HelchPOS vs NOQ: the event platform, and the venue platform
NOQ runs festivals and events at scale, and processes the payments. HelchPOS runs the building the rest of the year. By people who moved a food hall off NOQ.
We have more first-hand knowledge of NOQ than of anyone else on this list, and it is worth saying why: Helch Market Winchester ran on NOQ before it ran on HelchPOS. The Winchester menu — every vendor, every dish, every modifier group — was exported out of a live NOQ account, and its API was read carefully while we were deciding what a sale record ought to keep. So this comparison is not two websites next to each other.
Where NOQ is ahead
- They process the payments. Same fundamental difference as every other name on this list: card money flows through them and does not flow through us.
- The event layer. Attendee management, festival modes, sponsor tooling, cashless and RFID, click & collect at event scale. If you are running a weekend for forty thousand people, that is a product category we have not built.
- Proof. Twenty-seven case studies — Tall Ships Races Aberdeen, Secret Garden Party, SailGP, Fabric London. We have one, and it is our own venue.
Where HelchPOS is ahead
- The whole venue-management half. Rotas, clocking in with a photo if you ask for one, and a location, holiday accrual, contracts, working-time compliance, labour against sales live. NOQ's site does not describe any of it.
- Stock and margin. Recipes with ingredients, theoretical against actual gross profit, stocktakes that record a variance rather than overwriting a number, purchase orders that come out of a stock count.
- Your data stays yours. We copied the lesson: NOQ's sale record keeps per-payment rows, per-item tax and discount attribution, and ours now does too — deliberately matched, because it was the right shape. Our public API is documented and keyed so you can read your own sales out whenever you like.
- Photographs you own. When Helch left NOQ, 127 menu photographs were still being served from a bucket NOQ controlled. They are now in storage the hall owns. Ask any supplier where your pictures live before you upload two hundred of them.
Who should choose which
Events are their home ground. A touring festival operation with sponsors, wristbands and forty bars wants NOQ's event layer, and we would say so.
A permanent building that trades every week, counts stock, employs people and cares what its gross profit really was — that is the shape we built for, and the half NOQ does not describe.
The same caveats apply to us here. No integrated payments, no delivery adapter proven against a live restaurant, no text message ever sent. Our one case study is our own food hall. Printing was on this list when we wrote it; since 27 August 2026 a Star TSP143IV at a live venue prints dockets over CloudPRNT, and the Epson and label-printer paths are still unproven.
NOQ public claims read from noqgroup.com on 15 August 2026; API observations from a live account read in August 2026. Written by the HelchPOS team.