Last updated: May 2026
Your till manages a lot in your shop, a café or a salon and installing a good POS system (point of sale system) makes the day go faster and avoids issues at the worst possible moment when asking your customer for payment, which in our experience is usually a Saturday lunchtime when there’s a queue out the door.
We looked at POS systems most small UK businesses are likely to consider. Trial accounts where the providers offer them, dummy transactions on real readers, a poke around the reporting and the back office, and tested the provider’s support line. We focused on systems that make sense for a business with between one and five sites and revenue under roughly £2m a year. Anything aimed at chains or enterprise has been left out.
A note on cost. The headline subscription is rarely what you’ll actually spend. Card fees are. The cheapest base subscription isn’t always the cheapest system overall once you start moving real money through it, and we’ve tried to keep that front of mind throughout.
Here are the six we’d recommend.
Quick comparison
| POS system | Best for | Monthly software cost | Card transaction fee (in person) | Hardware starts at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Square | Most small businesses | Free plan available; paid from £29/month | 1.75% | £19 (reader) |
| SumUp POS | Cafés and small hospitality | From £29/month for full POS | 1.69% | £39 (reader) |
| Zettle by PayPal | Sole traders and mobile sellers | Free | 1.75% | £29 (reader) |
| Shopify POS | Anyone selling online and in person | From £25/month (Basic plan) | 1.7% (with Shopify Payments) | £49 (Tap & Chip reader) |
| Lightspeed Retail | Multi-location retailers | From £69/month | From 1.4% + 20p | Quote-based |
| Epos Now | Pubs, off-licences and busy retail | From £25/month | From 1.49% | £349 (full till bundle) |
Prices were verified at the time of writing and exclude VAT unless stated. Always check the provider’s site before signing up; rates change.
How we tested
We looked at eight things on each system. How quickly you can set it up, whether someone with no training can use it during a busy shift, and how the hardware actually holds up when you slam a cash drawer twenty times a minute. Then the things that start to matter once you’ve been running for a year: stock management, reporting that’s any use, what happens when you process a refund at 6pm on a Sunday, and whether the data exports cleanly into Xero or QuickBooks for Making Tax Digital.
We processed Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Apple Pay and Google Pay on every system. Contactless was tested on both phones and physical cards over a stable 4G connection. We didn’t test every single payment method on every single device, so if you take Alipay or WeChat Pay regularly, double-check with the provider.
1. Square Card Reader
Best all-rounder
Square is the system we’d point most small businesses to if they ring us up tomorrow asking what to buy. It does the basics very well, the free plan really is free, and the hardware is good.
The free tier covers what a market trader, a one-chair barber or a pop-up needs: take a payment, email or text a receipt, see today’s takings, refund a transaction when something goes wrong. Plug in a card reader (the basic one is £19 plus VAT) and you’re trading within an hour of opening the box. No monthly fee. No minimum spend. No contract.
If you need more, the paid plans add stock, table layouts, staff permissions and tip splitting. Retail is £29 a month, Restaurant is £69 a month, and both compare well on price with anything else in this guide. The reporting is the best of the three “easy” systems we tested. The Xero integration is native and works first time, which is more than you can say for some.
The catch is the card fee. At 1.75% per in-person transaction, it’s reasonable but not the cheapest. Process more than about £8,000 a month on card and it’s worth ringing Square’s sales team for a custom rate. They will offer one if you push. Most small businesses don’t push, which is exactly what they’re counting on.
Best for: small cafés, market traders, salons, mobile businesses, and anyone who wants something that just works without committing to a contract.
Watch out for: the iPad-based tills are great but expensive new. A refurbished iPad off the high street running Square’s free app costs a fraction of the price and does the same job.
2. SumUp
Best for cafés and small hospitality
SumUp started life as a card reader for sole traders. Since buying Goodtill and Tiller in 2021 it’s grown into something quite different: a proper hospitality POS, and for cafés and small restaurants we think it’s now the best in that segment.
The interface is the thing. Staff can be trained on it in twenty minutes. Table plans, modifiers (oat milk, no whip, extra shot), split bills — everything behaves the way you’d want it to. The all-in-one terminal SumUp sells with the system, a Sunmi unit with a built-in printer and reader, starts at around £499 plus VAT and feels like a serious piece of hardware.
The card fee is where SumUp really wins. 1.69% in person, no monthly minimum, no contract gymnastics. The POS subscription is £29 a month for a single till.
It’s not perfect. The reporting is fine but not a patch on Square’s, and the stock management will start to struggle if you carry more than a few hundred SKUs. If you’re running a deli with serious inventory, this isn’t the one. For a coffee shop, a sandwich bar, a wine bar or a food truck, it’s hard to beat.
Best for: independent cafés, sandwich shops, food trucks, small bars and restaurants with one or two sites.
Watch out for: the Xero integration is via a third-party connector rather than native. It works fine, but it’s a bit fiddly to set up the first time, and the connector is an extra few pounds a month.
3. Zettle by PayPal
Best free option for sole traders
If you’re a sole trader and likely to stay one for a while, Zettle is the obvious choice. No monthly fee at all. 1.75% per in-person card transaction. The reader is £29 and that’s the only cost.
As a basic till it does what you need. iPhone or iPad app, a product library, basic stock, daily reports, receipts by email or text. If you sell at markets, fairs, or in customers’ homes, Zettle is hard to beat on price.
It’s also limited. The table service mode isn’t really worth using, the stock won’t keep up with a busy shop, and support is slower than the paid systems in this guide. If you’re going to scale beyond the kitchen table, you’ll outgrow it.
The PayPal connection cuts both ways. Settlement to a PayPal wallet is quick, and Zettle plays nicely with the rest of PayPal’s tools if you use them. On the other hand, PayPal has been known to freeze accounts for reasons nobody can explain, and there’s no easy way to escalate when it happens. It’s rare, but worth knowing.
Best for: sole traders, mobile sellers, market and event traders, anyone who really doesn’t want a monthly fee.
Watch out for: keep a backup card reader from another provider in a drawer. Cheap insurance against a PayPal account freeze on the busiest day of the year.
4. Shopify POS
Best for omnichannel sellers
If you already sell on Shopify, or you’ll be doing so soon, this is the easy answer. Stock syncs between the shop and the website in real time, customer records are unified, and a customer can buy a jumper in store and have a different size shipped from your warehouse without any duct tape.
Two versions. The basic one is included with any Shopify plan and is enough for a market stall or a pop-up. Shopify POS Pro is £79 a month per location on top and adds the features that actually matter to a real shop: stock transfers between locations, in-store returns of online orders, proper staff role management.
The underlying Shopify plan starts at £25 a month, so you’re looking at about £104 a month all in. That’s more than most rivals. You’re paying for the integration. If you sell online and in person, it’s almost certainly worth it.
Card fees through Shopify Payments are 1.7% in person, which is competitive. Using a third-party payment processor with Shopify is technically possible but they’ll add a 0.5%–2% surcharge per transaction, which usually wipes out any saving. The Tap & Chip reader at £49 is fine for occasional use; for a busy shop floor, spend the £149 on the WisePad 3.
Best for: retailers already on Shopify, anyone planning to launch an online shop in the next year, and businesses where you might want to ship from store.
Watch out for: if you have no plans to sell online, ever, Shopify POS is expensive overkill. Square will do the job for less than half the price.
5. Lightspeed Retail
Best for serious multi-location retailers
Lightspeed sits a level above everything else here. It’s a proper retail platform aimed at independent shops with real stock complexity: a wine merchant with 800 SKUs, a bike shop with serial-numbered frames, a vintage clothing store, that kind of business. If you’ve got more than one branch it gets more compelling, not less.
Stock is where it earns its money. Purchase orders, supplier management, matrix products (one t-shirt design in five sizes and three colours, counted as one product with variants rather than fifteen separate items), serialised inventory for anything expensive enough to track individually. The reporting is the best of any system in this guide by a clear margin.
Pricing is also the highest. Plans start at £69 a month and most independents we know end up on the £119 or £199 plan once they add the modules they actually need. Card fees through Lightspeed Payments start at 1.4% plus 20p per in-person transaction. At higher volumes, that combined cost can work out cheaper than Square or SumUp despite the bigger monthly subscription.
The downside is the learning curve. This is not a system you stand up on a Sunday afternoon. Allow a week of proper onboarding and lean on the implementation manager you get with the higher-tier plans. It’s worth the effort, but go in with your eyes open.
Best for: independent retailers with hundreds or thousands of SKUs, multi-location operators, anyone for whom stock control is the single most important feature of the till.
Watch out for: the hospitality version (Lightspeed Restaurant, formerly Kounta) is a separate product with separate pricing. Don’t sign up for Retail and then discover you needed Restaurant.
6. Epos Now
Best for pubs, off-licences and busy traditional retail
Epos Now is a British company based in Norwich, and it has the deepest set of UK-specific features in this guide. If you run a pub or a convenience store, this is the one to look at first. Age-verification prompts at the till, age-restricted product warnings, deposit return scheme support (now live in Scotland and rolling out in England this year), proper beer cellar management. None of that is glamorous, all of it is necessary.
The hardware bundle is £349 plus VAT for a 15-inch all-in-one terminal, a thermal receipt printer and a cash drawer. We’d happily put one behind a busy bar.
Software is from £25 a month per till, which is competitive. Card fees through Epos Now Payments (a joint venture with Worldpay) start at 1.49% in person, the lowest in this guide for low-margin retailers.
Two things to be aware of. The interface is dated compared to Square or SumUp. It works fine but it isn’t pretty. And historically the contracts have been long — three years was standard — which is too long for a small business in 2026. They have flexed on this recently, but you’ll need to push. Don’t sign anything longer than 12 months on the first contract.
Best for: pubs, off-licences, newsagents, convenience stores, and any traditional retail that needs the full set of UK regulatory features.
Watch out for: contract length. Push for 12 months. Walk away if they won’t move.
How to choose
Five questions get you most of the way there.
- Will you sell online as well as in person? If yes, save yourself a headache and go with Shopify POS.
- How many products do you carry? Ten items, any system here will cope. Several hundred, you want Lightspeed or Epos Now. Square is fine up to about 500 SKUs and then it starts to feel its age.
- Is it a hospitality business? SumUp POS for cafés and small restaurants. Lightspeed Restaurant for anything more complex. Square Restaurant works but feels less natural for table service.
- What’s the card volume going to be? Below about £8,000 a month, the difference in card fees is too small to matter. Above that, get quotes from Square, Lightspeed and Epos Now and play them off against each other. They will all go below their published rates.
- How quickly do you need it? Square, SumUp and Zettle can be running in an afternoon. Lightspeed needs a week. Epos Now is somewhere in the middle.
A quick warning about card fees
The monthly subscription is usually a fraction of what you’ll spend on card-processing fees. A café taking £6,000 a month on card pays roughly £105 a month at a 1.75% rate, £101 at 1.69%, and £89 at 1.49%. Those differences add up over a year and they add up faster than most subscription differences.
Two pieces of advice. First, don’t sign a merchant-services contract pushed at you by a high-street bank rep without comparing rates to the POS providers in this guide. The bank rates are usually worse. Second, if you process more than £10,000 a month, ask for a custom rate. Every provider here will offer one. Most small businesses never ask.
What we didn’t include and why
A few systems didn’t make the list.
iZettle Pro has been folded into Zettle and isn’t sold as a separate product. Toast is excellent but it’s a US restaurant platform and overkill for most UK operators. Vend is now Lightspeed Retail. Tyl by NatWest is fine as a card reader but the POS software isn’t a serious competitor to anything in this guide. TouchBistro has no meaningful UK presence outside a few niches.
We also haven’t covered the older “legacy” tills, the kind sold by a man in a van who arrives with a 15-year-old EPOS unit and a three-year contract. If someone is trying to sell you one of those, say no.
FAQ
Do I need a POS at all if I’m just starting out?
If you take any card payments, you do. Even something as basic as a Zettle reader paired to a phone is enough. The receipt trail, the daily reporting and the cleaner export to your accounting software will save you hours when it’s time to do your taxes.
Can I keep my current card reader and just change the POS software?
Usually not. Most POS systems are tied to a particular payment processor. The main exceptions are some Lightspeed and Shopify plans, where you can plug in a third-party reader, but they’ll add a surcharge per transaction that often makes it not worth doing.
Is the cheapest POS system the best?
Almost never, because the card fees dominate the total cost. Pick the system that fits the business and then negotiate the rate.
What about Making Tax Digital?
Every system here can export the data your accountant needs for MTD-compliant VAT and Income Tax returns. Square, Shopify, Lightspeed and Epos Now integrate natively with Xero or QuickBooks. SumUp and Zettle use a connector, which works but is one extra thing to maintain. See our Making Tax Digital guide for the full picture.
How often should I look at switching?
Once a year is a sensible cadence. Card-processing rates trend down over time, the cost of switching is much lower than it used to be, and a contract signed two or three years ago is almost certainly more expensive than what you could get today.
The verdict
For most small UK businesses, Square is where to start. Free if you need it to be, hardware that doesn’t let you down, room to grow.
Cafés and small restaurants should look at SumUp POS first. Best card fees in the segment, easiest interface to train staff on, and the hardware feels properly built.
Already on Shopify, or planning to be? Shopify POS wins by a country mile. The integration alone justifies the higher cost.
For independents with serious stock — wine merchants, bike shops, anyone running a proper retail back office — Lightspeed Retail is worth the price. Plan for a week of setup and lean on the onboarding team.
Sole traders who don’t want a monthly fee should stick with Zettle. Just keep a backup reader from someone else, in case.
Pubs, off-licences and convenience stores: Epos Now. Nothing else in this list has the UK regulatory depth.
One last bit of advice. Spin up free trials on two systems before you sign anything. An afternoon of poking around your actual products and your actual reports will tell you things no review ever can.
Reviewed for accuracy by the GoSmallBusiness editorial team in May 2026. We update this guide every six months; the next scheduled update is November 2026.
Related reading: Best card readers for small UK businesses (2026); Making Tax Digital for Income Tax: complete guide (2026).
