Chowly vs. Oracle Hospitality - MICROS POS

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

In my experience, there has not been a resolution on outstanding tickets opened two years ago during the initial implementation. Simple things like time reporting, creating buttons, and marking items as "unavailable" have issues. The system has a lag when servers log out of checks that prevents them from opening the checks on another terminal without a wait that feels like an eternity in the restaurant industry and with direct impact to the guest. Good luck calling support. Most of my experience involves the person I spoke with having no idea how to fix my issue and having to "escalate the ticket." This escalation process will last weeks, months, and in our case, years with no resolution.

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

Incentivized

• Real time sales
• Real time labor costs
• Integration with account software

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

• Support is awful. Oracle does not directly support end-users and depends on resellers to offer support. So if there is a bug or breaking change, we have to jump through hoops to get something fixed.
• Does not play well with other software or interfaces. There are interfaces but they lack a serious amount of features that are crucial to our business.
• The guest facing hardware does not hold up to constant use very well.
• The backend hardware is lacking in PCI compliance and is not meant for enterprise use.
• The software itself looks as if it is stuck in the early 2000s and there has been no sign of an update in many years.
• Reporting is difficult to set up and use and you have to rely on third-party reporting to get decent usable reports.

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

We've stayed with MICROS mainly due to that's how we've always operated and to switch operating POS systems would be a HUGE learning curve for everyone involved.

Incentivized

• 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

• Micros has allowed us to leverage our margin by using our own credit processor and loyalty program. We've seen success from both of these platforms (not Micros) and have been able to save money on the extra costs of using Micros.

Incentivized