Toast POS vs. Square for Restaurants: Which One Actually Fits Your Bakery?
A bakery's POS decision isn't about menu complexity — it's about whether you're running a wedding-cake production calendar behind a retail counter, or just ringing up croissants. That's what actually decides which one fits.
Toast POS vs. Square for Restaurants — $89/mo vs. $175/mo, and Square tops out at 40 employees
The right pick depends on where your headcount sits relative to Square's 40-employee ceiling — not just the sticker price.
Both platforms will ring up a croissant and take a card. The real question for a bakery is narrower: does your kitchen need order-ahead tickets routed to a screen back by the ovens, or is a printed receipt and a verbal "two dozen for the Chen order" still working fine? That single workflow question, more than any feature checklist, is what separates the two.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Square for Restaurants | Toast POS |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $89/mo | $175/mo |
| Team size range | 1-40 employees | 2-60 employees |
| Online ordering | ||
| Kitchen display routing | ||
| Loyalty program | $50/mo add-on | |
| QuickBooks integration | ||
| CakeBoss integration | ||
| MarginEdge integration | ||
| Hardware | Standard iPad | Proprietary terminal |
The Toast-vs-Square call weighs kitchen complexity against headcount — not which platform has more total features.
Toast POS: $175/mo — built for 2-60 employees
Toast integrates natively with MarginEdge, which matters once you're feeding supplier invoices in weekly and need POS sales data to hit MarginEdge automatically rather than through a manual export. It also does something Square doesn't: kitchen display routing, which turns a custom order into a ticket that prints or displays in the production area instead of relying on the counter staff to walk back and relay it verbally. That's a real workflow upgrade during a holiday rush with 40+ standing pre-orders, and close to irrelevant for a bakery running two ovens and one counter. The trade-off is proprietary hardware — you're buying into Toast's terminal ecosystem, not a standard iPad you could repurpose or replace cheaply.
Square for Restaurants: $89/mo — built for 1-40 employees
Square covers the same retail-counter POS and online ordering at roughly half Toast's cost, running on standard iPad hardware you can source and replace yourself. It bundles loyalty at the base tier — Toast charges $50/mo extra for the same function — which narrows the real price gap once you account for add-ons. What it doesn't do is kitchen-display routing or a native MarginEdge integration, so if your production side outgrows verbal handoffs and spreadsheet invoice tracking, you'll feel the ceiling.
Square's 40-employee cap isn't a soft guideline — it's where the platform's design stops matching the operation. A bakery pushing past 40 staff is usually running multiple locations or a much larger custom-order pipeline than Square was built to route.
The actual decision rule
- Under ~15 employees: Square almost always wins on fit-for-cost. A crew this size is rarely running enough simultaneous custom orders to need dedicated kitchen-display routing, and the bundled loyalty program covers what Fivestars would otherwise cost extra.
- 15-40 employees: the real gray zone, and it's Square's own ceiling that makes it one. If your custom-order volume is climbing and you can see yourself crossing 40 employees within a year or two, migrating POS platforms later carries real cost — re-training staff, re-mapping menu items, re-testing every integration. It can be worth paying Toast's premium now to avoid that migration.
- Above ~40 employees: Toast becomes close to the only real option, since Square isn't designed to serve a team past that point. This is also where MarginEdge's native integration and kitchen-display routing start paying for themselves in labor time saved.
Questions to ask before switching POS platforms
- How many simultaneous custom orders are we routing to the kitchen by memory or shouted instructions right now?
- What's the early-termination penalty on our current POS contract, and does it offset the savings from switching?
- Does our headcount trajectory put us within 40 employees in the next 12-18 months?
- Will we need to re-source hardware, or can we reuse existing iPads/terminals?
- Who owns re-training the counter staff, and how much lost throughput does that cost during the transition?
The decision isn't which POS has more features — it's whether your kitchen workflow has outgrown verbal handoffs, and whether your headcount is approaching Square's 40-employee ceiling.
One thing worth naming directly: a lot of "best bakery software" content online is written by, or paid by, the vendor with the bigger affiliate budget — which tends to be the more expensive platform. That's exactly the incentive our engine is built to be blind to; it ranks purely on your team-size fit, not on which vendor pays the biggest bounty.
Run the free audit with your real headcount and current spend to see which one — plus the rest of your stack — actually fits.