The honest list of Square Online alternatives.

Owner.com is the opposite bet from Square Online: instead of a generic free store, one restaurant-specific growth bundle. AI website, online ordering, branded app, loyalty, and marketing automation. Per its own pricing page, it is $249/month plus a 5% restaurant fee per order on the Flexible plan or $499/month flat, month-to-month; on both plans guests pay a 5% order support fee at checkout, and setup and processing rates are not published. Best for operators who outgrew a self-serve store and want a vendor-run direct channel with marketing built in, priced accordingly.

ChowNow is the original "no commission" direct-ordering vendor, and the core claim is genuine: it never takes a percentage of your food revenue. The trade is what sits around the subscription, per its own pricing page, a $119 to $499 setup fee, 2.95% + $0.29 payment processing per transaction, a $99/year Apple developer fee on the branded app, and $7.98/order Flex Delivery. It is also direct-only: no marketplace ingestion, and email/SMS marketing contacts are capped by tier. Best for operators who want a proven restaurant-first ordering vendor instead of a general-purpose store, and are fine paying a real subscription for it.

Toast is where operators land when the real conclusion is "I want restaurant-grade POS and ordering on one vendor", the restaurant-native version of the all-in-one bet Square makes generically. The honest trade-offs: Toast's pricing page lists the Starter Kit from $0 and the Point of Sale plan from $69 a month, sells online ordering as an add-on with no price shown, and lists no processing rate, so the real number arrives in a quote. Ask for the card-not-present rate and the contract term in writing. Best for operators consolidating the whole operation on one restaurant vendor.

BentoBox has the strongest design pedigree in the category, its sites for ambitious full-service restaurants genuinely look the part, which is exactly what a square.site subdomain does not. Two honest caveats for 2026: BentoBox does not publish pricing, and its own pricing page now states its products are available only to Clover POS customers, so leaving Square Online for BentoBox trades one POS coupling for another. Best for design-led, Clover-anchored restaurants where the website is the brand asset.

Popmenu is the marketing-first alternative: interactive menus, review aggregation, and AI marketing tools that a generic e-commerce store does not attempt. The structure to understand before signing: Popmenu's own pricing page lists Starter at $159, Essentials at $269 and Premier at $449 a month prepaid annually, and sells online ordering and catering as an add-on with no price shown, so ask for the full quote with ordering included. Best for single-location operators whose bottleneck is filling seats and building a marketing engine, not per-order economics.

Zayos is our platform, so judge this entry accordingly, but the structure is the honest pitch. The fee schedule is flat and published: $399/month per location (Operator), $499 with Otter marketplace ingestion so Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub orders land on the same kitchen tablet as direct orders, $599 Concierge with up to 5 virtual brands per kitchen. No setup fee, month-to-month, and the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue, and 100% of tips on pickup and dine-in: the diner pays a flat service fee. $0.99 pickup, $0.99 delivery, $0 dine-in, 10% on catering. Direct orders run on Stripe at ~2.9% + $0.30, the same rate as Square's paid plans and 0.4 points below Square's free-plan online rate. Full disclosure on scale: restaurants are live and taking direct orders today, Naya Grill (Pompano Beach, FL) among them. We get you live in under a week. Best for operators graduating from a free generic store to a restaurant-first direct channel with the marketplaces ingested into one flow.