A search for restaurant pos and a search for restaurant epos return two sets of vendors selling the same thing to the same person. The words are geography, not category. What is worth knowing is what tends to travel with each word, because the bundling differs even when the product does not, and that is where a comparison goes wrong.
One product, two vocabularies
Point of sale is the older phrase and the American default; electronic point of sale, shortened to EPOS, is what British vendors write. A restaurant pos and a restaurant epos system are the same purchase: a screen or a tablet, a record of orders, a way to take payment and a printer somewhere near the pass. If a comparison appears to be between the two categories, it is really between two suppliers.
What restaurant pos software means when hardware is not included
The word software in restaurant pos software is usually doing real work: it signals a product you run on hardware you already own, priced monthly, with no installer. That is the shape most independent rooms want now, and it is why a tablet on a stand has replaced a terminal in a lot of them. Check what it expects of the printer, because that is the one piece of hardware that is genuinely fussy.
Reading a quote that mixes the two
The unhelpful quotes are the ones that put a software fee, a hardware cost and a card processing rate into one monthly figure. Ask for the three separately. You are trying to answer two different questions, which are what the record costs you every month and what the payments cost you per transaction, and no combined figure answers either.
Questions people ask about restaurant pos
Should I search for pos or epos to compare products?
Both, if you are in the UK. The vendors selling to British independents index on epos, and the international products index on pos, so each search surfaces roughly half of the field.
Is restaurant point of sale different from retail point of sale?
The record is different, which makes the product different. A restaurant order has a table, covers, courses and modifiers; a shop sale has none of those. A retail till pointed at a restaurant works until the first split bill.
Does restaurant POS software include the hardware?
Usually not, and that is the point of the word. A product sold as restaurant pos software expects to run on a tablet or a computer you already have, priced monthly. A terminal, a drawer and a kitchen printer are separate purchases, and a quote that folds them into the monthly figure is hiding which half is which.
What differs on the receipt between the UK and the US versions?
The tax line. A UK till prints VAT-inclusive prices and shows the VAT in the total; a US till adds sales tax at the register at the rate for that site, and many states have rules about what the receipt shows. The same product handles both, but the setting is per site and it is worth checking on the first receipt rather than the first audit.