Best Bar POS Systems of 2024

Square consistently comes out ahead of other POS providers not only for the strength of its system but especially because of its competitive pricing — across monthly software, hardware and payment processing fees — and lack of surprise fees and contracts. In fact, many competitors in the industry-specific POS space require longer term contracts, so for bar owners who are hesitant to make a long-term commitment just yet, Square for Restaurants is a strong choice.

Here’s a look at Square for Restaurant’s dashboard. Its user interface is especially easy to navigate, but requesting a demo to experience the software for yourself can help you choose the best fit for your needs.

Square also makes it easy to customize gratuity percentages or go with its preset options. This is a big plus for bars that use handheld POS systems or countertop registers with customer-facing screens to cash out customers.

As a specialized POS system designed specifically for restaurants, Toast includes all the features you’ll need (or want to add-on) for a bar that serves more than just a few nibbles, including menu, table and employee management and built-to-be-dropped-bumped-and-splashed hardware. Toast makes it easy to edit and update menus, take orders in multiple ways and get up-to-date reporting on your bar. The software also automatically breaks down the tip pool for payroll.

Toast’s sales summary report, as seen below, provides insight into your net sales by day of the week and time of day, so that you can staff your bar accordingly and run promotions when it makes the most sense. You can see how gratuity amounts, net sales and discounts have changed year over year, too.

Toast also has its own bar menu template that you can fill out, pass along to your onboarding team and use to determine drink pricing.

Similar to Square, the company sells its own handheld terminal for employees taking orders tableside, in addition to a countertop register. The Go 2 device, shown below, is made specifically for restaurants to withstand spills, has a 24-hour battery life and lets employees know when orders are ready.

Clover is another household name in the POS industry offering solutions for various business types, including bars. The company offers a variety of sleek and sturdy proprietary hardware options and discloses pricing for each on its website. Clover is also transparent with its monthly software fees, offered at a variety of tiers depending on business need, and payment processing fees.

Here’s Clover’s customer engagement tools in action. When customers download the Clover app, they can leave reviews, send feedback and receive discounts. But the Clover app isn’t the only way bars can interact with customers — promotions can also be sent through email, text or social media.

Clover offers a variety of hardware products, including the Clover Station, pictured below. You can see that its home screen includes access to rewards, feedback and customer promotions.

Lightspeed acquired Upserve in 2020 and built on its restaurant POS prowess to create Lightspeed Restaurant POS. Like many of the other specialized systems in this space, Lightspeed Restaurant comes with a wealth of tools and features a bar POS system should have, including bill splitting, inventory management and a training mode to quickly onboard new staff.

Lightspeed Restaurant has in-depth inventory tracking, shown below, that automatically updates ingredient levels as menu items are ordered. You can also view your bar’s current stock value, set up low-stock alerts and send recurring purchase orders to vendors.

Additionally, you can use its reporting tools to gain insight into menu performance with categories like “most popular” menu items and “repeat customer favorites.”

TouchBistro is another recognizable POS brand in the bar and restaurant industry. As such, it comes with many of the features you would expect, including tools to manage staff, menus, tables and inventory. It also comes loaded with dozens of reports to offer useful business insights on customers, employees and revenue.

Busy bars that accept reservations will appreciate TouchBistro’s reservations add-on. As you can see below, the iPad reservations app in the floor plan view lets you view reservations for a particular day, along with which table the system automatically assigned each party to. You can use it to view guests’ visit history as well.

Bars can customize their POS system with other TouchBistro add-ons, like online ordering, loyalty programs, gift cards and profit management tools.