HelchPOS vs NOQ: the event platform and the venue one

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-eight case studies — Tall Ships Races Aberdeen, Secret Garden Party, SailGP, Fabric London. We have one, and it is our own venue.
• Trading with the internet down. Their terminals switch to offline processing when connectivity drops and, by their Mint Festival case study, store ten thousand transactions each until it returns. Our till cannot complete a sale offline, and we say so on every page that compares us.

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.
• Margin, not stock. This bullet said “stock and margin” until 24 October 2026, and the stock half was wrong. NOQ’s Fabric London case study describes managing ingredients, ordering stock, raising purchase orders, transferring stock between bars, recipe management and variance reports against projected counts; its SailGP one describes bulk-importing stock quantities. What their site does not describe is the margin: a dish’s cost from its ingredients, theoretical against actual gross profit, and a supplier invoice photographed into a delivery.
• 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, employs people and cares what its gross profit really was — that is the shape we built for, and the half NOQ does not describe. It counts stock too, and so, by its own case studies, does NOQ.

If your year really is four weekends of events, choosing wrong here costs you more than it costs us, which is worth saying on a page arguing our own corner. There is no contract and no exit fee, so trying us for one event risks the setup time rather than a term, and the whole of what we charge fits on a page.

Events are NOQ's home ground, and a hall picking a supplier is rarely weighing only two names. The comparison index sets us beside seven of them, four of which have a post like this one and three of which are on that page only.

NOQ public claims read from noqgroup.com on 15 August 2026 and re-read there on 13 September, 23 October and 24 October 2026. The case-study count was checked on 23 October: their sitemap lists twenty-eight, one more than in September. The 24 October read was the first to read all 83 of their pages as text rather than the home, about and four vertical pages plus the address list, and it corrected this post: the stock claim above was wrong and is now the margin claim, because two case studies describe stock management in detail. The labour claim holds — no page on the site describes rotas, clocking in, holiday or contracts; the nearest is a bar saying NOQ’s reporting helps it track staff shifts for payroll. Their four verticals are all event types — music festivals, food events, sport, cultural — which is why we say events are their home ground rather than guessing at it. API observations from a live account read in August 2026. Written by the HelchPOS team.