Chowly vs. TouchBistro

I would not recommend Chowly to any restaurant that is trying to push orders through to their POS from a third party delivery site. Any restaurant would be much better off finding a third party site that integrates directly with their POS. Using Chowly was more of a headache than it needed to be and our company switched to Checkmate (also not great) after a year with Chowly.

Incentivized

For a small business like ours, it works very well, is very user friendly, but the cost to add more tablets so that we can keep one at the bar, one on the interior dining area and one on the outside dining area is difficult as they have to be iPads, and there is an additional cost to add another tablet for use on the floor

Incentivized

• Responsive support team
• Their team's knowledge of Toast POS
• Their sales team is aggressive and confident in their product

Incentivized

• Very fast transaction times; I do not need to wait for the credit slip printer to respond, it is almost instantaneous.
• I can add, delete, or modify menu items on the fly and in real time in literally a handful of seconds.
• TouchBistro provides an intuitive and easy way to check my tasting room’s metrics in real time from anywhere on the globe.
• My employees are able to access a customized menu of item modifiers and discounts very quickly and easily.

Incentivized

• Promises of ways to avoid mapping errors were never followed through on
• Many mapping errors which required constant attention
• To use requires multiple hidden modifiers in Toast, clogging up the menu

Incentivized

• Online ordering can not be added on to once the customer arrives, can’t edit or change anything once placed
• Slow speed to place next order, and syncing with debit machines
• Frustrating that screen needs to be closed until payment goes through, hard in a very busy restaurant
• New updates always cause glitches in the system. The last update I now have drinks printing to my kitchen that never did before.
• Admin and servers not being able to do printouts
• Discounts not displaying on day printouts

Incentivized

It's an incredibly easy system to navigate both from a management perspective as well as a service member perspective.Training, programming items and inventory, day to day sales, processing payments, gathering reports and data, gift card sales and processing (with the exception of online for us) is easy and seamless.

First of all, I hardly ever need support for Touch Bistro, that’s how well it works. In the very instances over the years where I did need to call, customer support was easily accessible and fast and accurate with their responses

Incentivized

Chowly was not as good as Checkmate, though I cannot in good faith recommend either. We ended up switching over to Checkmate after a year with Chowly due to our dissatisfaction with the service.

Incentivized

Toast overall was a very impressive system. However being new to Canada I was hesitant to sign. Clover worked well with payment processing but was not a great system for sales and service. Square would repeatedly crash and miss payments, their customer service was terrible and took too much effort to have any corrective assistance. We went with TouchBistro because in all the restaurants I have worked in this has been a consistent system and was able to integrate with Moneris payments.

• Required a lot of attention from upper management to maintain
• Enabled orders from Caviar to go through to the POS without staff needing to enter the orders manually, saving on time and labor
• Due to frequent changes in our menu, Chowly could not handle these and needed to remap every single time there was a menu change.

Incentivized

• The consistency of ordering with Touch Bistro has aged me money! From the customer to the person who takes the order to the person who makes the order and then back to the customer we have less room for error with Touch Bistro.
• It can be slow during large volume times, especially if a lot of my customers are laying with credit cards or gift cards.

Incentivized