Shopify POS vs Lightspeed,
Square and Clover:
the honest pick.

Here is the uncomfortable thing about every "best POS" article, including this one. Nearly all of them are written by someone with a payments referral deal, so the winner is whoever pays the affiliate. I do not sell any of these systems. I have stood up in-person selling across a portfolio of Shopify brands, signed for POS software per location, and watched the card-processing line grow until it dwarfed every subscription. So read this as an operator's walk-through, then decide on your own numbers.

This is the sibling to my Shopify POS cost breakdown, which answers "what does Shopify POS cost" line by line. This post answers the next question: which of these systems should you actually pick? I take the four-way table first, then the two head-to-heads people arrive with, Shopify POS against Lightspeed and Clover against Lightspeed, then each system on its own, then a verdict by merchant type.

Worth noting that the POS decision usually follows the ecommerce platform decision rather than leading it, and platform concentration is the reason. Shopify holds roughly 30% of US online stores, so its POS benefits from a much larger integration ecosystem than its share of retail alone would suggest. The full split is in the ecommerce platform market share data.

One promise up front. Every rate and price below links to the vendor's own pricing page or is attributed to my own operating experience. Payment terms change often, and a headline rate can mean different things at different companies, so treat these as the current shape of the market and confirm your exact numbers before you sign.

Read the processing
line, not the sticker
price.

Start where the money actually goes. On every one of these systems, the monthly software fee is the small, predictable line, and the card-processing rate is the big one that grows with every sale you ring up. At a blended 2.5% rate, $100,000 a month in retail sales is about $2,500 in card fees, before you pay a dollar of software. The sticker was never where your cost lived.

That single fact reorders the whole comparison. A system with cheap or free software and a high card rate can cost you far more at volume than a pricier subscription with a lower rate. So when you read a pricing page, find the card-present rate first, then check what it includes: some vendors quote an all-in rate, others quote only their markup over the card networks' interchange fees, and the two are not the same number.

Watch out for one more trap in that line. A published rate like "2.6% plus 15 cents" tells you the software company's take, but your true cost also depends on your average ticket size, your card mix, and whether the processor passes interchange straight through or blends it. Across the brands I have operated, the merchants who negotiated anything negotiated the rate, never the $89, because the rate is where the dollars are. This is the same logic behind reading your whole retail cost stack the way you would read a P&L rather than a price tag, which is the core of the DTC retail velocity playbook.

Keep that lens on as we go. Each system gets its software cost, its published card-present rate with a link, its hardware entry point, and the honest catch the pricing page will not volunteer. The four-way table comes first so you can see them side by side, then the two head-to-heads.

The four systems,
scored on what you
actually pay.

Here is the whole field on one screen. The software column is the published monthly price, the rate column is the vendor's stated card-present rate, and the lock-in column is the one that catches people after they have already committed. Read the rate and the lock-in columns first, because those decide your cost and your freedom to leave.

Sources, in order: Shopify POS pricing and Shopify POS hardware; Square Retail and Square pricing; Clover systems; Lightspeed Retail pricing. The lock-in and sync commentary is from my own operating experience across brands I have advised.

The rate column tells its own story. Lightspeed publishes the lowest headline card-present rate at 1.5%, but always confirm whether a quoted rate is all-in or a markup, because a low posted number can sit on top of pass-through interchange. Square and Shopify quote fuller all-in rates. Clover does not publish a single rate at all, because your processor sets it, which is the first sign of where Clover is different.

Now, almost nobody actually shops four systems at once. People arrive with two names and a decision to make, so the next two sections take the match-ups I get asked about most, and the vendor-by-vendor detail follows after them.

Shopify POS vs
Lightspeed: one system,
or the better brain.

This is the comparison people actually run, and the honest answer turns on one question rather than a feature grid: do you sell online on Shopify? If you do, Shopify POS wins by default, because the register and the storefront share one catalog, one inventory count, and one customer record, and choosing Lightspeed means running a second platform beside your store forever. If you are not on Shopify and your real problem is inventory depth, Lightspeed wins on merchandising tools Shopify POS does not try to match.

Price is not the tiebreaker here, which surprises people. Shopify POS Pro is $89 a month per location. Lightspeed Retail runs $89, $149, or $289. The two overlap almost exactly at the entry tier. What differs is what you get for the money, and how many platforms you end up operating.

Read that rate row carefully, because it is the one that misleads. Lightspeed's 1.5% looks like it halves your processing cost against Shopify's 2.4% to 2.6%. It might. It might also be a markup sitting on top of pass-through interchange, in which case your all-in number lands close to Shopify's and the saving evaporates. Get the all-in figure in writing before you let that row decide anything.

Shopify POS vs Lightspeed, in one line

On Shopify already, take Shopify POS and stop shopping. Not on Shopify, with thousands of variants and real purchase-order workflows, take Lightspeed. The expensive mistake is a Shopify brand buying Lightspeed for inventory features, then spending two years reconciling it against its own website.

Clover vs Lightspeed:
the reseller against
the retail brain.

Plenty of people comparing these two have no Shopify question at all, so here is that decision on its own terms. Clover against Lightspeed is really two different comparisons depending on what you run, and in both of them the deciding factor is how you buy rather than what you get.

If you run a restaurant or bar, the real match-up is Clover against Lightspeed Restaurant, not Lightspeed Retail. Both handle tables, coursing, and kitchen tickets. Clover's countertop units are excellent and the all-in-one Station is a genuinely good machine. But Lightspeed sells direct with published pricing, and Clover sells through banks and merchant-services resellers, and that distinction is the whole decision. With Clover your rate is set by a reseller you have not met, it is published nowhere, and the hardware is usually locked to whoever sold it.

If you run a retail store, Lightspeed Retail is the stronger system and Clover is the stronger box. Lightspeed's inventory, variant matrices, and supplier catalog are built for retail complexity in a way Clover's app ecosystem is not. Clover feels nicer on the counter on day one and costs you more freedom on day four hundred.

A note if you landed here from ShopKeep or Vend

Lightspeed acquired ShopKeep in 2020 and Vend in 2021, and merchants on both have been moved onto Lightspeed platforms since. That changes this comparison. If you are weighing Clover against Lightspeed because your old register is being retired, the Lightspeed path is the vendor's own migration route, which makes it the easiest option and not necessarily the right one. A forced migration is the cheapest chance you will ever get to re-pick from scratch, so use it. If you sell online or plan to, look at Shopify POS before you default to the path of least resistance.

Square: brilliant
free start, watch
where it ends.

Square is the easiest system in the world to start on, and that is not faint praise. The Square POS app is free, your first magstripe reader is free, there are no monthly software fees on the base plan, and there is no contract. You download it, plug in a reader, and take a card in an afternoon. For a market stall, a new brand, or a cash-light side business, nothing beats that on-ramp. Square publishes a card-present rate of 2.6% plus 15 cents per tap, dip, or swipe (Square pricing).

Where does free end? In two places. First, the base app is deliberately basic, so serious retail features live in Square for Retail Plus at $89 a month per location, which is where you get real inventory tools, vendor management, and better reporting. Second, the hardware climbs fast once you want a proper counter: the contactless-and-chip reader is $49, the Square Terminal is $299, and the Square Register is around $799. None of that is unfair, it is just the point where "free POS" quietly becomes a real bill.

The honest limitation for a brand like yours is ecommerce depth. Square Online is capable, but it is not a serious direct-to-consumer storefront the way Shopify is, so if online is or will be a meaningful channel, running Square in the store means running two systems and reconciling them. Square shines when in-person is the whole business. It gets awkward the moment online becomes half of it, which is exactly the seam that good inventory management for DTC brands is supposed to close.

Square, in one line

Best for the in-person-first business that wants to start today for nothing and does not need a heavyweight online store behind it. If ecommerce is central to your brand, Square's biggest strength, its simplicity, becomes its ceiling.

Clover: nice
hardware, the lock-in
nobody mentions.

Clover makes genuinely good-looking countertop hardware, and the Station, Mini, and Flex devices feel like real point-of-sale machines rather than a tablet in a stand. That is the pitch, and it lands, especially for full-service and quick-service restaurants where the all-in-one unit does a lot. Software plans are modest on paper, commonly in the $0 to $135 a month range depending on the plan and vertical (Clover systems), with hardware like the Flex around $599 and a Station bundle running well over $1,000.

Now the catch, and it is a big one. Clover is usually sold through a bank or a merchant-services reseller, not bought direct on transparent terms. Your processing rate is set by that reseller rather than published, so two merchants on identical hardware can pay very different rates. And a Clover device bought through one processor is often locked to that processor, which means you cannot carry it to a cheaper rate the way you can switch a Square or Shopify reader. That bundling is the cost nobody flags at signup.

Across the merchants I have advised, Clover lock-in is the single most common source of regret in this category. The device is fine. The trap is the account behind it: opaque rates, a multi-year processing relationship, and hardware you cannot easily repurpose if you leave. If you do choose Clover, choose the reseller as carefully as the machine, get the full rate in writing, and read the term. The hardware is the easy part to love and the account is the part that costs you.

Clover, in one line

Best for a full-service restaurant that wants real countertop hardware and has someone willing to negotiate the processing rate and read the term. Genuinely good machines, sold through a channel that makes the account behind them the expensive part.

Lightspeed: powerful
retail brain, priced
like it.

Lightspeed Retail is the serious specialist's choice, built for stores with deep, complicated inventory: bike shops, apparel with size-and-color matrices, jewelry, sporting goods, anything with thousands of variants and real purchase-order workflows. Its inventory, supplier catalog, and reporting are a genuine step up for that kind of retail. Pricing runs $89 for Basic, $149 for Core, and $289 for Plus a month, each including one register, with annual billing saving up to 18% (Lightspeed Retail pricing).

Lightspeed's pricing page lists a 1.5% card-present rate on Lightspeed Payments, which looks dramatically lower than Square's 2.6%. Read that carefully. A posted 1.5% that sits on top of pass-through interchange is not comparable to an all-in 2.6%, so confirm exactly what the number includes before you treat it as a saving. This is the entire reason section one told you to interrogate the processing line: the same two digits mean different things at different companies.

The honest trade-off with Lightspeed is that you pay for the depth. It is more expensive than Square at the counter, the tiers step up quickly as you add locations and registers, and plans commonly run on annual terms. Its ecommerce arm exists but is not the reason anyone picks Lightspeed. You choose it for the retail brain, the inventory and supplier tooling, when that complexity is the actual problem you have. For a specialty retailer not on Shopify, it is a strong pick. For a Shopify brand, it means running a second platform.

Lightspeed, in one line

Best for complex-inventory specialty retail that is not already on Shopify and needs the deep merchandising tools. Powerful and worth it for that profile, and overkill, plus a second system, for most Shopify brands.

Shopify POS: obvious
only if you already
sell on Shopify.

Shopify POS is the obvious pick under one condition, and that condition is doing all the work: your store is already on Shopify. If it is, POS is not a separate system you bolt on, it is the same catalog, inventory, and customer records your website already uses, now available at the counter. One product edit updates both channels. One customer buys online and returns in store against the same profile. That single source of truth is the entire value, and no competitor can match it for a Shopify brand.

The cost is clean. POS Lite is free on every Shopify plan, and POS Pro is $89 a month per location (about $79 on annual billing), billed per store rather than per register, so you can run as many iPads and readers as you want inside one location on one subscription. The in-person card rate through Shopify Payments runs roughly 2.4% to 2.6% depending on your plan. Hardware starts at nothing with Tap to Pay on iPhone, and the newest countertop unit, the POS Terminal, is $349 (Shopify POS hardware). The full line-by-line math lives in the Shopify POS cost breakdown.

Where is Shopify POS not the answer? Be honest about it. If you run a full-service restaurant with table management, coursing, and kitchen tickets, Shopify POS is not built for that, and Square, Lightspeed Restaurant, or a dedicated restaurant system will serve you better. And if you have no online store, no plan for one, and deep specialty inventory, Lightspeed's retail brain may fit better. Outside those narrow cases, for the roughly nine in ten merchants who sell online or intend to, keeping the register and the website on one platform wins.

That is the part the other systems cannot argue with. Square is a better free start, Lightspeed is a better inventory engine for non-Shopify specialty retail, Clover is a legitimate restaurant device if you accept the account behind it. But if you are a Shopify brand going omnichannel, splitting your store and your counter across two platforms creates exactly the reconciliation work that omnichannel is supposed to remove. The whole thesis of the omnichannel path to $100M is that one system beats two glued together, and POS is where that shows up first.

Shopify POS, in one line

Best for any brand already selling on Shopify, which is most of the merchants asking this question. Free on Lite, $89 a month per location on Pro, month to month, and the only option where your register and your website are the same system rather than two you reconcile.

The verdict, by
merchant type, no
hedging.

There is no universal winner, so here is the pick for each kind of business I get asked about. Find the row that sounds like you. Three of the six land on a Shopify or Square answer, because those two cover the majority of real merchants cleanly.

Read the pattern. If online commerce is any part of your business, the deciding factor is not the POS feature grid, it is whether your register and your storefront share one brain. For a Shopify brand, they should, which is why Shopify POS wins those rows without a real contest. Square wins the pure-start case on price and simplicity. Lightspeed wins non-Shopify specialty retail on depth. And a restaurant is the honest exception where none of the retail-first systems is the natural fit.

If you take one thing from all of this, take the ordering: pick the platform your commerce model wants, then read the processing line as the real cost, then treat the monthly software fee as the small, predictable number it is. Do it in that order and you will not overpay, and you will not get trapped by a rate you never got in writing. If you want a second set of eyes on your specific numbers, my door is open at hello@taylorsicard.com. And if the design story behind Shopify's own hardware interests you, the evolution of Shopify POS hardware is a good companion read.

Questions merchants
ask about picking a
POS.