Toast POS System Review

Toast POS is best suited for hospitality businesses because it has been created exclusively for this industry. Its restaurant-grade hardware protects your system, and its software has open integrations, allowing you to integrate apps with ease.

Our research team extensively compared 12 POS providers, focusing on several different areas that include: hardware, price, usability, and help and support.

Overall, Toast POS scores a 3.7/5 in our research, with the highest scores in business management, stock management, usability, and price.

It offers some great features for the hospitality industry and ranks highly on our list of best restaurant POS systems. However, it doesn’t perform strongly all around. It scores very low in the help and support area with a 1/5, and in the business development area, with a 2.5/5.

How Much Does Toast Cost?

Toast’s free plan is a good option for start-ups and small businesses. Other POS providers, such as Square, also have a free POS app, but Toast offers restaurant-specific features and lets you choose add-ons. If your business is not in the hospitality industry, Square may be a better option. Zettle by PayPal also offers a free POS app designed for hospitality, however Zettle offers less features and is a more suitable for POS for food trucks and small cafes.

The Point of Sale package offers a fairly affordable plan for businesses looking for restaurant features and payroll software, since Toast lets you bundle its payroll software with its POS software at no added cost, for $69 per month. Splitting the two can often be costly and, with it all on one system, you get the advantage of your POS system speaking to your payroll software, ensuring it’s accurate and up to date.

The Point of Sale package also gives you access to a wider range of add-ons than the Starter Kit, like accounting and team management.

The Pros and Cons of Toast

Pro: Designed for the hospitality industry

As Toast has been designed for the hospitality industry, it has numerous specialized features. The software offers tableside service, menu engineering, detailed reports, as well as online ordering and delivery.

Toast hardware has been built to withstand heat, grease, and spills. As well as being durable, the hardware is sleek and modern, an aesthetically pleasing addition to your business.

Toast Go is a handheld POS system that allows you to take orders and process payments anywhere in your restaurant.

You can also opt for a customer-facing screen for your till system for greater transparency. Other hardware options include self-ordering kiosks, and a kitchen display. Toast Flex for Kitchen has been built to withstand the heat and grease of kitchens to avoid your hardware being destroyed.

The kitchen display has one screen to ensure orders are accurate and on time, plus, you can set up the system to suit your kitchen’s workflow.

Pro: Solid stock management tools

Stock management scores a perfect five in our research because it has numerous tools for managing your inventory. This comes in the form of xtraCHEF by Toast, an integrated solution for automating accounting and inventory management.

Count lists can be carried out on a phone or mobile device, even without a connection to Wi-Fi. Inventory counts can be assigned to specific staff members, so it can’t be skipped or forgotten.

This platform centralizes all your orders, vendors, and product catalog. Once you’ve taken an initial inventory, it creates an order guide for you so that you can stay on top of what needs to be reordered and when. You can then choose to schedule recurring orders for your most popular items.

Pro: Easy to use

Toast scored a 5/5 in this area as its interface is sleek and designed to be a modern addition to your eatery. The system is intuitive and easy to use, with users reporting that they had little trouble figuring out how the system works.

It’s important for POS systems in the hospitality industry to be easy to use, as a slow system can reduce service speed and can cause major issues. Toast’s handheld system, Toast Go, has a 24 hour battery and the Toast Go 2 is said to have up to 3x faster processing speed than Toast Go.

Con: CRM functionalities only available via a third-party app

Toast doesn’t have an in-built CRM (customer relationship management) system, so you’ll need to use a third-party provider to access one.

The issue with this is that using a third party means there’s more of a chance that things will go wrong as it hasn’t necessarily been built to work with Toast. Plus, when things do go wrong, you’ll need to contact the third party to deal with it, and if there’s an issue on both sides, fixing it could be a struggle.

Con: Poor customer support

The customer support area has been scored a 1/5 in our research. While Toast offers customer support through call, email, and live chat, many users have reported that its customer support is not very quick or reliable. It can often take customers a while to receive a response to their issue or query, or to get a call back from customer service.

Toast does offer in-person training, so you can customize the system to suit your business. On the day you go live, it offers support so you can overcome any immediate hurdles.

For further support as you use the system, you can access ‘Toast University’ online, which includes training videos and tutorials.

Toast’s Key Features Explained

Let’s explore some of Toast’s top features:

✓ Multi-Location Management

With Toast, you can manage multiple locations at once, and standardize your operations to provide a consistent experience for your customers and staff.

You can opt for one menu across all locations, or set different prices across each location.

Not only that, but Toast is available internationally: in the USA, United Kingdom and Canada.

✓ Payroll and Team Management

Toast offers payroll solutions suitable for all 50 states. Toast can remit and file federal, state, and local payroll taxes.

Team management tools include timesheet integration that directly syncs to payroll, employee scheduling, and an integrated tip pool.

Some users have found that the payroll integration does not work well and is not easy to use. For businesses with more complex payroll needs, Toast’s payroll solution may not be a good fit. You can still choose to use Toast, but opt for different payroll software.

The payroll software does not come with the free plan, and if you want to use it, prices start from $110 per month for the Restaurants Basics package.

✓ Free Plan

Toast offers a free plan, suitable for single-location businesses with one or two terminals. This version does not include a loyalty program, gift cards, or email marketing. It does not include the payroll and team management solutions. However, it does include core features necessary to run a hospitality business.

For businesses on a tight budget, this is a great option, although you will need to fork out for Toast hardware.  You can use your own hardware, but it will need to be Android-operated. If you go for this option, Toast is unable to provide complete support.

✓ Online Ordering and Delivery

Your customers can order online with online ordering that’s integrated with Toast Marketing and Toast Loyalty. The online ordering functionality is integrated with the POS system to ensure orders are carried out on time. You can also set windows for accepting orders to prevent your staff from being overwhelmed during busy periods.

✓ Integrations

Toast offers integrations with a range of third-party providers. These include OpenTable, Craver, and Uber Eats. These integrations help expand the system and give your business the ability to scale and grow at a steady pace.

Users have reported that the integrations work fairly well. However, with almost all third-party integrations, there’s always a chance that functionalities may not work as smoothly compared to integrated features. Plus, if something goes wrong, you’ll need to deal directly with the third party, which can be frustrating.

✓ Order and Pay at Table

Customers can both order and pay at their table by scanning a QR code. They can even choose to pay via Apple Pay, for a quick and convenient process. This option reduces the stress on your staff, and gives your customers more options when it comes to reading the menu and ordering.

What kind of business is Toast best for?

Toast is best for businesses in the hospitality industry, specifically, restaurants and bars.

Restaurants

Toast is one of the best POS systems for restaurants as it has been designed with this industry in mind. It features specific tools and solutions such as menu engineering, tableside service, and online ordering and delivery.

For hospitality businesses that start out small, the free plan is a good option and, as your business expands and grows, you can opt for the paid plans.

With restaurant-grade hardware and simple kitchen display systems, Toast offers a functional and sleek POS system.

We recommend Toast for restaurants of all types and sizes as it has the functionality and tools to deal with a variety of hospitality businesses.

Bars

Toast’s durable POS hardware, and hospitality features such as menu engineering, stock management, and marketing tools make it a great choice for bars. Toast can automatically generate profiles based on credit card payments and it can also collect email addresses for digital receipts. You can use this customer data to send out marketing emails from the Toast dashboard. This feature is helpful if you host events or want to announce special offers.

Working in the Food & Beverage Industry? Don’t miss Expert Market’s exclusive industry report – sponsored by Toast – exploring today’s challenges and future predictions.

Please note: All Expert Market Reviews, including this one, are editorially impartial, and Toast’s sponsorship of our 2024 Food & Beverage report, shown above, in no way affects their rating or the content on this page.

How does Toast compare to its competitors?

Price

Square also offers a free POS software, with free software for both retail and hospitality. However, Square doesn’t include the price of hardware in its free plan, unlike Toast, so you’ll still have to pay for that upfront.

For the paid plans, Toast’s Point of Sale plan is a middle of the road option, at $69 per month. Other providers generally offer similar, if not more expensive plans, although Toast might end up costing the same in the end, since you’re likely to need to pay for add-ons. Toast also only runs on an Android operating system, so you’ll need to ensure you have this, or purchase Toasts hardware.

Bear in mind, that if you choose not to go with Toast’s own hardware, if something goes wrong, they won’t be able to help you fix it. But we do know that providers such as Square also offer very affordable hardware, with costs starting at $59 for a card reader.

Features

As a whole, Square offers some of the highest-rated features. Although Toast wins by some brownie points in the hardware area, scoring a 4.1/5 over Square’s 4/5. Toast’s toughest competitor might be Lightspeed, as it offers a restaurant-specific system. Lightspeed scores higher than, or the same as, Toast in all areas except price, as Toast offers a free plan whereas Lightspeed doesn’t.

Business Development

Toast scored a low 2.5/5 in this area, which includes features such as a CRM system, loyalty programs, ecommerce platform, and brand awareness. Toast scores low in this area, especially as CRM functionalities are only available through a third-party integration.

It does, however, include a loyalty program. This is linked to a customer’s credit card, so they don’t even need to bring their loyalty card with them. You also get reports on your loyalty program, so you can keep an eye on your regulars, and see how well your program is working out.

None of the other providers score a 5/5, with the highest being a 4/5, so it seems no provider is doing especially well in this area.

Does Toast have good reviews?

Overall, customers like the features and hardware Toast offers, such as payroll integration, self-service kiosk, and extensive reporting. Users also liked how easy it was to use and set up.

Many users reported having a bad experience with customer service, finding it hard to get in contact with a customer service agent and have their queries answered quickly. Some users reported that they felt like they were misled as they needed to purchase add-ons to access features they were initially shown.

How We Reviewed Toast POS