Choosing a restaurant POS comes down to a few decisions that matter more than feature lists: cloud vs legacy, whether you're locked into hardware, how it behaves offline, multi-branch control, tax compliance, and how painful migration will be. This guide walks through each with a checklist you can use.
Every restaurant POS takes orders, sends them to the kitchen, and processes payment. That's table stakes. What separates systems is everything around that core: how orders arrive (counter, QR, delivery apps), how the kitchen receives them, whether stock and staff are connected, and how the day closes for tax.
Before comparing products, write down your non-negotiables. For an operator in Egypt, that list usually includes ETA-compliant e-receipts, Arabic support, and pricing in EGP — filters that quietly rule several global systems in or out.
A cloud POS stores your data centrally and updates itself, so you can see sales from anywhere and add a branch without a server. A legacy (on-premise) POS keeps data on a machine in the restaurant — powerful at large scale, but heavier to run and slower to change.
For most independent and growing restaurants, cloud wins on cost and flexibility. The one fair worry about cloud — what happens when the internet drops — is answered by offline mode (below).
Some vendors sell you their hardware and charge per cashier terminal. That turns a simple counter into a five-figure commitment before you ring a single sale, and it makes adding a register expensive.
Prefer a system that runs on devices you already own — an iPad, an Android tablet, or a browser — with no per-device license. WDPW, for example, runs on all three with unlimited POS devices on every plan.
In a region where connectivity and power can be uneven, a cloud-only POS that freezes during an outage is a real risk. Ask whether the POS — and the kitchen display — keep working offline and reconcile automatically when the connection returns.
If you'll ever run more than one location, check that menus, staff, permissions, inventory, and reporting are centralized, not copied per branch. And confirm tax compliance is built in: in Egypt that means ETA-ready e-receipts and an immutable end-of-day Z-report.
Switching systems is where deals stall. The best migrations import your menu, modifiers, customers, and inventory automatically and let you run both systems in parallel before cutting over. A vendor that makes you re-enter your menu by hand is telling you something.
It varies by model. Systems that bundle hardware and per-cashier licenses cost more as you add registers. Flat-plan cloud systems are more predictable — WDPW, for example, is a flat annual EGP price with unlimited devices. Compare total cost for your number of registers and card volume.
Not with a modern cloud POS. Systems like WDPW run on iPads, Android tablets, or browsers you already own, with no proprietary hardware required.
Offline reliability and migration cost. A POS that stalls during an outage or forces manual menu re-entry causes far more pain than a missing feature.
