Lightspeed

Review:

Lightspeed's POS offerings are feature-rich and easy to use, with a lot of room for customization using a wide range of integrations and many add-on options. The company has made it simple for business owners to find which solution best fits their needs by making pre-assembled industry-specific POS examples and kits available on the website.

While Lightspeed's POS solutions are expensive, the fully-integrated retail and restaurant POS solutions have everything one needs in a POS, especially excellent inventory management.

Pros:

• Lightspeed POS offers excellent inventory management features including 3,000 integrated vendor catalogs and has included many opportunities for personalized branding, two features not offered by Square.

• Lightspeed and Square offer excellent e-commerce solutions, but Lightspeed takes it a little further by supporting 14 languages and multiple currencies.

• Square is a download-and-go solution, but Lightspeed offers more features and requires help with setup and onboarding, which the company does for free and one-on-one. This, in particular, has been something much appreciated by reviewers and customers.

Cons:

• Where Square cuts unnecessary features to keep its POS light, Lightspeed offers all the features one can imagine. This feature-heavy approach has made digging through the features for the ones needed a challenge for some. Split bills, for example, is a feature that has proven difficult for new users to find when using the Restaurant POS.

• A free basic version would allow small business owners to feel whether Lightspeed's feature-rich packages are too much or just right. There is no free version, though, only a 14-day free trial, and with everything Lightspeed has to offer, we're not so sure that's enough time for getting a good feel for the software.

• When you sign-up to Square, they send you a free credit card reader. With Lightspeed, the hardware is sold separately.

• And, staying on hardware, Lightspeed does not offer its own mobile credit card reader. So if you want to use Lightspeed Payments, you won't be able to attach a card reader to your iPad or mobile phone. Only if you use another payment processing provider will you have the option of using a mobile reader. Square offers its own mobile magstripe readers.

Reputation:

Most customer reviews of Lightspeed are positive. Ease of use, clean user interface, and the presence of every feature one could imagine, tend to be the main positives, but Lightspeed has a number of complaints against it.

Based on complaints filed at the Better Business Bureau, customer support seems to be a major problem among Lightspeed users, as well as a seeming disinterest in figuring out fixes to a few persistent bugs in the software.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Find all of Lightspeed's restaurant POS integrations and retail POS integrations on the website.