HelchPOS vs Lightspeed
Lightspeed is an established restaurant and retail platform with deep inventory. HelchPOS gives up its breadth (retail, e-commerce) to go deeper on one shape of venue: the multi-vendor food hall.
| HelchPOS | Lightspeed | |
|---|---|---|
| Counter till (POS)me&u and peazi connect to a till rather than being one. | ✓ | ✓ |
| QR ordering on the guest’s own phone | ✓ | ✓ |
| Kitchen screen (KDS)Square charges per screen; Lightspeed lists it as new. peazi’s half is a printed ticket at each dispense point rather than a screen; me&u’s routes orders to the venue’s own KDS or printer through the POS. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Self-order kiosk | ✓ | – |
| One basket across several kitchens, paid onceThe food-hall question. The three general-purpose systems do not describe it. | ✓ | – |
| Money split to each kitchen automaticallyWho gets what when one payment covered three kitchens. me&u pays every vendor out automatically from the one transaction. | ✓ | – |
| A meal deal spanning two different kitchensBurger from one unit, drink from another, one price. Nobody else describes it. | ✓ | – |
| Loyalty for returning guestsOurs is one card for the whole hall rather than per kitchen. DINES describes vouchers, passes and packages rather than points earned across visits; NOQ’s home page names voucher and promotion management, and loyalty programmes appear only in a news post. | ✓ | – |
| Ingredient-level recipe costing, stock taken by dishHalf means stock counts exist without recipe-level depletion being described. NOQ’s half is the other way about: a case study describes ingredients, purchase orders, recipes and variance against projected counts, with no costing. | ✓ | ✓ |
| A photograph of a supplier invoice becomes a delivery | ✓ | – |
| Rota, clocking, holiday and contractsDINES lists staff management without the employment record. | ✓ | ✓ |
| An API for your own reports and apps | ✓ | ✓ |
| Card payments processed for youOurs is the cross. HelchPOS records a card taken on your own terminal and never touches the money — deliberately, so you keep your acquirer and your rate. | ✗ | ✓ |
| Keeps trading with the internet downAlso ours. Kitchen bumps survive a drop; the till cannot complete a sale offline. | ✗ | ✓ |
| What it costs | £0for the software. A percentage only if you ever let us take the card payment. | from $69/mo. Essential $189, Premium $399. |
Read off Lightspeed’s own public pages on 2026-08-17 (fresher dates are marked in the text). A dash is not a criticism — it only means we would not assert it for them. Wrong about your product? Tell us and we will change the cell.
Who should pick whom
Pick Lightspeed if…
You run restaurants alongside retail, want mature inventory across both, and a subscription platform with years of releases behind it.
Pick HelchPOS if…
You run food, not shelves: recipe-level costing to the ingredient, the food-hall basket nobody general-purpose describes, money split between vendors at the root — and no per-site licence at all.
See every system side by side: the full seven-way table →
Or just try ours.
The software is free — not a trial. If it is not better by the weekend, close the tab.