Till systems for hospitality side by side: seven you will meet in the Netherlands

How we looked, and what not to expect

Most till comparisons end with stars and a winner. This one does not. A till that is perfect for a market stall does not suit a restaurant with forty covers. So we put side by side what each vendor makes public itself, and the judgement is yours.

In October 2026 we read the public websites of seven vendors and took over what they said. If something is not there, we say so. That does not mean it cannot be done, only that you should ask in the demo. Amounts are those at the time of writing. They can change, and a price on a website is not a quote.

The seven are systems aimed at hospitality, with a Dutch-language offer: Lightspeed Restaurant, unTill, Tebi, MplusKASSA, Eatcard, SumUp and Zettle. We do not know how many businesses use which system, so we make no claim about which is biggest. More systems exist than these seven.

What to look for in any till, and how to judge a demo, is covered in Till systems for restaurants: what to look for. How to add up the costs is in What does a till system for a restaurant cost?. This article starts where those two stop: with the names.

The seven at a glance

First the overview. After that, one system at a time.

Read the table as a map, not as advice. The middle column is the vendors' own wording and says nothing about how well a system fits you.

The systems one by one

Each system gets the same questions: who is it for, how is it sold, what does it connect to and what do you ask in the demo.

Lightspeed Restaurant

Lightspeed's basic set-up is an iPad on a stand, with printers, a card terminal and a cash drawer. The iPad is not included.

You pay a monthly subscription per licence: Basic is €89 for one licence, Core €159 for two and Pro €249 for three, and each extra licence is €49. Table ordering with a handheld, a kitchen screen, QR ordering and stock control are extras on Basic and come with Core. The card terminal has to come from Lightspeed itself for its payments to work. The page does not say whether the amounts include or exclude VAT.

The integrations page for Lightspeed Restaurant (K-Series) lists many Dutch accounting packages, such as Exact Online, Twinfield, SnelStart, Yuki, e-Boekhouden and Moneybird. Under delivery it names Uber Eats. Thuisbezorgd is not on it.

unTill

Air is unTill's light package, which you set up yourself on your own tablet, phone or fixed terminal. Prime is the larger system for waiting staff, bar, kitchen and back office.

Air Basic costs €19 a month on a yearly subscription billed monthly, or €21.85 on a monthly one. Air Horeca, with production tickets and table service on a floor plan, costs €39 or €44.85. All amounts exclude VAT, cover one device and leave hardware out. Prime is priced by quote, with hardware, installation, training and service included. Three Dutch dealers are your contact from installation to maintenance. A maintenance contract is not compulsory.

unTill names more than 125 integrations, among them Exact Online, Twinfield, SnelStart, Yuki and AFAS, and payment partners such as Adyen, Worldline and CCV. We did not see Thuisbezorgd or Uber Eats by name.

Tebi

At Tebi everything sits in one package: till, kitchen screen, stock, reservations, QR ordering, payments and a guest database.

You pay one subscription with no contract. The amount depends on your turnover, and the site works it out in a calculator. Its example is €100 a month at €60,000 turnover a month. Extra users or screens carry no licence fee. You buy hardware once, or use your own devices running Android 9.0 or iOS 17 and later. Screens start at €785 and printers at €255, excluding VAT.

On the pages we read, Tebi does not name accounting packages, Thuisbezorgd or Uber Eats. Ask for the list of integrations.

MplusKASSA

MplusKASSA's hospitality offer has tables on a floor plan, bill splitting, ordering by course, kitchen screens, handhelds, QR ordering, a kiosk and an ordering website.

You can only buy it through certified dealers. According to the site you pay once for hardware and software, choose your modules, and may pay monthly for service and online services. Amounts are not on the site, the dealer gives them. You can try it free for thirty days.

The integrations page names, for accounting, Exact Online, Twinfield, SnelStart, e-Boekhouden.nl, Visma and Yuki, for delivery Thuisbezorgd, and for payments Pay., MultiSafepay, Adyen, CCV and Worldline. Uber Eats is not there.

Eatcard

Eatcard's package has a till, QR ordering at the table, kitchen screens, an ordering kiosk and handhelds.

One subscription, Eatcard Complete, costs €95 a month with everything included and no installation fee. The page does not say whether that includes VAT. You pay for hardware once. The contract length is not on the pricing page.

Eatcard says orders from Thuisbezorgd and Uber Eats arrive directly in your till and kitchen. The pages we read say nothing about accounting integrations.

SumUp

SumUp sells card readers and card terminals and has built a till on top. Table orders, a floor plan and several ordering devices come with the paid package, POS Plus.

The till software costs €0 a month, POS Plus €49. The SumUp Kassa costs €399 excluding VAT, and the sets with an extra screen and printer, and with a cash drawer as well, cost €549 and €599. The card terminals cost €34, €79 and €169, also excluding VAT. You can cancel whenever you like and try each product for thirty days.

We found no list of accounting or delivery integrations. The site says the till complies with local tax rules. Ask where that is shown.

Zettle

Zettle belongs to PayPal. The Dutch site now also speaks of PayPal POS and the PayPal Reader. The product page addresses businesses in general and names no tables, kitchen or bill splitting.

The till app costs nothing extra. You pay 1.95% per card transaction. The PayPal Reader starts at €29 for new business users, extra readers cost €79, and the PayPal Terminal starts at €199, all excluding VAT. According to the site there are no contracts or recurring fees for accepting payments.

For accounting, Zettle names e-Boekhouden, Exact, SnelStart, Twinfield, Visma eAccounting and Yuki. Delivery platforms are not listed.

What you meet online and what does not apply here

Search in English for a restaurant till and you get lists with Toast, Square, Clover, Revel, SpotOn and TouchBistro. They are American comparisons, written for American businesses with American payment rules.

Square is the best-known example. By Square's own help page, you can accept card payments with the Square app in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Spain. The Netherlands is not on the list, and outside those countries Square does not support card payments.

orderbird, a till that turns up in European comparisons, names Germany, Austria, Switzerland and an international version on its own site. The Netherlands is not there.

For the other American names, check first whether the vendor sells in the Netherlands, invoices in euros, handles a two-rate VAT split and has a number you can call on a Friday evening. That is not a verdict on those systems.

What does carry over from those comparisons

The same worries return in the American articles: systems that only work with their own hardware, a free start followed by costs in card fees and extras, and uncertainty about payouts. Here they become four questions for every vendor:

1. Must my hardware come from you, and what can I take with me if I leave?
2. Is the price in the subscription, the hardware or the card fees?
3. Which parts and integrations cost extra?
4. How fast do I get my money, and when can the payment provider hold it back?

What a Dutch till has to do

Two VAT rates, card payments and accounts you must be able to retrieve for seven years: you know the outline. Here is what the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration itself writes.

Two VAT rates on one bill

The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (Belastingdienst) puts food and non-alcoholic drinks in a hospitality business under the lower btw rate of 9%, takeaway meals included. The standard rate of 21% applies to everything that is not exempt and not under 9% or 0%, so alcohol is at 21%. One bill therefore often carries two rates: the lunch is 9%, the glass of wine with it 21%.

The rate belongs to the item, not to the bill. A till that knows the rate per item splits the day's takings by itself. Changes must stay visible too: the Tax Administration names the master data of items, prices and VAT percentages, with their history, as something a till system must be able to show.

Card payments with a terminal that receives the amount itself

There are two broad ways to connect card payments to a till. With an integrated terminal, the till sends the amount across. unTill Payments is built that way, and with Lightspeed the payment solution is part of the system. With a stand-alone terminal you key the amount in again, which costs seconds each time and, on a busy evening, causes differences between bill and terminal.

Ask which payment methods the connection covers: Lightspeed names iDEAL, Bancontact and Payconiq, and Tebi also invoice, QR payments and gift cards. Ask too what happens when a card payment breaks off halfway. The Tax Administration wants even an unpaid order to be recorded.

Accounts the Tax Administration can follow

The data in your till belongs to your accounts. The Tax Administration says so in its 2023 guidance on a reliable checkout system, which rests on article 52 of the General Tax Act (Algemene wet inzake rijksbelastingen). That article is an open standard: your accounts must meet the demands of your business, and bigger businesses face higher demands. The guidance is written mainly for software builders, but users can use it to check their own system too.

There are five points of attention. Read them as five questions to your vendor:

1. Registration: does the system record everything, including an order that is never paid?
2. Integrity: does a mistake stay visible as a reversing entry, or can someone simply delete a line?
3. Retention: are the data available for seven years, and is there a back-up somewhere else?
4. Reporting: are the end-of-day and turnover reports right, and do they show the settings they were built with?
5. Traceability: can you follow a bill back to its first record, with who, what, where and when?

Three things in the guidance are very concrete. Condensing data so that detail is lost is not allowed. A back-up in another location is compulsory, which a cloud system normally gives you anyway. And responsibility for what a vendor stores for you stays with you, so agree what happens to your data if the service ends.

The guidance also lists exceptions you must be able to see: returns, discounts, gift vouchers, open tables, a cash drawer opened without a sale, gratuities and turnover in training mode. For an inspection you must be able to supply all the detail, and the standard format for that is the Auditfile Afrekensystemen, an XML file. Ask whether the system can produce it. It is the honest test of whether your data is really yours.

What the quality mark does and does not say

There is a quality mark for checkout systems, issued by the Stichting Keurmerk Betrouwbare Afrekensystemen. It applies only to the brand and type that was tested, from the version named. The law does not require a quality mark, because the standard in article 52 is open. It is a way of making it plausible that your till meets the guidance.

The register is at keurmerkafrekensystemen.nl and shows, per brand and type, whether a mark is valid or has lapsed. The list changes, so look it up yourself before you sign, and search for the exact product and version you are being offered. A system that is not in it is not breaking the rules for that reason. It does mean you should ask the vendor how it meets the five points, preferably in writing.

Card fees: three ways of quoting a rate

The fee for card payments is the cost that is hardest to compare. The seven vendors quote it in three different ways.

The difference between the rows is bigger than it looks. SumUp and Zettle quote one percentage, which is the whole rate. unTill and Tebi quote the vendor's part. unTill calls its model interchange++: the costs of the acquirer, of your guest's bank and of the card network are shown separately. That gives lower numbers in the table, but you only know what a payment costs from a real statement.

A worked example with an average bill

Say your guests pay €25 per bill by card and you take €20,000 in card payments a month. That is 800 bills. With the published percentages, SumUp without a subscription costs about €0.37 a bill and €298 a month. With Betalingen Plus you pay €19 plus 0.99%, together €217 a month. Zettle comes to about €0.49 a bill and €390 a month.

SumUp's subscription pays for itself from €3,800 a month in card payments. The difference of half a percentage point is then more than the €19 you pay. Below that, it costs you money.

With unTill and Tebi you cannot do that sum from the website alone. Ask for last month's statement from an existing business, with the costs per card type, and convert it to the same bill.

Payouts and freedom

SumUp pays out the next day at 07:00, weekends included. Zettle says the money usually reaches your business PayPal account within minutes. Lightspeed writes that money sometimes arrives within hours, weekends included, without a guarantee. That matters for your cash flow on Monday morning, when a supplier needs paying.

The second difference is freedom. With Lightspeed you buy the terminal from Lightspeed. With unTill and MplusKASSA, payment providers such as Adyen, CCV and Worldline connect through an integration. With SumUp and Zettle the card reader and the till come from the same company. Ask each system whether you can place your card payments elsewhere.

What the subscription costs over five years

A subscription is an amount per month, but you sign for sixty months. The examples below are arithmetic with published amounts. They are not quotes.

Lightspeed: two tills, two tiers

Say you have two tills, a fixed one and a tablet. On Basic you pay €89 for the first licence and €49 for the second, together €138 a month and €8,280 over five years. Core includes two licences and costs €159 a month, €9,540 over five years. That is €21 a month more, €1,260 over five years, for which the site lists table ordering, kitchen screens, QR ordering, stock control and gift vouchers, among other things. Hardware and card fees come on top.

unTill: year or month

Air Horeca costs €39 a month on a yearly subscription and €44.85 on a monthly one, both excluding VAT. The difference is €5.85 a month and €70.20 a year, per device. Ask whether you can pause the monthly plan in a quiet season. Then the difference can pay for itself. If you are open all year, you pay it for nothing.

The other systems

Eatcard Complete costs €95 a month, €5,700 over five years. SumUp POS Plus costs €49 a month, €2,940 over five years, plus €399 for the till itself and possibly €19 a month for Betalingen Plus. Those amounts say nothing about what you get for them, so count only the parts you will use. At Tebi the subscription depends on your turnover. At MplusKASSA and unTill Prime the price comes from a dealer's quote. Ask then for an amount over sixty months with every line in it: hardware, installation, training, modules, service costs and indexation.

Integrations with bookkeeping, delivery platforms and your own ordering site

A till that passes nothing on makes you retype. What the vendors name differs a lot.

Read this with care. Not named is not the same as not possible. An integration can exist without appearing on the pages we read, or run through a middleman with its own monthly fee and its own outages. So ask whether an integration is direct, and what it costs.

Your bookkeeper wants the takings per day, split by VAT rate and payment method. Ask for a real export from an existing business, not a screenshot from a demo. Which figures from your till you track yourself is covered in Restaurant bookkeeping: the numbers you need to track.

The systems also differ in how Thuisbezorgd and Uber Eats orders come in. Eatcard says orders from both arrive directly in till and kitchen. MplusKASSA names Thuisbezorgd. Lightspeed names Uber Eats. An integration saves typing and mistakes on the ticket, and otherwise changes nothing in your agreement with the platform. Why guests order through platforms, and how to bring them to your own channel, is in Why guests order through platforms, and how to win them back.

Orders from your own site should land where the counter order lands. Lightspeed uses Order Anywhere and partners for that, unTill has a webshop, MplusKASSA an ordering website and Eatcard a takeaway webshop. What a good ordering system does is in Ordering systems compared: what a good one actually does, and you can read more about ordering on the ordering page. Which reports from your till matter is in Reading your numbers: the reports that matter.

How to choose between the seven

Choose in six steps, and let the brand come last.

1. Decide first who your payment provider is. It sets your card fees and your payouts, and with some systems your till as well.
2. Decide how many devices you need and which you already own. Tebi runs on your own Android and iOS devices, unTill Air on your own hardware, and with Lightspeed the iPad is not in the package.
3. Write down which integrations cannot be missing: your bookkeeping, a delivery platform, your own ordering site.
4. Ask two or three systems for the same quote over sixty months, with every cost line in it.
5. Run the demo with your own menu, have someone from your team work the screen and have the wifi switched off.
6. Ask each system about the quality mark, or how the vendor meets the guidance of the Tax Administration.

What to watch for per kind of business

• A counter or stall with one or two devices: low start-up costs and fast payouts. SumUp and Zettle start with no monthly fee for the basics, unTill Air from €19 a month.
• A restaurant with waiting staff and a kitchen: tables, kitchen screens and handhelds. unTill and MplusKASSA name floor plans and ordering by course, Lightspeed names table ordering with a handheld and kitchen screens from Core, and Eatcard and Tebi name kitchen screens. With SumUp table ordering is in POS Plus. Zettle names none of these.
• Takeaway and delivery: look at how orders from Thuisbezorgd, Uber Eats and your own site arrive. Eatcard and MplusKASSA name Thuisbezorgd, Lightspeed and Eatcard name Uber Eats.
• Several sites: Lightspeed names multi-site management at its top tier. Ask the others how they manage one menu across several businesses.

Two questions make the most difference among these seven. Who provides the service? With MplusKASSA and unTill it is a dealer, and Lightspeed names support by chat and phone around the clock. And where does your money go: into the subscription, the hardware or the card fees? A breakdown seldom comes at a convenient time, so a vendor who knows your business is worth more than a polished demo.

Switching, contract traps and your data

Mistakes with a till happen at two moments: when you sign and when you leave. The first sits in the contract, the second in your data.

Leases, rental and terminals

Ask of every hardware proposal whether you buy, rent or lease, and from whom. With a lease, a third party can sit between you and the vendor, and the lease can keep running if you cancel the software, so you pay for devices you no longer use. A card terminal can also have its own contract with the payment provider. Ask about the term and the rental, and whether the terminal can move to another till. Ask too when the provider can hold back payouts or close an account, and for how long.

Term, indexation and renewal

Look for four lines in any contract: the term, the notice period, whether the contract renews itself and whether the price rises each year. Of the seven, Tebi says it has no contracts, SumUp lets you cancel whenever you like, Zettle names no contracts or recurring fees for payments, and unTill Air can be stopped when needed. For Lightspeed, Eatcard and MplusKASSA the term was not on the pages we read. Ask, and get the answer into the quote.

Taking your data with you

Even if you switch, the data of the old system remains part of your accounts for seven years, the retention period the Tax Administration names. So know in advance how to get at it. Ask which export exists for takings per day, item, VAT rate and payment method, whether the system can produce the Auditfile Afrekensystemen, and how long your old account stays readable after cancelling and at what cost.

Your guest data belongs in it too, as far as you recorded consent. What you can do with it is in Restaurant CRM: turning guest data into repeat visits. Make an export yourself every quarter as well and keep it with your bookkeeper, so you never depend on a vendor that closes down.

How to switch without a gap in your figures

1. Pick a quiet day at the start of a month or quarter, never a Friday. That way a VAT period sits in one system.
2. Have your menu, the VAT rate per item and your item groups ready before the hardware arrives.
3. Export your sales history and guest data from the old system, and check one day against your bank statement.
4. Keep the old account active until after the first month-end close.
5. After the first day, put the end-of-day report next to your card statement and your cash.