Clover vs. Toast for Small Restaurants in 2026

Toast is the deepest restaurant software in the industry — rented on Toast's terms: locked processing, stacking add-ons, multi-year contracts. Clover is strong restaurant software on an open channel, where processing is shoppable. For a $30k/month independent, the 3-year math runs ~$37–39k on Toast vs. ~$5–6.7k on Clover with dual pricing — plus the honest cases where Toast still wins.