Online ordering for catering, four right answers from Zayos.

The operator whose catering has outgrown the restaurant that spawned it: a real book of accounts, banquet event orders, delivery routing, and a person whose job is catering. CaterZen is built for that job rather than adapted to it, and it publishes a branded online ordering site inside the plan, so you are not paying a second vendor to take the orders.

Published, verified 4 Oct 2026. Pro $179/month, Pro Plus $199/month adds a custom branded online ordering site, Marketing Pro Plus $229/month adds marketing systems, VoIP calling, a delivery manager and banquet event order templates. Enterprise is by quote. Start-Up Support is a one-time $499 covering up to five locations, $99 per additional location, and includes menu entry, training and branded design. Usage extras are itemised: 8 cents a text message, 25 cents an automated call, $1.39 a postcard.

It is catering software, not a restaurant platform. It will not run your regular takeout, it does not ingest DoorDash or Uber Eats tickets, and the $499 start-up support fee is the largest one-time cost on this page. Contract terms are not stated on the pricing page. If catering is 15% of your revenue, this is more system than you need.

A restaurant where catering is growing but is not yet a separate business, and where buying a second subscription to handle it feels absurd. Zayos runs the everyday ordering and the catering flow on one platform: a party-tray builder that does the headcount to pan math, corporate accounts that hold billing details and purchase order numbers, delivery windows booked 1 to 14 days out, and lead-time gates that scale with order size so the kitchen is never blindsided.

$399/month Operator, $499/month Operator + Tablet, $599/month Concierge, per location, month to month, no setup fee. 0% commission: the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue, and 100% of tips on pickup and dine-in. On delivery the tip goes to the driver. The diner pays the service fee at checkout, $0.99 pickup, $0.99 delivery, $0 dine-in, and 10% on catering orders. Payments run through Stripe.

Disclosure: we build Zayos, and the catering fee is the one number on this page where we are not the cheapest. Ten percent is a percentage, so a $1,500 order carries $150 for your customer. Owner.com’s 5% guest fee on the same order would be $75, and CaterZen would add nothing per order. On very large tickets, price that honestly against a flat-fee catering system. We are also the youngest platform here: Naya Grill in Pompano Beach is live and taking orders, and eight more storefronts are live and taking direct orders.

The kitchen with capacity and no corporate pipeline. ezCater is where office managers already shop, and no amount of on-site optimisation replicates a buyer who arrives pre-loaded onto a platform with a company card. There is no signup fee and no monthly fee, so a slow Tuesday filled by ezCater is revenue you would not otherwise have had. Used deliberately as a discovery channel, it earns its place.

ezCater publishes its partner terms in its own Catering Partner Help Center, not on a public pricing page. It charges a commission on accepted marketplace orders plus a payment transaction fee, and runs a lower-cost ezOrdering programme for orders that come from your own site. We state no percentage here because we could not read one on ezCater's own page on 4 Oct 2026. Confirm your own rate in your agreement.

The buyer belongs to ezCater, not to you. The commission comes out of every order before food cost, and the office manager who ordered it will search ezCater again next month, not your name. Treat it as paid acquisition with a per-order price, and work to convert those accounts onto your own channel.

A restaurant already running Toast that does moderate catering. One menu, one ticket flow, one vendor, and catering orders land in the same system the line already watches. That is a genuine operational advantage and it is worth more than a slightly better feature list somewhere else.

Toast lists a Starter Kit from $0 a month and a Point of Sale plan from $69 a month (read 4 Oct 2026). Online ordering is an add-on with no price shown on its pricing page, and no card processing rate is listed there, so the cost of taking catering orders arrives in a quote.

Catering depth is not the point of the product. Banquet event orders, proposals, house accounts and tax-exempt invoicing are not what Toast is optimised around, and you cannot buy any of it without buying Toast: the hardware and the payment processing come with the decision.

A restaurant that wants catering to ride on the same marketing engine as everything else: website, branded app, automated SEO pages, loyalty, email and text campaigns in one subscription. On big tickets its guest fee is genuinely kinder than a 10% catering fee, and that deserves saying on our own page.

Published, read 4 Oct 2026. Flexible is $249/month plus a 5% restaurant fee per order. Flat Rate is $499/month with no additional restaurant fees. Guests pay a 5% order support fee at checkout on both plans. Month to month, no cancellation fees, with special rates offered for multi-location groups.

There is no catering-specific ordering flow: no pan-ratio builder, no lead-time gates by headcount, no banquet event orders. And on the Flexible plan the restaurant pays 5% too, which is $75 of a $1,500 order on top of the $75 the guest pays. If catering is a serious share of revenue, the Flat Rate plan is the only version of Owner that makes sense.

A restaurant taking catering orders on the phone today and losing some of them. Square Online publishes a $0 plan, so a simple catering menu with pickup scheduling can be online this week at no subscription cost. Something imperfect that captures the order beats a perfect system you have not bought.

Published, read 4 Oct 2026. Square Free $0, Plus $49/month per location, Premium $149/month per location. Online card processing is 3.3% + 30 cents on the Free plan and 2.9% + 30 cents on Plus and Premium.

Catering depth is absent. No headcount math, no lead-time gates, no deposits or event orders, no house accounts, and the percentage is restaurant-paid, so a $1,500 order costs you about $49.80 in processing on the Free plan. It is a starting point, not a destination.