Toast POS Review: Features, Hardware and Pricing

Toast POS: at a Glance

We’ve rounded up some need-to-know facts about Toast, to help you determine if its a good fit for you off-the-bat.

• Toast offers excellent inventory management features including cost management and stock alerts, making it a great choice for food businesses with complex or large inventories.
• Unlike competitors Square and Clover, Toast offers a useful training mode to help new employees get to grips with the software.
• Toast offers a quality free plan and affordably priced packages too — allowing restaurants to benefit from its products without digging too deep into their pockets.
• Toast’s help and customer support tools vary by price and don’t include email or live chat support at all, making it a poor choice for businesses that rely on customer support.
• Toast’s POS doesn’t automatically back up your data, which means that users are required to update important information manually.
• Toast’s Payroll feature can be used to process your payroll in-house, which means you won’t have to outsource the task to a third party or invest in another software platform.

Before committing to Toast, we’d recommend you take a look at some other providers on the market. The easiest way to do so is by using our quote-generation tool, which thousands of businesses have already used to figure out their pricing options. You’ll receive obligation-free quotes tailored to your business’s needs within minutes.

Who should be using Toast?

• Food businesses that want to get started for free
• Businesses looking for an Android-based system
• Businesses using a POS for the first time
• Independent food vendors with specialized inventories

Who shouldn’t be using Toast?

• Businesses that want an iPad-based setup
• Small cafes and restaurants with simple inventories
• Users who rely on a live chatbot for support

Core Features

Toast offers some of the best restaurant features in the industry. Here’s a breakdown of the POS’s major capabilities.

Tableside order management

Toast enables servers to accept orders from customers and relay them to kitchen workers, all while still at the table. Once the meal is ready in the kitchen, the server will receive a notification on their tablet, increasing efficiency. When customers are ready to pay, the server can then take tableside mobile payments, with EMV card processing supported, as well as Samsung Pay. What’s more, unlike leading POS solutions like Square and Zettle, Toast also includes a “Guest Feedback” feature, which lets the software collect customer feedback.

Cost management

It’s never been more important to monitor your bottom line. Toast makes this straightforward by letting managers keep an eye on their overheads, calculate expenses associated with labor and product costs, and factor in fixed overhead costs as well for a unified view of total revenue.

Meals and ingredient costs can also be separated too, for an inside look at which types of sales offer the best cost-benefit.

Reporting & analytics

Toast’s POS offers a location overview with a birds-eye view of net sales or total employee costs, and can be viewed across all locations or broken down individually. Sales summaries can be produced across any time period too, giving business owners a quick snapshot of their earnings.

Toast offers some of the best reporting tools on the market, with the POS letting managers filter performance by a ton of metrics, including location, service type, and dining options. However, if you’re after capabilities like sales and payment trends reports, you’d be better off opting for Square, which also scored full marks in this category.

You can use Toast POS’s reporting features to view your top items, top modifiers, top sales categories, and more. Source: ToastTab

Online ordering

Toast’s takeout and delivery app, Toast Takeout lets businesses manage online orders and increase takeout and delivery sales. You can use the platform to create a public-facing website, facilitate online orders, display your menu, and make updates to it in real time.

Users can save their profiles and credit card information, while the interface connects to Toast’s delivery dispatch feature, letting your employees deliver the order if needed. The online site can be tailored to your restaurant’s branding, too. Gift card features and loyalty programs are supported as well, whether the user is present in person or online.

Toast Takeout & Delivery features let me manage online orders and edit my menu in real-time. Source: Tech.co user testing

Menu management

Finding a POS that keeps up with seasonal menus can be a pain. But with Toast, menus can be updated from any device logged into the POS software, including terminals and smartphones.

The cloud-based software will be constantly updated in real-time, making sure that servers and kitchen workers remain in sync regardless of which deals might be starting or what ingredients might be temporarily out.

Users can use Toast’s menu management features to edit items, prices, modifiers, and more. Source: Toast Tab

Inventory management

We found Toast’s inventory management features to be excellently comprehensive, and so awarded it a perfect 5/5 score in the inventory management category of our research. Its stock tracking toolkit is second to none, and truly stands out from its restaurant-specific competitors.

Toast’s platform lets restauranteurs track the cost of each ingredient. This means that you can see exactly where your money is going and improve efficiency, a key benefit for any POS. It also helps your staff ensure consistent portion size and account for any wastage.

Plus, Toast automatically updates your inventory, meaning that there’s no data export needed — helping you save money and time.

Customer management

Toast offers email marketing features integrated directly into its POS systems. Customers can enter their email for a virtual receipt when checking out, building an email list that can be used for automated campaigns centered on guests’ histories. Loyalty programs can also be created through Toast, with customizable rewards offered using a points-based system.

However, while Toast’s customer management capabilities are nothing to be snubbed at, they do fall slightly short of Clover’s — with the rival POS scoring a promising 4.5/5 in our business development category thanks to its own custom customer loyalty app.

Employee management

In busy food service businesses, keeping tabs on employees can be a headache. Fortunately, Toast offers a suite of team management features, allowing businesses to create one profile for each employee. Employees can clock in and clock out through the POS software, and the system will automatically log their hours worked, saving managers manual labor. Cash and credit card tips earnings are factored in as well.

Toast’s onboarding features also help alleviate the burden of recruiting and training new staff. The system lets you digitize the process from start to finish, and Toast also lets new members set up a new profile, fill out  I-9 and W-2 forms, and choose how they’d like to get paid via a smartphone app.

Payroll

Toast’s in-house payroll service streamlines the payment process for you, leaving you with more time to manage your team. The software lets you post payroll in three easy steps, reducing the need to skip manual upload. You also have full agency over how you pay your team and can choose free options like Toast Pay Cards, and the platform’s new self-serve check printing feature.

You won’t have to worry about tax assessments either. Toast payroll takes care of compliance issues by automatically remitting and filing your federal, state, and local payroll taxes for you.

Toast POS’s lets you manage upcoming payrolls, and view past payroll data, among other processes. Source: Toast

Third-party integrations

While Toast’s feature set is already pretty expansive, the POS also offers a variety add-ons beyond its basic POS software. You can find the full list of integrations online, but some popular options include the business insights tool Compeat, the ordering app PayTronix, and the delivery tool GrubHub.

However, you’ll need to consider which POS integrations are essential for your business as each add-on represents an additional monthly charge.

How Much Does Toast POS Cost?

Toast offers five main pricing plans and a separate software package for delivery businesses. There’s a Toast tier for every type of business, whether they’re just getting started or managing multiple locations. Check out the table below to see how Toast’s pricing options compare side by side, and scroll down to learn more about each tier.

Toast changed the name of its pricing plans and removed references to its Pay-as-you-go-Starter, Standard Starter, and Essentials plans in 2023.

Note: Prices updated July 2024

Processing fees

Toast also charges processing fees, depending on your chosen plan and the type of transaction. The transaction fees are as follows:

• 2.99% + 15 cents for Toast’s pay-as-you-go option
• 2.49% + 15 cents if you pay for hardware upfront
• 3.5% + 15 cents for card-not-present transactions

Hardware fees

Hardware also comes as a premium for most of Toast’s plans. These fees are as follows:

• $609 for Toast’s Handheld Starter Kit
• $799 for Toast’s Countertop Starter Kit
• $999 for Toast’s Guest Self-Service Starter Kit

For more specifics on the monthly, per terminal cost of a version of Toast POS that’s tailored to you, you’ll have to contact Toast for a custom quote. While you’re at it, we’d recommend joining the thousands of businesses that have used our quick price comparison tool to get the same quotes from other leading POS vendors available today.

Learn more about how much POS systems cost.

Does Toast offer a free plan?

Yes, Toast lets businesses get started for free with its Starter Kit plan. The POS’s free tier even gives businesses access to a free hardware kit of their choice, only charging them a percentage of each sale. This makes the free plan even more generous than the package offered by our POS frontrunner Square, and our top pick for the best free POS software.

Toast Hardware

Toast’s hardware is available separately and in bundles. We’ve rounded up some of Toast’s main hardware devices and packages, along with their prices, below:

Toast retails a wide range of own-brand hardware, from countertop and handheld POS systems to accessories like receipt printers and customer-facing displays. The fact that Toast offers physical POS terminals automatically gives it an advantage over systems that are 100% tablet-based, like TouchBistro and Zettle By PayPal, and makes it a more favorable choice for larger, established hospitality venues.

Toast POS Customer Facing Display. Source: Tech.co

However, it is important to point out that unlike most of its competition, Toast only sells Android hardware, and its software isn’t available through an iOS app. While this won’t be a dealbreaker for businesses building a hardware set-up from scratch, it rules the POS out from being used by venues wanting to build a system around existing iPads.

Check out our guide to the best POS iPad apps for our list of the best tablet-based systems.

Toast POS Terminal and Card Reader. Source: Tech.co

Setup and Customer Support

Toast POS support is available 24/7 in the US, both over the phone and through an online portal that can connect users with live representatives. The POS’s knowledge center ‘Toast Classroom’ also provides useful resources like live training and on-demand sessions on a range of topics.

However, unlike POSs like Square and TouchBistro, Toast doesn’t offer live chat, email support, or social media support. This makes Toast’s customer support center a lot more limited than other leading systems and makes the POS less favorable for businesses that prefer to reach out for help via these channels.

Toast’ POS’s resource centre has a wide range of help articles to help you resolve queries. Source: Tech.co

Alternatives to Toast POS

Toast is a solid option for food businesses with advanced POS needs. However, if you’re looking for a versatile system with an even smaller price tag, our POS frontrunner Square might fit your needs better. 

Square is our best-rated POS for restaurants and our best POS for small businesses. What’s more, with no up-front costs and an excellent customer support center – Square is even more ideal than Toast for smaller vendors like market stalls or food trucks. 

Clover is another all-around solid restaurant POS with stronger support tools than Toast, and the best customer loyalty system we’ve reviewed, making it great for hotel POS functions. It’s also our top pick for the best retail POS, making it a versatile option. Read our Toast vs Square vs Clover guide to learn more about how all these providers compare.

Alternatively, restaurants with advanced needs that use iOS devices would be better off opting for TouchBistro. Unlike Toast which exclusively runs on Andoird hardware, TouchBistro is compatible with all technology, and matches Toast’s impressive feature offering due to its unique hospitality tools like waste management and advanced menu customization.

There are loads of top-notch options out there through. Take a look at our table below to see how they compare side-by-side. 

Frequently Asked Questions