December 31, 2024
Written by: The POS Exchange Team
Choosing a restaurant POS system is no easy task. With a long list of options, finding the best fit for your business can feel overwhelming. Aloha vs. Toast is one of the most popular pairings in the restaurant POS game.
Aloha (by NCR) offers a full restaurant POS integration with diverse features that are suitable for any operation. Toast is also a cloud-based POS system that boasts a list of restaurant-specific tools to help operations boost performance and enhance the customer experience.
This guide will break down the differences and similarities between the two options and help you determine which system best meets your restaurant's unique needs.
NCR Aloha is a POS system designed specifically for the restaurant and hospitality industries. Aloha POS is known for its strong performance in high-traffic environments, making it a reliable option for busy restaurants. It is a cloud-enabled platform designed to help restaurants embrace digital transformation, driving both on- and off-premise revenue while streamlining operations.
It offers a range of features under a single subscription, including fixed and mobile POS, contactless dining, analytics, online ordering, and third-party delivery integrations. Trusted by thousands of restaurants globally, more staff are trained on Aloha than any other POS system. Aloha POS serves over 75,000 restaurants worldwide. The system includes hybrid cloud capabilities, ensuring critical data is safe even if hardware fails and allowing access to reports from anywhere. Aloha also offers mobile POS functionality to speed up table turns and reduce order errors.
NCR Aloha's payment processing accepts all primary forms of payment, including EMV technology, and makes menu-building and tab-splitting easy. The system has adapted to COVID-19 by adding online ordering, QR code payments, and self-ordering kiosks. With hundreds of integrations, Aloha POS provides flexibility to upgrade and enhance your business operations.
Here are some pros and cons of Aloha POS to consider:
The Toast POS system is a cloud-based restaurant point of sale and online ordering system designed for food outlets such as eateries, cafes, and food trucks. Toast offers large and small businesses a range of functionalities to streamline restaurant management. This includes POS hardware options, menu management, payment processing, and advanced reporting features.
One of the most significant benefits of Toast’s restaurant POS system is its purpose-built exclusively for restaurant operations. This differs from more well-known POS systems that market specific POS software plans suitable for restaurants. For example, Toast hardware is designed specifically for kitchen environments, with spill-resistant surfaces and a hardwired connection. Multiple payment plans offer a comprehensive solution to every type of food business, from new restaurant openings to fast food outlets.
With Toast’s mobile ordering and checkout capabilities, you can take orders and process payments at the table. This feature is perfect for busy restaurants that need to turn tables quickly. It’s not ideal, however, as its offline mode doesn’t allow you to process payments, which could be a problem if your internet connection goes down or you’ve got seating far from a Wi-Fi connection.
Customers can place orders online and track their delivery status in real-time. This feature is perfect for businesses that want to offer delivery but don’t have their drivers. Toast will even ping its network of drivers to find someone to take the delivery in your area. However, online ordering isn’t available with its free plan, so you must upgrade to a paid plan to access this feature.
Toast’s reporting capabilities are extensive, allowing you to monitor your sales, labor expenditures, and inventory levels in real time. By generating custom reports, you can get valuable insights into your business, make decisions quickly, and keep your finger on the pulse of your restaurant at all times.
With Toast, you can make changes to your menu quickly and easily. This is perfect for businesses that need to make seasonal or daily changes to their menu. The software also makes it easy to track prices and ingredients to keep your costs in check. Its downside is that it doesn’t have a nutrition information feature unless using the Nightly Menu JSON export, a technical process that might confuse most users.
Multiple payment methods are accepted
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To pick the right POS software for your restaurant, start by considering the type of establishment you run. Toast and Aloha each cater to different restaurant types, so evaluate what will work best for your business settings.
If you're looking for a more feature-rich POS system with ultra-detailed reporting, Toast is the better POS system. It is better suited to specialized restaurants, chains, and franchises. While it is built to service thousands of locations nationwide if needed, it is also highly popular with single-owned restaurants, coffee shops, cafes, bakeries, and bars.
While Aloha POS and Toast POS offer many of the same features, restaurant owners find it easier to train employees on Aloha. More than 100,000 restaurants use NCR products, so if you have high turnover rates, it’s likely that your employees will already be familiar with the layout and have an easier time catering to customers right off the bat.
Toast VS Aloha POS System Comparison
If you're looking for a robust restaurant POS system, Toast is a great option. Check out some of the best features of this software below.
Toast has a strong lineup of POS hardware compared to its competitors. You can find almost anything you need, no matter what type of eatery you are running, including desktop terminals, kitchen display systems, handheld devices, and customer kiosks for self-service. The pricing is quote-based, and you can pay once upfront or in monthly installments.
When it comes to third-party integrations, Toast comes out on top. This is simply because Aloha does not integrate with some of the most popular restaurant software partners today, including SpeedETab, Chowly, and Checkmate. You'll also find many labor and payroll software providers integrated into Toast's system. The API in Toast's point-of-sale system is flexible, allowing you to utilize software from more than 70 restaurant technology partners.
One of Toast's core offerings is its real-time reporting and analytics, which you can read and download on any device connected to the internet. The reporting software in the Toast POS system syncs up to the internet and automatically stores all of your most important data in the cloud. From inventory management data to customer data to sales tracking and beyond, all of the valuable insights you need for your business become readily available.
Toast Pos Multi-Location Management Toast is one of the best enterprise POS systems. If you run a restaurant with multiple locations, you'll surely enjoy what Toast POS offers. You can keep multi-location restaurant menus current, even with different prices or menu items. You can even group specific locations when creating reports to organize your data better. Staying organized between entities can be challenging for those operating a restaurant with a single location and a significant online presence. With Toast POS, you can create a centralized menu and use the intuitive Toast POS app to keep everything updated.
Toast gets a lot of positive feedback for its customer support. Many users have noted the customer support team is very professional. Unlike many larger POS system providers, there isn't much negative feedback about the company being hard to reach. Visit Toast customer service for more details. Customer support is one of those elements that is often overlooked when considering certain POS system factors. Having reliable service when your POS system isn't functioning correctly or breaks down can be a major lifesaver.
While Toast POS has excellent features for all types of restaurants, Aloha POS also has its strengths. Here are some of the best features of the Aloha POS system.
Aloha POS comes out slightly on top regarding ordering capabilities, allowing patrons to order their food using multiple methods. While additional features such as online ordering cost extra (same as Toast), which many customers feel should be included, the in-house ordering features are often raved about. This company's ordering software is user-friendly, especially the tableside ordering capabilities.
You can separate checks or split checks using this helpful POS software. We love it for its quick communication functionality, keeping your front-of-house staff and kitchen staff connected through the busiest of shifts. Aloha also allows for an entirely contactless experience, including contactless QR payments and contactless delivery. Whether your customers are dining in your restaurant or ordering delivery through your app, they can choose whether or not they want to engage with staff.
The employee management features found in the NCR Aloha POS system are outstanding. And user ratings indicate that it's a clear winner. You'll find several helpful tools in the NCR Aloha point-of-sale solution for your employees to manage their time and responsibilities. Some of the features include task management and overtime. One of the unique features built into this software is the tip-sharing distribution, which makes it quick for employees to divvy up tips after shifts so they go straight into their paychecks.
If you're a business owner who spends your time between restaurant locations or often finds yourself out and about on the go, having the ability to keep tabs on your business is essential. In such a fast-paced industry, you know you can't afford to miss something important. This is where the NCR Aloha POS app comes in handy.
With this helpful app, you can access your restaurant's inventory levels, employee working hours, net sales for each hour, and additional metrics, providing insight into how your business is doing daily. These mobile tools also allow you to see which of your employees is clocked in at any time, how many guests are in your restaurant, and how many tables are seated.
The flexibility of the NCR Aloha POS system allows business to be run in any way you choose, whether you're a table service restaurant, quick-service restaurant, fast-casual restaurant, or bar. For example, the menu management features are some of the best available. They allow you to easily create food order modifications and deliver upsell suggestions to your employees as they move through the payment process. Other fulfillment features in the Aloha point-of-sale system include loyalty programs, customer information storage, and kitchen schedules.
The menu-building feature on the Aloha POS system is one of the most instinctive on the market. You can easily create separate menus for in-house dining, delivery, pickup, and third-party delivery. The nice thing is that you can dial in these simple changes on the main dashboard of your POS system and see those changes reflected throughout every customer stopping point.
Along with the menu-building experience, Aloha also delivers a custom branding experience. You can use your colors and logos to create brand consistency throughout your menus, from your in-house menus to your online ordering platform. Simply upload photos of my menu items alongside your logo to make the experience more memorable for your customers.
While Toast and Aloha are excellent restaurant POS systems, they aren't perfect. Below, we compare the drawbacks of both systems to help you better understand what to expect.
While Toast provides a starting price for its software, everything else is quote-based, including payment processing fees, higher-tier software, and hardware. As a customer, you'll have to put in more work upfront to get the best deal for your system. Spending time going through a consultation with a representative from Toast to get simple price quotes can be a long process, and as you know, time is money. Another troublesome drawback of Toast POS is that you must sign a contract when using the system. The contract typically lasts one to three years, and you must renew it yearly. If you decide to leave during my contract period, you could have to pay a hefty cancellation fee.
One of the significant drawbacks of the Aloha POS system is the lack of transparency in pricing. While Toast POS lacks transparency in the pricing information department, Aloha makes it more difficult for customers to determine their prices, estimate their initial or ongoing costs, or compare this restaurant POS system with others they like. Many Aloha restaurant POS users have also noted the sub-par customer support they get from the provider.
Several customer reviews state dissatisfaction when attempting to acquire decent support during their system setup or when trying to add third-party integrations. Lastly, you don't get online ordering capabilities with the main version of Aloha POS. The same goes for Toast POS, which is frustrating when you consider that these are the two large restaurant POS software solutions on the market today.
It's difficult to pick between these two systems, as they offer incredible features. But at the end of the day, Toast POS is a more substantial system overall. You'll get much more capability out of it, especially if you run a non-franchise restaurant, and growth and expansion are your main goals. With that said, several large restaurant chains are working with NCR Aloha or other NCR modules, so this is not to say that you can't run a successful restaurant empire with a single NCR Aloha POS system as your "brain."
Both systems have many features for food service businesses that you won't find in other systems, such as robust inventory management systems, vendor management solutions, quality data reporting, customer relationship management tools for better service, and more.
The POS Exchange brings over 20 years of restaurant expertise, serving 200,000+ merchants and processing billions annually. Our tailored POS system solutions help businesses speed up checkouts by 30%, implement dynamic pricing, and manage customer reviews while reducing overhead. Perfect for full-service restaurants, pizza shops, coffee houses, and multi-location enterprises.
We offer end-to-end service, from brilliant consultation and interactive demos to local installation and 24/7 support. Our mobile iPad POS systems streamline operations with features like order management, bill splitting, and inventory control. With integrations for business management tools and advanced security measures, we ensure your POS system grows with your business. Trust our expertise to help you avoid the common pitfall that affects 38% of new business owners who choose the wrong POS system.
Whether managing a busy restaurant, a local café, or operating a multi-location business, The POS Exchange delivers customized POS system solutions that tell your unique business story. Book a free demo with POS exchange to learn about our customized POS system solutions today.
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