Toast vs. Square for Restaurants: Which One Actually Fits Your Brewery Taproom?
Square and Toast aren't priced $131/mo apart by accident — one is built to run a full kitchen and payroll-linked floor, the other is built to be the cheapest thing that opens a tab. The right pick depends on whether your taproom has grown into the first one yet.
Toast $220/mo vs. Square $89/mo — a $131/mo gap, mostly explained by kitchen routing and two integrations Square doesn't have
Pricing based on standard plans for brewery taprooms.
Square for Restaurants isn't a stripped-down Toast — it's built for a different taproom. A brewery running a small tasting room with no kitchen and a handful of servers doesn't need kitchen-display routing or a payroll-linked POS; a brewery running a full food menu, a packed event calendar, and a larger front-of-house team does. The $131/mo gap between them tracks that difference almost exactly, which is a more useful way to make the call than reading a features list.
Monthly cost comparison
Toast: $220/mo — built for 3-60 employees
Toast earns its price with three things Square doesn't do: kitchen-display routing for a food truck or in-house kitchen, QR ordering that keeps release-night lines moving without funneling every order through one register, and direct integrations with both Gusto and Stripe — meaning labor cost and online payment data flow into the rest of the stack without a manual export. The failure mode is paying for all of that and using none of it: a taproom that only pours beer and never runs food is carrying a kitchen-routing premium it will never turn on.
Square for Restaurants: $89/mo — built for 1-20 employees
Square covers the same tab and table-management basics at roughly a third of the price, and its integration list stops at QuickBooks Online and Mailchimp — no direct Gusto or Stripe connection, so payroll and online payments stay separate systems you're reconciling by hand. That's a fair trade for a small taproom, and a real cost for a growing one: cross past ~20 employees on Square and you're doing manually what Toast would already be feeding into payroll and reporting automatically.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Toast | Square |
|---|---|---|
| Kitchen display routing | ||
| QR ordering | ||
| Direct Gusto payroll integration | ||
| Direct Stripe payment integration | ||
| QuickBooks Online integration | ||
| Mailchimp integration | ||
| Employee range | 3-60 | 1-20 |
| Monthly cost | $220 | $89 |
Most taprooms don't choose a POS once — they choose it, outgrow it, and choose again. The question is whether you migrate on your own timeline or during your busiest weekend.
Migrating POS systems mid-season is the real cost of waiting too long on Square — moving tab data, menu items, and staff logins over during release-night volume is a self-inflicted worst case. If you're within a year of crossing 20 employees, migrate in the off-season, not after you've already outgrown it.
The actual decision rule
- Under ~10 employees with no kitchen: Square wins on fit-for-cost almost every time — you're not yet running the food-service or payroll-integration complexity Toast is priced for.
- 10-20 employees, especially if you're adding a food menu or expect to cross 20 within the year: this is the real gray zone, and the migration-timing risk above should weigh into the decision now, not after you've already outgrown Square.
- Above ~20-25 employees, or the day you add a kitchen: Toast's routing and payroll/payment integrations stop being nice-to-haves and start replacing manual work you're already doing.
Under ~10 employees and no kitchen → Square saves roughly $1,572/yr. Past ~25 employees or the day you add food service → Toast's Gusto and Stripe integrations start paying for themselves.
One thing worth naming directly: a lot of "best brewery POS" content online is written by, or paid by, the vendor with the bigger affiliate budget — which tends to be the pricier platform. That's exactly the incentive our engine is built to be blind to; it ranks purely on your team-size and integration 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.