We make TallyTill, so read this with that in mind. What we can offer instead of neutrality is checkability: every claim below about Square is sourced to Square's own published pages and date-stamped to when we checked it (August 2026). Square ships quickly, so verify anything that matters to your decision before you commit.
On price: this page deliberately contains no numbers. Not ours, not Square's. Both companies change pricing, and a comparison page that quotes figures goes quietly stale and starts misleading people. What we compare instead is shape — how each product is licensed and what it can actually do — because that tends to outlive a price list. For current numbers, go to Square's pricing page and ours.
Where Square is simply the better choice
Let's put this first, because for a lot of readers the rest of the page won't matter.
If you run one location with staffed lanes, Square is very likely the right answer. Its subscription plans are priced per location — Square's October 2025 pricing announcement states the per-location structure plainly — which means once you're paying for a site, adding more registers at that site doesn't multiply your software bill. That is a genuinely good deal for a busy shop or restaurant, and it is the opposite of how we charge.
If you need depth beyond the till, it isn't close. Square's platform includes payroll, loyalty programmes, email and text marketing, real inventory management, invoicing and booking, banking, a large hardware line with real support behind it, and an app marketplace of third-party integrations. TallyTill has none of that. No payroll. No loyalty programme. No scale integration. No deep inventory management — we track products and stock, not purchase orders, vendors or multi-warehouse transfers. If you want one vendor for the whole business, choose Square and don't look back.
And if you have iPhones or iPads, note now that TallyTill has no iOS build at all. We run on Android tablets and Chrome. Square's Point of Sale app supports both iOS and Android (iOS 17.1+ and Android 7.0+ as of August 2026). This is a real disadvantage on our side, not a positioning choice, and for an Apple-equipped merchant it is probably disqualifying.
Where the structures actually diverge
Per location vs per device
Square's per-location pricing is an advantage that inverts depending on your shape. One site, five lanes: per-location billing is excellent. Five sites, one lane each — five farm stands, three unattended fridges, a handful of market tables — and you are now paying per site for a set of tills that individually do very little volume.
TallyTill is licensed per device. For one busy location with several lanes, that is worse for you, and we'd rather say so than let you find out. For a scatter of tiny, low-volume, mostly-unattended points of sale, it's the model that fits. That's the whole structural argument, and it's the one thing most worth thinking about before anything else on this page.
Is self-serve a separate product — and what does "unattended" actually mean?
Square's self-serve product is Square Kiosk, and it is a separate paid software subscription: Square's support documentation states that "each active kiosk device counts toward the subscription" and that "new kiosk devices can be added for an additional monthly fee per device" (Square Support, checked August 2026). Note the shape flip — the base plans are per location, but Kiosk is billed per device.
Square Kiosk is also scoped to a particular industry. Square describes it as "a self-serve ordering solution built for quick-service and fast casual food and beverage businesses" (Square, checked August 2026), and the May 2024 launch announcement framed it around restaurants. If you sell prepared food, that focus is a feature — it's built for your workflow. If you run a produce stand or a nursery, you're using a restaurant ordering product for something adjacent to its design.
Before going further, one definition needs pinning down, because in payments "unattended" is a term of art and it is not a synonym for "self-serve". Stripe's documentation draws three lines: attended, where "staff support is available, either per device or per location"; semi-attended, where "a customer independently interacts with the card reader, but staff may be available in the store or nearby if needed"; and unattended, where "no staff is on location to help the customer if needed" (checked August 2026). The test is simply whether a person is on the property — not whether anyone is watching the till. The same fridge can therefore be semi-attended at ten in the morning and unattended at ten at night. Stripe is explicit that "Terminal's pre-certified card readers and Tap to Pay support attended and semi-attended retail environments but don't support unattended." The full rules, and what they mean for a real site, are in attended, semi-attended and unattended: the Stripe rules.
For TallyTill, self-serve operation is included in the app rather than sold as a second product — there is no separate kiosk subscription to put a till in front of customers. What changes when nobody is on site is not the licence but how the card is taken. With someone on the property, a Bluetooth card reader on the till is available. With the property genuinely empty, the reader is the wrong instrument, and payment moves to a Stripe QR code: the customer scans it, a hosted checkout opens on their own phone, and it settles as an ordinary online card payment — which carries no attendance restriction at all. So an unstaffed till really does take cards; it takes them through the shopper's phone rather than through hardware on our device. Cash and check are unaffected by any of this.
That is worth stating as a comparison axis rather than buried as a caveat, because it isn't a TallyTill quirk. Any till that takes a card through certified card-present hardware inherits the same environment rules, and that certification is set upstream of both vendors. What genuinely differs between these two products is commercial shape — how the licence is counted, and whether putting a device into self-serve mode costs extra — not which of us has quietly solved the attendance rules.
Kiosk mode on our side is a setting, and it's worth being blunt about what it is: Android screen pinning. It stops a casual customer wandering into your admin pages. It is not tamper-proof and an admin can escape it deliberately. Anyone telling you a pinned Android tablet is locked down is overselling.
Hardware
Square Kiosk runs on Square's own kiosk hardware with an integrated reader, or on compatible iPads. That hardware is well-made and supported, which is worth real money when something breaks at the worst moment.
TallyTill runs in Chrome on an Android tablet you already own, with an optional Bluetooth card reader and an optional thermal receipt printer. Cheaper to start and easy to replace; the flip side is that when a no-name tablet dies on a Saturday, that's your problem to solve, not a vendor's.
Goods with no barcode
Square's answer is the item library and a tile grid — you build the catalogue and someone taps the right tile. It's fast, reliable, and it scales fine once staff know the layout. For a customer facing forty varieties of tomato they can't name, tile-hunting gets harder.
TallyTill has the same catalogue grid, plus a second route: the customer can tap to snap a photo, which is sent to server-side AI that identifies the item against your catalogue. Two things must be said precisely. First, this is always customer-initiated — the camera does not watch the counter, does not continuously recognise anything, and never adds an item on its own. Someone scans a barcode or deliberately taps to take a photo. Second, photo recognition requires a connection; barcode and QR scanning run locally in the browser and work with no signal at all. We've written up the practical side of this in ringing up plants that don't have barcodes.
Offline behaviour
This is where an unattended site at the end of a farm road lives or dies, and Square publishes its specifications clearly enough to chart.
Two things are worth reading off that chart carefully, because it is easy to get wrong in Square's favour or against it.
The first is that Square's supported devices are more alike than they look. Register, Terminal and Handheld accept offline payments for the same 24 hours that Readers and Square Stand do. What Register, Terminal and Handheld get on top is a longer leash for settling up — 72 hours to reconnect and upload — rather than a longer window for taking money.
The second is the bar that sits at zero. Square's offline documentation names "Square Kiosk hardware running the Square Kiosk app" among the hardware not supported for offline payments (Square Support, checked August 2026). Square's staffed devices have well-defined offline windows; its self-serve kiosk product is the one that doesn't. If your kiosk sits somewhere with unreliable signal, check this yourself before buying — it is the single most decision-relevant line on this page.
Square also documents that Afterpay, Cash App Pay, Square Gift Cards, Tap to Pay on iPhone, Tap to Pay on Android and manually-entered cards don't work offline, and — importantly — that "you're responsible for any expired, declined, or disputed payments accepted while taking offline payments."
TallyTill's offline story is different but also conditional, and we won't pretend otherwise:
Read that card step carefully. Offline card sales work through Stripe store-and-forward, which means the same honest caveat that applies to Square applies to us: a queued card can still decline when it forwards, and you've already handed over the goods. Store-and-forward shifts when you find out, not whether the risk exists. There's more detail in our guide to taking card payments when the internet goes down.
Notice too how the two constraints stack, because they pull in opposite directions. Offline card acceptance is card-present, so it needs someone on the property. QR checkout on the customer's phone has no attendance restriction, but it does need a connection. At a site that is both empty and offline, cash and check are what remain — worth knowing before you site a till somewhere with no signal and no staff.
Choose Square if…
- You have one location, especially with more than one lane — per-location pricing works in your favour.
- You want payroll, loyalty, marketing, or serious inventory from the same vendor.
- You're on iPhone or iPad. We have no iOS build.
- You sell prepared food in a quick-service or fast-casual setting — Square Kiosk is built for exactly that.
- You want supported hardware and someone to call when it fails.
- You need a mature, proven platform. Square is one; we're a much smaller company.
Choose TallyTill if…
- You run several small, low-volume sites rather than one big one, and per-location licensing multiplies badly across them.
- Self-serve is included, not a paid add-on — a fridge, a stand, a market table, an after-hours shop. With staff on site the card can go through a reader; with the property empty it goes through a QR code and the customer's own phone, and you should read the attendance rules before you plan around either.
- Your goods have no barcodes and a customer-initiated photo lookup would beat hunting through tiles.
- You want to run on the Android tablet you already own.
- You need cash and check alongside cards at a site where card-only would cost you sales.
If you're weighing this up for a specific site, micro market "lite" and starting a self-serve fridge without a smart fridge work through the economics for the setup rather than the software.
All Square claims above were checked against Square's own published pages in August 2026 and link to the source. Square is a trademark of Block, Inc.; we're not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Please verify current details with Square directly.