Best POS for quick service restaurants: how to choose for a counter or drive-thru

No POS is best for every quick-service restaurant. Choose by what your counter and lane must do in the rush: fast combos and modifiers, a kitchen screen, kiosks, online and delivery orders in one queue, and a drive-thru screen if you have a lane. Then price the plan that includes those tools, and test it with your own busiest hour.

Our guide to choosing a restaurant POS covers every kind of restaurant. This page covers the counter and the lane: which plan includes kiosks, kitchen screens and drive-thru tools, what those cost per device, and a drill for your rush. For how the POS fits with your other tools, see our QSR technology stack.

What does a quick-service restaurant need from a POS?

Need	Why it matters at the counter	How to test it
Quick entry for combos and modifiers	Most tickets carry a combo, a size and a swap	Ring your five most common combos with one swap each and count the taps
Kitchen screens that route by station	Grill, fry and drinks work from different screens	Send a combo and check each item lands at the right station
Kiosks	Guests can order while the line is long	Order from the kiosk with a modifier and pay by card
Online and delivery orders in one queue	A tablet for each app slows the counter	Send a test order from each app and from your own site
Sold-out items drop off everywhere	A kiosk that sells a sold-out item means a refund	Mark an item sold out and check the kiosk, online menu and each delivery app
Drive-thru tools	Staff must match each car to its order	Enter an order with a car description and find it on the kitchen screen
Card payments when the internet drops	The rush carries on without Wi-Fi	Unplug the router, take three cards, reconnect and check each one

Which POS systems print quick-service prices?

These details come from each vendor's own US pages. Hardware, tax and add-ons are extra unless a cell says so.

POS	Plans and card rate, as printed	Kiosks, kitchen screens and drive-thru	Start here if
Square	Square plans: Free $0/mo., Plus $49/mo., Premium $149/mo., per location; in person 2.6%, 2.5% or 2.4% + 15¢	Square add-ons: KDS app $30/mo. per device on Plus or $20 on Premium; Kiosk app $50/mo. per device on Plus or $30 on Premium; neither on Free; drive-thru workflow on Premium only	You want every price in print and no contract
Toast	Toast plans: Starter Kit from $0/month for 1 location with up to 2 terminals, on a 2 year agreement; Point of Sale from $69/month; card rate by quote	Kiosks, kitchen screens and Orders Hub for takeout and delivery; Toast Drive-Thru for US brands with 15 or more locations	You want Toast hardware and 24/7 support in one quoted package, or you run a drive-thru chain
Clover	Clover quick-service bundles: Starter $135/mo, Standard $185/mo, Advanced $245/mo for 36 months, or $849, $1,899 or $2,648 plus a monthly fee; 2.3% + 10¢ in person	Line busting with a Flex handheld on Advanced only; Clover sells a self-ordering kiosk separately	You want one fixed monthly payment and a printed card rate
SpotOn	SpotOn plans: All-In $0/station per month at 2.79% + $0.20, 2yr minimum term; POS Essentials $55/station per month at 2.45% + $0.15, month-to-month	KDS and kiosks listed among its software, with no price on the pricing page	You would rather pay per station, or want no hardware bill up front
PAR	By quote	POS, loyalty, ordering and payments sold to multi-unit brands	You run many units and want one enterprise platform

Sources: Square's restaurant pricing page; Toast's pricing page, fast casual page and the plan footnotes on its pizza page, which say the prices apply to new customers and single locations only; Clover's quick-service pricing and quick-service page; SpotOn's pricing page; and PAR's homepage.

Which plan includes kiosks, kitchen screens and the drive-thru?

On Square, the plan decides. Square's pricing page puts the KDS and Kiosk apps on Plus and Premium only, each billed per device on top of the plan. Advanced modifiers, with step-by-step flows for things like toppings or sides, also start at Plus, as does marking an item sold out across every channel. The drive-thru workflow, which assigns car identifiers and shows guests their order so they can check it, comes only with Premium. So does Send & Stay, which fires items to the kitchen before payment.

On Clover.com, the bundle decides the devices. The quick-service pricing page lists QR-code ordering, online ordering and remote order firing on all three bundles. It lists line busting only on Advanced, and the customer database, promotions and loyalty program on Standard and Advanced only.

Toast launched Toast Drive-Thru in April 2026. It adds a POS drive-thru mode for vehicle ID and lane tagging, an order confirmation screen, speed-of-service reports, kitchen screens that sort tickets by car order, and links to AI voice ordering partners such as Incept AI. Toast's drive-thru page says it is open to US brands with 15 or more locations. A single-store drive-thru should ask Toast what its standard POS offers the lane.

What do kiosks and kitchen screens add each month? A worked example

This example is made up. A counter restaurant runs two kiosks and two kitchen screens on Square. It takes $60,000 a month in card sales across 5,000 in-person payments at $12. It leaves out hardware, online orders, tax and payroll.

Line	Square Plus	Square Premium
Plan	Plus plan: $49	Premium plan: $149
Two KDS app licenses	Plus KDS: 2 × $30 = $60	Premium KDS: 2 × $20 = $40
Two Kiosk app licenses	Plus kiosks: 2 × $50 = $100	Premium kiosks: 2 × $30 = $60
Software total	Plus software: $209	Premium software: $249
Card fees	Plus cards: 2.5% of $60,000 + 15¢ × 5,000 = $2,250	Premium cards: 2.4% of $60,000 + 15¢ × 5,000 = $2,190
Monthly total	Plus total: $2,459	Premium total: $2,439

With this setup, Premium's software costs $40 more a month. Its in-person rate is 0.1 point lower, which saves $1 on every $1,000 of card sales. The two break even at $40,000 a month in card sales, and above that Premium costs less and adds the drive-thru workflow. With no kiosks or kitchen screens, the gap is the $100 plan fee, and the break-even rises to $100,000 a month.

Hardware comes on top. Our kiosk cost guide and kitchen display guide list what the devices cost.

How should you test a POS at your rush?

1. Send your top 20 items with their combos and modifiers a week ahead, and ask the vendor to load them.
2. Have your fastest cashier ring your ten most common orders in a row. Time it and count the taps.
3. Place the same combo at the counter, at a kiosk and on your online menu. Check that each ticket reaches the right kitchen screen with its modifiers.
4. Mark a side sold out. Check that it drops off the kiosk, the online menu and each delivery app you use.
5. If you have a lane, enter an order with a car description, then find it on the kitchen screen and at the window.
6. Drop the internet. Take three card payments and a kiosk order, reconnect, and check each one. Square's pricing page says offline payments are declined if the device does not reconnect within 24 hours of the first one.
7. Ask for a written monthly total: every device license, the card rate for tapped, typed-in and online cards, and the cost to leave in month 12.

What else sends orders into the POS?

List every tool that sends orders to the POS: kiosks, online ordering, delivery apps, the phone and the drive-thru. Ask each vendor whether full orders with modifiers arrive, or only totals. Our guide to drive-thru AI and the POS covers the tests for the lane.

Maple's phone ordering, and its drive-thru and voice kiosk units in early access, write orders into the POS systems on its integrations page, including Toast, Square, Clover, SkyTab (now Shift4 Dine), Lightspeed and SpotOn.

Published by Maple. This AI-assisted guide combines Square, Toast, Clover, SpotOn and PAR pricing, product and press pages with an original needs table, a worked cost example using made-up sales, and a rush test. It does not include a quote from any vendor, report hands-on testing of any POS, or name a best system.