees.
  
• Features (25%): In particular, we evaluated the sales dashboards and tested each system’s payment processing, inventory management options and customer engagement tools. We also considered access management settings to ensure only authorized employees could access the system.
  
• Usability (20%): We paid close attention to the ease with which the hardware and software could be set up, how intuitive we found the platform’s navigation and use of key features, and the training and informational resources available to new users. We also investigated whether the point-of-sale hardware was portable and if the software had a responsive mobile app or mobile browser.
• Customer Support (15%): We examined the different ways customers could contact the vendor’s customer service team if in need of help. We also reviewed customer feedback to assess how well each company’s customer support representatives meet the needs of existing customers.
• Integrations (5%): We considered the third-party integrations each POS system includes, as well as whether the vendor offers an open API or would build new integrations upon request. While every business’s tech stack is different, we prioritized vendors that offered pre-built integrations with leading accounting software platforms and those that extended open APIs to their customers.

In addition to evaluating each POS system based on these criteria, we also determined the best use-case scenarios for each. No two businesses are exactly alike, so we put ourselves in the shoes of different types of small business owners to identify the best POS systems for a variety of needs.

To learn more about how we review and test sales technology products and services for small businesses, read about our editorial process. 

POS systems have come a long way since the early days of retail. No longer is a POS system just a register, cash drawer and credit card swiper. These days, they are multifaceted solutions that enable you to manage various aspects of your business from one platform. In 2024, POS systems will likely offer advanced AI-driven features and provide tools that help businesses optimize operations and gain data about their customers.

As POS systems change, we expect to see expanded automation abilities. Vendors are regularly rolling out software features that let you set up automated workflows for inventory management, payroll, reservations, orders and payments, freeing your staff to focus on other areas that may require more attention. Automation can be an effective solution for streamlining processes and maximizing efficiency.

We’re also noticing more POS systems offering self-service options for customers, especially restaurants. Customers can order online and pick up their food without ever leaving their vehicles. They can also use self-serve kiosks to order and pay and even pay their bill right from their phone. Meanwhile, POS systems that cater to e-commerce companies are offering more ways for businesses to sell their products online via social media and this trend will continue in 2024 and beyond.

For both online and brick-and-mortar businesses, we expect AI to play an increasingly important role in POS software. Predictive AI can perform functions that include flagging suspicious transactions and recommending products to stock. Another valuable feature is AI-controlled dynamic pricing that adjusts product prices in real time based on supply and demand.