Toast Alternatives for Restaurants
Toast is the register; the complaint is usually the phone. Who should migrate, who should stay put, and the ten-minute demo that sorts one from the other.
On this page
There is a Toast terminal bolted to your counter and a printer at the pass that has never once been the reason a service fell apart.
The search that landed you here usually starts somewhere else. A Friday where the line rang six times between 6:40 and 7:10 and nobody could reach the handset. A statement where the add-ons and the hardware cost more than the register you thought you were buying.
A QSR Magazine analysis puts 30–32% of calls unanswered during the 5–8 p.m. peak, and that is the number to argue with before you price a new POS.
TL;DR
- Toast is a restaurant POS: the menu and the kitchen ticket live there, so swapping it is a menu rebuild rather than a subscription change (published pricing, October 2026).
- The same analysis estimates roughly 150 missed calls a month, which at a $35 ticket is $5,250 of demand nobody answered.
- Square, Clover, Olo, and Flipdish are the register-side alternatives worth a demo, and each one moves where your menu lives.
- Take your own menu to every demo, ask for two modifiers and a substitution, then ask to see the kitchen ticket.
- Kovo is the phone half at $99 a month for 750 connected minutes or $299 for 5,000 (plans), writing the ticket into Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or a printer.
Who should stay on Toast
Stay if the kitchen already reads the KDS and the manager can pull the report they need without calling support. Toast is the system of record for the menu and the ticket in the rooms it is sold to, and that is not a small thing to hand back: the modifier groups, the price by size, the 86 button, and the pass printer all point at the same catalog.
Stay too if the hardware is still on a lease. The terminals on your counter are the switching cost, and they do not come off the wall because a cheaper subscription appeared.
Who should leave, and what to settle first
Leave when the register has become a cash drawer with a screen and a bill attached. A counter shop that runs 40 cards a day and never opens the back office is paying for a system of record it does not use.
Leave too if the real complaint is the phone and the POS answer is a partner referral. That is not a reason to migrate the register. It is a reason to add a phone layer, which is a separate purchase with a separate price.
Before any migration contract, get four things in writing: the menu export format, including modifier groups and nested choice sets; the contract term and the hardware terms; the date the old system stops taking orders; and who re-keys the menu, you or them.
The first ten minutes of a replacement demo
Ten minutes with your own menu, not theirs, tells you more than a two-hour presentation. Do five things.
- Import your real menu and open a pizza with two toppings on each half.
- Change one item to 86 and watch whether it leaves the order screen and the online menu.
- Ring a $47 order with a substitution and print it to the pass.
- Refund a card, then find the report that shows the refund.
- Ask what the cutover costs in hours, and who answers the phone at six on a Friday if the KDS stops.
Step one is where most demos end. Nested modifier groups are the part a sales call glosses and a migration breaks, and a vendor who cannot load your half-and-half pie in ten minutes will not load it during a cutover either.
Five alternatives, and the case for staying
Published information, October 2026. These prices move, so check each one on the vendor's own page before signing. Kovo is in the rows below and it is ours, which is why it is marked that way.
| Option | Best for | Published price | Order on the call | POS path | Card handling | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toast (staying) | Table service and quick service | Subscription plus add-ons, quoted by plan and hardware | Not publicly listed — confirm | Its own; the menu and KDS live here | Integrated payments, rates quoted — confirm | Installer-led — confirm dates |
| Square | Cafes and counter service | Free tier plus processing; paid plans above it | Not publicly listed — confirm | Its own catalog | Integrated payments, rates quoted — confirm | Buy the hardware, set it up yourself |
| Clover | Shops already on a Clover register | Hardware plus a monthly plan | Not publicly listed — confirm | Its own, with an app market | Integrated payments, rates quoted — confirm | Hardware bundle through a reseller |
| Olo | Multi-unit brands | Enterprise contract | Not publicly listed — confirm | Enterprise order routing | Not publicly listed — confirm | Contract-led |
| Flipdish | Owning the ordering channel | Quote-based | In the stack, per the vendor | Ordering stack; confirm the POS | Not publicly listed — confirm | Quote-based onboarding |
| Kovo (ours) | The phone line | $99/mo for 750 minutes; $299 for 5,000 | Yes, read back before it is placed | Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, Epson, Star | A card on file, charged on the line; link for a first-time caller | Self-serve; test call the same day |
The options, one at a time
Square
Square publishes a free tier plus processing, with paid plans above it, and its catalog API is the cleanest of this group. For a cafe or counter shop that is hard to argue with: cheap entry, hardware from a store, and an app market for the gaps.
The caveat is the difference between an order that exists in Square and a note that sits in a third-party dashboard. Ask any phone vendor to show you the order inside Square, not a summary of it. Kovo vs Square is the phone half of that question.
Clover
Clover is Fiserv's register, sold as hardware bundles with a monthly plan and an app market on top. The installed base is large, the payments are integrated, which is why so many independents hold one.
The caveat is the bundle. Each app that fills a gap carries its own monthly, and the phone question is whether the vendor reads the Clover catalog directly or needs a separately maintained menu. The second one is a second menu to keep current, which is the job you were trying to remove.
Olo
Olo is order routing for multi-unit brands, sold on an enterprise contract rather than a published price. If you run one store, this is not your shortlist; the reason to look is several locations with several channels to reconcile, and a single shop would be paying enterprise money for routing it does not need.
Flipdish
Flipdish sells online ordering, websites, and branded apps, with phone AI inside the same stack. It fits a restaurant that wants an ordering channel it owns.
The caveat is the same one every bundle has: the phone product has to be checked on its own. Ask which POS the order lands in and what the phone piece does that the website does not already do.
Kovo
Kovo is our product and it does not replace Toast. It answers the phone, takes the order the way the caller says it, reads it back, and writes the ticket to Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or an Epson Server Direct Print or Star CloudPRNT printer. Starter is $99 for 750 connected minutes, Unlimited is $299 for 5,000, one store per subscription, and there is no overage: when the minutes run out, calls forward to your own phone.
The scope is part of the product. It answers a website chat on the same engine and books tables in its own reservation book, not into OpenTable or Resy. The card path splits by caller: a card the shop already holds is charged while the caller is still on the line, and a first-time caller gets a Stripe Checkout link with the line held open. The order limit belongs to the shop: defaults of 10 items in total and 8 of one item, either of them changeable, plus an optional order-value limit; above one, the call rings the handset if large-party routing is on, and otherwise the agent says the order is too large and keeps taking what fits. The Kovo vs Toast comparison sets both columns side by side. The Kovo comparisons cover the rest of the field.
What a migration actually costs
The subscription difference between two POS systems is the smallest number in this decision, which is why it gets the most space on a pricing page.
Start with the phone, where the money is bigger. A QSR Magazine analysis estimates the average restaurant misses roughly 150 calls a month. At a $35 ticket that is $5,250 of demand, and at $85 it is $12,750. Both are multiplications from a stated estimate, not your P&L, so run them again with your own call log.
Then price the migration. Two quiet days of a manager rebuilding modifier groups, a week of the kitchen learning a new ticket layout, and a card-processing statement you will read twice. Against that, a monthly between $99 and $399 is not what tips the decision. A shop that changes registers to fix a ringing phone has bought the wrong product. The missed-call arithmetic is the version worth doing with your own log.
Who should not switch
If the KDS is clean, the reports get used, and someone on the floor answers the phone anyway, keep the register and spend the money on the line.
The reverse holds too. If the phone rings out during service and the POS is fine, a register migration adds a menu rebuild to the week and fixes nothing. Answer the line first, then argue about hardware.
FAQ
Do I have to leave Toast to get an AI phone agent?
No. Kovo answers the line and writes the finished ticket into the Toast you already run, so the menu stays where it is. Starter is $99 a month for 750 connected minutes, Unlimited is $299 for 5,000, one store per subscription. At the cap, calls forward to your own phone instead of billing an overage.
Why do restaurants start looking for Toast alternatives?
Usually for a reason that has nothing to do with the register. A QSR Magazine analysis puts 30–32% of calls unanswered during the 5–8 p.m. peak, and a shop that loses calls at dinner will describe the problem as the whole system being slow. The other reason is the monthly: a subscription plus add-ons plus hardware is a real bill for a counter that only swipes cards.
What does a POS migration cost in time?
More than the subscription difference, which is the number every comparison leads with. Plan on two quiet days for a manager to rebuild modifier groups and nested choice sets, plus a week for the kitchen to stop hunting for the 86 button. If nobody will export your modifiers as data, add the hours it takes to retype them.
Which of these options takes a card during the call?
Loman documents card payment inside the call, published from $199 a month with no per-minute fees (published pricing, October 2026). Kovo charges a card the shop already holds while the caller is still on the line, and texts a Stripe Checkout link to a first-time caller with the line held open; paying that link vaults the card for the next call. No card number is read to the agent either way. For the rest, ask on the demo and get the answer in writing.
How long does switching the phone line take?
The software is a day; the phone number is the slow part. Kovo is self-serve, the trial runs 14 days with no card, and a shop with a menu it can import is usually taking a test call the same day. Forwarding or porting your existing line is a separate job, so do it on a Monday and Tuesday and keep the old line answering until the new one has survived a Friday.
Final Thoughts
The Toast alternative most shops need is not a register. It is whatever answers the phone at 6:50 on a Friday, and that decision is separable from the register: keep Toast, put a phone layer in front of it.
If the register really is the problem, book the demos and take your own menu to each one, half-and-half pie included. If the phone is the problem, the test is smaller. Kovo is $99 a month, self-serve, and it writes into the Toast you already own. Take a test call and dial your own number from a cell phone.