Online ordering for small restaurants, ranked honestly by Zayos.

A one-location restaurant that needs a working ordering page this week and cannot commit to a monthly bill. Square Online publishes a $0 plan, runs on the same Square account as your register, and handles modifiers, pickup windows and tipping with nothing to integrate. For a small independent it is the lowest-risk way to start taking direct orders.

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

Processing is the real bill. On the Free plan every online order carries 3.3% + 30 cents, so the cost climbs with every order you take. Restaurant depth is also thin on the Free plan, and your marketplace orders keep arriving on their own tablets.

The restaurant with no software budget at all this quarter. GloriaFood offers a free ordering system, and you can be taking pickup orders off your own site in an afternoon. When cash is the binding constraint, that beats every argument about features. One caution: its own site now says "GloriaFood will reach end of life on April 30, 2027" (gloriafood.com, read 4 Oct 2026), so treat it as a stopgap, not a home.

The core ordering system is offered free, with paid add-ons for online card payments, promotions and a point of sale. GloriaFood lists those prices on its own pricing page. We could not confirm them there on 4 Oct 2026, so no figure is repeated here. Card processing depends on the provider you connect.

Free buys you ordering, not a business. There is no owned customer database worth the name, no marketplace ingestion, and you will outgrow it. Treat it as a bridge that proves your regulars will order direct, then move.

A small independent that wants one predictable number and no percentage anywhere in the contract. Menufy sells a single plan with the whole platform in it, priced by whether you commit month to month or for a year.

Listed by Menufy, read 4 Oct 2026. $179/month on a month-to-month basis, or $149/month on an annual agreement. No per-order commission. Menufy does not list card processing rates on its pricing page, so get them in writing before you sign.

The pricing page is silent on the two lines that decide your real bill: card processing and delivery. Menufy also runs its own diner-facing marketplace, which brings traffic but also means some diners will learn your restaurant as a Menufy listing rather than as your website.

A small restaurant that wants commission-free direct ordering with a modest discovery bump attached. The underrated feature for a small kitchen is Order Throttling: ChowNow hands out 15-minute capacity slots and hides the full ones, so a two-person line does not get twelve tickets at 6:40pm.

Listed by ChowNow, read 4 Oct 2026, each as a starting price. Launch $229/month on annual billing or $249 month-to-month, Grow $319/$349, Elevate $409/$449, plus a one-time setup fee of $119 to $499 and payment processing of 2.95% + 29 cents. Branded mobile apps add Apple’s $99 annual developer fee, and Flex Delivery orders are $7.98 each. 0% commission on direct orders.

Three lines stack before you have sold a single sandwich: subscription, setup fee, processing. The processing line is charged on every order, so the monthly total rises with volume where a flat plan stays put.

A small restaurant whose actual problem is marketing, not order-taking. Owner ships the website, a branded app, automated SEO pages, loyalty, and email and text campaigns in one subscription. It is also the only platform here that openly sells you a choice between a percentage plan and a flat plan, which is a genuinely operator-friendly thing to do.

Listed by Owner.com, read 4 Oct 2026. Flexible is $249/month plus a 5% restaurant fee per order. Flat Rate is $499/month with no restaurant fee per order. On both plans guests pay a 5% order support fee at checkout.

The guest-side 5% is a percentage, so it climbs with the ticket: $5.00 on a $100 order, where a flat fee stays at $0.99. And on Flexible the restaurant-side 5% climbs with sales as well, so a busy month on Flexible can cost more than Owner’s own flat plan would have.

The small restaurant that is not really small online any more: direct orders are a real share of the business, or it has a marketplace habit it wants to break. Zayos is one flat monthly bill per location for a branded ordering site on your own domain, a customer book you own and can export, and, on the $499 Operator + Tablet plan, DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets ingested into the same kitchen tablet through Otter.

Published on our pricing page. $399/month Operator, $499/month Operator + Tablet, $599/month Concierge, per location, month to month, no setup fee. The restaurant pays 0% commission and 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 a flat service fee at checkout: $0.99 pickup, $0.99 delivery, $0 dine-in, 10% on catering. Payments run through Stripe, so confirm card processing in your quote the way you would with anyone on this list.

Full disclosure: we build Zayos, and $499 (Operator + Tablet) is the wrong number for a genuinely small restaurant. At low online volume, Square Online and ChowNow both cost less. We are also the youngest platform here. Naya Grill in Pompano Beach is live and taking orders today, and eight more storefronts are live and taking direct orders. If a ten-year track record is your first filter, four platforms above this one have one.

A small restaurant already on Toast POS. One menu, one ticket flow, one vendor, no third-party integration to babysit. If your whole floor already runs on Toast, adding its ordering module is the path of least resistance, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Toast lists its Starter Kit from $0 a month and its Point of Sale plan from $69 a month, with online ordering sold as an add-on and no price shown for it (read 4 Oct 2026). Ask Toast for the ordering price in writing.

You cannot buy it without Toast, which means Toast hardware and Toast payment processing arrive with it, and the diner-facing page defaults to a toasttab.com address rather than your own domain. Buying a point of sale to get an ordering page is backwards.