Comparison
Dines or Lightspeed
We've put together a helpful summary, with the key features you need, to help you choose between two full-featured restaurant POS platforms. Both are capable systems. The right choice depends on what you run and what you prioritise.
The short version
Dines is purpose-built for complex, multi-vendor hospitality. Food halls with dozens of independent traders. Large-scale events and festivals with intricate revenue-share models. Theatres maximising the 15-minute interval. Full-service venues running on one connected suite. Offering uninterrupted sales with Offline Payments, and a constant stream of new tools, including Tilly AI, we stay true to our promise: serving those who serve.
Lightspeed is a mature, full-featured restaurant POS with excellent reporting, deep inventory management, and one of the broadest third-party integration ecosystems in hospitality. It is a common choice for upscale restaurants.
Feature comparison
To save you time, here’s a useful overview of key hospitality functions, as publicly available / published on company websites/literature (at the time of posting).
With many useful features available (and some unique to one platform over the other, or just not published as available when researching online), you have plenty of choices to review. But hopefully, this summary helps narrow down the choices for you.
Updated August 2026
Ordering
Operations
Payments
Advanced
Support & Reliability
Common questions
How do I switch to Dines?
Faster than most people expect. Send us your menu however it exists today, a spreadsheet, a photo of the board, even a PDF, and our team builds it in the system for you. We set everything up in parallel while your current till keeps running, so a single site can be live in as little as 24 hours and a multi-site group in as little as a few days. Most venues switch between services and never close the doors.
What costs are involved?
There are no software fees, no licence costs and no setup fees. You pay for payment processing, and everything else is included in that: the POS, mobile ordering, kitchen screens, stock, reporting and support. The one thing you might pay for is hardware, and only if you need it. Dines runs on standard iPads and iPhones, so if you already have Apple devices we can often use those, and if not we will quote you for what you need. Full rates are on our pricing page.
Do you offer contracts?
No contracts. We work on a seven-day rolling term, so if Dines is not right for you, you can walk away with a week's notice. That is deliberate. We want our incentives pointing the same way as yours, and if we stop deserving your business we should not be holding on to it. If a longer commitment suits you better, across a group of sites for example, we can look at that too.
What is support like?
You get real people who have worked in hospitality, not a ticket queue. Hospitality is not a nine to five, so neither are we. The team is on WhatsApp, phone and live chat whenever you are trading, and our average first response is under 60 seconds. During your first week, and during live events, we stay close with hands-on cover while your team finds its feet.
The data on this page was collected as of August 2026 and this information is subject to change or update without notice. Dines does not make any representations as to the completeness or accuracy of the information on this page.
See Dines in action
Book a 15-minute call and we will show you how Dines works for your specific venue type.
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