HelchPOS vs Square
Square is the default for small business everywhere, and its breadth is real. The comparison turns on shape: Square for Restaurants Plus is £69 a month per location, extras are priced on top, and its restaurant pages do not describe the multi-vendor basket a food hall lives on. Here those are the product.
| HelchPOS | Square | |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | ✓ | ½ |
| 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. | £0 – £29+/mo, plus £15 per kitchen screen, £35 per kiosk, £25 loyalty — each per month. |
Read off Square’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 Square if…
You are a single small business that wants payments, a till and a huge ecosystem from one household name, and per-add-on pricing suits how little of it you need.
Pick HelchPOS if…
You are a food hall — one basket across kitchens, money split automatically, meal deals across vendors — or you simply do not want the till, screens, kiosk and loyalty each to be a line on a monthly bill.
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.