Looking for a Square Online alternative for your restaurant?

Square is a payments company that gives you a website. We are the website. If what you got from Square is an ordering page bolted to a register, the table below is what the other purchase looks like: the sections your trade needs already on the page, the modules that take the orders, the database that keeps them, and a folder of code you can walk away with.

Storefront $49 a month, Storefront Pro $79 a month. Building and previewing cost nothing and take no card; the price starts when you publish, and there is a 7-day refund. See the full price list

The 14 questions a restaurant actually asks

Every row can be checked against the sources at the bottom of this page, and 2 of them go Square Online’s way. A comparison where the author wins every row is an advertisement, and you would be right to discount all of it.
What you are asking about	With Naratake	With Square Online	Who takes the row
What is inside one starting point	The number to ask about is not 40, it is what opens. The bakery starting point is four pages: nine priced items, a custom-cake enquiry form with a photo column, and a six-image portfolio — a site that works before you have typed a word, carrying the sections that trade actually uses. Put any of 15 design styles over it and the layout is rebuilt rather than recoloured — a different set of bones, not the same page in a different colour.	Square’s own words for what a theme brings are layouts, pages and sections, chosen as a fast start and then customised with preset colour, font and shape combinations. The trade split lives one level down, in the ordering page: Shop All for physical goods, which Square says has the best support for shipping, and Order Online for prepared food, which it says has the best support for local delivery and pickup.	Ours
Changing the look without retyping the menu	40 industry starting points across 15 design styles is 600 different-looking restaurants before anyone touches a colour — and the count is not even the good part. This is: every one of the 15 styles rebuilds the layout instead of recolouring it. The hero composition, every page header, the type, the corner radius, the motion and the photo treatment all move together, and palettes are picked per trade, so the same style over a bakery and over a bistro does not come out the same colour. Switching rebuilds the pages from the template and your content comes with it: the menu and its prices, the reviews, the staff, the coupon codes and the opening hours all carry over, along with the restaurant’s own details — name, phone, email, address, logo, social links. What does not: the headings and body text you edited inside a block, and the photos you swapped in, go back to the template’s. A single undo puts the whole switch back. So trying a second direction is a look at it, not typing the menu in again.	Square publishes themes, and describes what one brings as layouts, pages and sections to start from, then preset combinations of colour, font and shape to customise. What a change of theme does to the words and pictures already in a site is not something we are going to characterise on Square’s behalf — its own theme article is linked at the bottom of this page, and it is the thing to read before you switch.	Ours
The parts that actually run the business	Eleven of them, in the box: online ordering, table reservations, appointment booking by staff member and time slot, a class timetable, an order tracker, property listings, quote requests, a coupon banner and three menu layouts. Nothing to install, no second subscription behind any of them, and every record lands in the site’s own back office. Where they run is a plan boundary: ordering and reservations go live on Storefront Pro, $79 a month or $758 a year; Storefront, $49 a month or $468 a year, builds and previews them.	Ordering is genuinely built in — Square describes its free tier as building an online ordering profile, a basic website or store, or a booking site. The rest is other Square products wired together: the online booking page is documented for people who subscribe to Square Appointments as well as Square Online, class booking is listed for Square Appointments Plus and Premium, and multi-channel menu management belongs to Square for Restaurants.	Ours
Motion on the page	The motion arrives finished — 29 scroll and cinematic sections, among them video that scrubs as you scroll, parallax, a scroll-told story, a horizontal scroller, a film strip, a cinema reel, a marquee, an image that reveals as it comes up, a scroll progress bar. A 3D hero and an animated background ship alongside them. One attribute sets the intensity for the whole site — subtle, lively, cinematic, or off altogether — across ten entrance signatures: rise, fade, slide, zoom, blur, clip, flip, letterbox, iris and swing. Change your mind once and every section follows. The words are readable with JavaScript off, and a visitor whose system asks for less motion gets the site holding still.	Square’s own round-up of Square Online customization names three things that move: banner slideshows, banner videos and a scrolling text bar, the last of these in its own words as putting some motion in your message. That article is a round-up rather than a feature list, so read it as what Square chose to highlight rather than as everything its editor can do.	Ours
What is in the editor before you install anything	111 components and 15 design styles, all of them in the editor on both plans. There is no marketplace because there is nothing to go and fetch: menus, galleries, pricing tables, FAQs, forms, maps, testimonials, ordering, booking, timetables and the back office that receives them are the same box, at no extra charge and with nobody else’s terms of service attached to your site.	Square builds pages out of sections, and calls them the content building blocks of your website. When a built-in section does not cover it, Square’s documented answer is the embedded-code section, listed for Square Online Plus and Premium subscribers, with Google calendars, custom contact forms, reservations and event registration given as the examples. Square also states plainly that it cannot help with custom code of any kind, because the editor is what-you-see-is-what-you-get.	Ours
How far you can push one element	Dragging a block onto a page is the doorway, not the product. What is behind it: 44 style properties on any single node, each of them settable four times over — desktop, tablet, mobile, and again for hover — which is 176 adjustable points on one element. Vertical CJK text for a hanging-scroll heading, a neon glow in a colour you choose, frosted-glass backdrop blur, a two-colour gradient at the angle you set, a tilt up to 45° either way, sticky positioning, z-index, and a per-node entrance of fade, slide, zoom or blur. All of it is a control in the panel: no CSS to write, and no layout system to learn before you start.	Preset combinations rather than properties. Square describes customising a theme as choosing preset colour, font and shape combinations, builds pages out of what it calls the content building blocks of your website, and states plainly that it cannot help with custom code of any kind because the editor is what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Where a built-in section does not reach, its documented answer is the embedded-code section, listed for Square Online Plus and Premium subscribers.	Ours
Running the restaurant in two languages	A checkbox, not a project. English plus Chinese or Spanish, one site, with a real language switch rendered in the navigation and both languages living in the same file. No third-party app, no word quota, no price per language, and nothing extra on either plan.	Square’s own instructions hand this to somebody else: automatic translation is the Weglot Translate app from the Square App Marketplace, documented for Square Online Plus and Premium subscribers. The alternative Square documents is one site per language, and it says in its own words that this option will not automatically translate your site’s editable text — every editable string has to be written in the target language by you, in the site editor.	Ours
Who takes a cut of what the site sells	Not us. We take no percentage of an order, a booking or a deposit, on any plan, ever — the subscription is the whole bill we send. The card is charged through your own Stripe account: your keys, Stripe’s own processing rate billed by Stripe, and the money arrives in your account without passing through us. The keys are yours because the money is: you connect your own Stripe account once, and after that there is no point in the flow where a percentage could reach us.	Square is the processor, so a percentage of every order is part of the arrangement. What that percentage is depends on which Square plan you are on and how the card is taken, and Square publishes the current figures itself — the link is at the bottom of this page. We are not reprinting somebody else’s rate card, because the week it changes ours would be the wrong one. What the arrangement buys is a processor you never have to set up, and that is worth something. What it costs is a slice of every order for as long as the site is up, which is a different kind of bill from a subscription.	Ours
Getting the site out again	A folder of Next.js source you keep. In the browser that download is part of Storefront Pro; the $49 Storefront plan does not include it. Or build in the desktop app, which exports the whole codebase with no limit: pages, styles, scripts, images, plus the database and back office when the site stores anything. Either way what you get is a project you can read, change and host anywhere.	On Aug 26, 2026 we could find no page of Square’s documenting a way to download the site. When a seller asked about moving to another platform on Square’s own community forum, a Square staff member answered that it is not possible to transfer your menu, online site or gift cards, and pointed at CSV exports of the item library instead. That is a customer-support reply on a forum, not a Help Center article, and we are labelling it as one rather than dressing it up. The domain can move; the site is a rebuild.	Ours
Where the orders and the bookings live	In a database that belongs to the website. Orders, reservations, appointments, customers and enquiry forms are all in the site’s own back office, on the site’s side, rather than inside a payments account, and the export takes that database and back office with it. Where they run is a plan boundary: ordering and reservations go live on Storefront Pro, $79 a month or $758 a year; Storefront, $49 a month or $468 a year, builds and previews them.	Orders live in your Square account, which is a sensible place for them if the account is where you already work. Reservations are a different product again: Square documents the online booking page as something for people who also subscribe to Square Appointments.	Ours
Your own domain name	One custom domain is included on both cloud plans — connect a domain you already own, apex or subdomain, with the exact DNS records shown in the workspace, and HTTPS is issued automatically. It stays registered in your name at your own registrar, which is what lets the site move later without the address moving with it.	Sold on the paid plans, and Square registers it for you in the same checkout. The free plan keeps the square.site address it was given.	Even
What the paid tier costs	Storefront is $49 a month or $468 a year. Storefront Pro — the plan that runs ordering and reservations on a published site, and the only one that includes the source download — is $79 a month or $758 a year. That is the whole bill: no percentage on top, no per-location multiplier.	Square prices per location, across Square Free, Square Plus and Square Premium, and the card rate in the row above rides on top of whichever one you are on. Read today’s figures on Square’s own pricing page — we do not keep somebody else’s price list, and this row is a moving target on their side, not ours.	Even
Taking a card payment on the site	Only with your own Stripe account. You save your Stripe secret and publishable keys in workspace settings, and Stripe pays you directly. There is no onboarding we run for you, and no point at which we hold your money.	Built in, because Square is the processor. Nothing to wire up, no keys to look after, and it works on launch day. What rides along with it is a percentage of every order, and the fees row above sets out Square’s published figures for that.	Theirs
One menu on the register and on the site	A register ships with the site. Every ordering site carries one in its own back office, ringing from the same menu the site sells from: product grid, modifier picker, server-priced totals, and cash with change due. Switch coupons on and it takes gift cards; switch bookings on and the deposit a customer already paid comes off the balance at the counter. Card-present is there too, through a Stripe Terminal reader you connect to your own Stripe account — the same bring-your-own arrangement as the website checkout, so counter takings land in your bank with no percentage to us. It keeps selling for cash when the line drops, prints a receipt, and closes the shift with a Z-report — expected drawer against counted, over and short, broken out per station. Counter sales and web orders sit on one board in one database, and that database leaves with the export on Storefront Pro. What we sell is the register itself — the software, the shift and the database — running on hardware you already have and a Stripe account that is already yours.	The whole design of the product. Square’s own pages describe the menu syncing from Square POS, and online orders landing on the register and the kitchen display.	Theirs

Everything said about Square Online on this page was last checked on Aug 26, 2026. Plans, prices and features change without telling us — confirm them on Square Online’s own pages before you decide anything.

What Square Online is shaped for

Square and we are built for different restaurants, and it is cheaper for both of us if you work out which one is yours here. Any of this true, and Square is the shape that fits.

01Square is already your register, and its hardware is already bolted to your counter. Ours rings cash, takes card through a reader you connect yourself, and closes a real shift, but it runs in a browser on hardware you supply — so moving means re-fitting the counter, and a counter that already works is an expensive thing to rebuild for a website.
02You want to take cards without opening a Stripe account or handling keys. Square is the processor on that side; here the keys are yours — one evening of setup, once, and after that we take no percentage of an order.
03The website is the small part of what you buy from Square — point of sale, invoicing, Square Banking, the domain in the same checkout. You are buying the account, not the site. We sell the site, and the register we ship lives inside it rather than the other way round.

When we are the better answer

Move when the thing you are buying is the website itself, rather than the payments wrapped around it.

01You want the site to do the work: ordering, reservations, appointments by staff member and time slot, a class timetable, an order tracker — running on your own pages instead of pointing at somebody else’s.
02You want one database for orders, reservations, appointments, customers and enquiries, in a back office that belongs to the website rather than to a payments account.
03You want to own what you paid for. Take the source download on Storefront Pro, or export the whole codebase from the desktop app, hand it to whoever looks after it next, and the site stays up whatever happens between you and us.

Plain about the fit

Who this is built for

Square Online is a website hung off a point of sale you already own, and ours is the opposite shape — a register that lives inside the website, in a browser, on hardware you bring, so a counter already bolted to Square hardware is a counter you would be re-fitting. If what you actually want is a catalogue with stock counts, shipping rates and sales tax worked out for you, that is Shopify’s trade and a different product from either of us. What we sell is a restaurant site with its own ordering, its own reservations and its own counter, all three reporting into one back office, two languages, 600 industry-and-style combinations to choose the look from, and on Storefront Pro a folder of source code you keep.

Questions people actually ask

Can a Naratake site take card payments?

Only through your own Stripe account. You save your Stripe secret and publishable keys in workspace settings and Stripe pays you directly. There is no onboarding flow we walk you through, the money never passes through us, and we take no percentage of it.

Will online orders appear on my Square register?

Not on Square’s. We do not talk to Square’s point of sale and will not imply otherwise. They appear on ours: an ordering site ships a register in its own back office, and a sale rung at the counter sits on the same board as an order placed on the web, in one database that belongs to the website rather than to a payments account — and that database leaves with the export on Storefront Pro.

If I stop paying, what happens to the site?

A site we host stops being served, so what you can take away is worth settling before you build rather than on the day you cancel. Storefront Pro includes the source download; the $49 Storefront plan does not. The desktop app exports the whole codebase either way, and the folder it writes builds and runs on a host of your own.

Put your real menu into it before you decide

Building costs nothing. Take a restaurant starting point, load your actual menu, turn the ordering and the reservations on, and look at both the storefront and the back office before any money moves.

Start building for free See what the plans cost

What we checked

The pages this comparison was read from, all of them on Square Online’s own site.

Square and Square Online are trademarks of Block, Inc. Naratake is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Block, Inc.