What Each Platform Is Built to Do
ChowNow and Toast solve different problems. ChowNow is primarily an online ordering and direct-channel marketing platform. It helps restaurants capture commission-free online orders through a branded app and website widget, reducing dependence on third-party marketplaces like DoorDash or Uber Eats. Toast, by contrast, is a full point-of-sale system built on proprietary hardware, covering tableside ordering, payment processing, kitchen display systems, and basic reporting.
Neither platform was designed to be the other—so comparing them directly requires understanding what gap you're actually trying to fill.
Features: Where Each One Shines
ChowNow excels at guest acquisition and retention. Its branded ordering, email marketing tools, and loyalty features are genuinely useful for restaurants that want to own their customer relationships rather than rent them from aggregators. It does not replace a POS.
Toast covers the in-service experience well. Tableside ordering, split checks, and kitchen routing are reliable. Toast also offers add-on modules for payroll, scheduling, and inventory—but these are separate subscriptions that add up quickly, and operators frequently describe the inventory and scheduling tools as basic compared to dedicated alternatives.
Ease of Use and Setup
ChowNow onboarding is relatively straightforward for online ordering. Toast requires hardware installation and staff training, which takes more time but delivers a more complete in-house workflow once live.
Cost Considerations
Toast's pricing varies by plan and hardware configuration; add-on modules each carry additional monthly fees. ChowNow charges a flat monthly subscription rather than per-order commissions, which can save money at volume. Stack both together with separate inventory, scheduling, and analytics tools and the total monthly cost grows significantly.
Where an All-in-One System Like Hubstaurant Helps
If you're already paying for a POS, an online ordering platform, a scheduling app, and an inventory tool separately, you're likely managing four logins, four vendor relationships, and four data silos. Hubstaurant is built to replace that stack—combining POS analytics, purchase-driven inventory, food-cost tracking, vendor purchasing, staff scheduling, theft detection, and a programmatic SEO website under one roof. Because it reads invoices automatically and works agentically, it reduces the manual entry that makes multi-tool setups time-consuming.
ChowNow and Toast are both credible tools for what they do. The question is whether point solutions still make sense for your operation—or whether a unified system would give you better insight at a lower total cost.
Ready to see the difference? Start a free trial with Hubstaurant and explore how a single system can run more of your restaurant for you.