Compare EFTPOS Machines Side by Side

If you’re trying to compare EFTPOS machines side by side, here’s the honest starting point: most of them are the same machine wearing a different badge.

There are a lot of banks and providers in the Australian market selling EFTPOS solutions. Nearly all of them put their own name on their own terminals and talk about their own technology. Underneath, the differences are much smaller than the brochures suggest — and the things that genuinely will make or break your experience are almost never the things being advertised.

So this article is not another list of brand names. It’s a look at what actually varies between terminals, why it varies, and the handful of questions worth asking before you commit. If you’d rather go straight to the machines themselves, our side-by-side comparison does that.

Why most EFTPOS machines are basically the same

Strip a terminal back and there are three parts.

There’s the hardware — the physical device. There’s the payment application sitting on it, which is usually built by the bank or built in conjunction with the bank. And there’s the message that application sends into the bank to get the transaction approved.

That’s it. That’s the machine.

So when a provider tells you their terminal is the best, the fastest, the most secure — take a breath. A lot of the time they’re describing the same hardware, running a similar application, sending the same message to the same place. The claims get loud precisely because the underlying product is so similar.

What that means practically: comparing EFTPOS machines on brand is close to useless. Comparing them on form factor, integration model, and what your acquirer has switched on is where the real differences live.

The terminal swap-out you’ve probably noticed

Over the last couple of years there’s been a slow swap-out across the market — the old terminal fleet being replaced by a new one.

That’s driven by security compliance. Payment terminals are certified under the PCI PTS standard, and each version of that standard eventually expires. Once a version expires, acquirers can’t issue those terminals to new merchants any more. Terminals already sitting on counters are generally allowed to keep running for a period after that — they don’t switch off overnight — but the pipeline of new ones stops.

That’s why the fleet has turned over. The old generation had a long run: devices like the Ingenico Move 5000 were in the market for the better part of a decade, and to be fair to them, they were robust. They worked. A lot of merchants were perfectly happy and didn’t ask for anything else.

What replaced them is a different animal.

The “smart terminal” promise — and the Australian reality

The new fleet is mostly built on Android, with some Linux. Bigger screens, funkier hardware, and a pitch attached: because it’s an app platform, third-party developers can build straight onto the terminal.

In the Australian market, “third-party developers” really means point-of-sale providers. The vision is your POS — your shop items, your menu, your stock — living on the payment terminal itself. One device instead of two.

Here’s what we’ve found: it is very, very hard to actually make that happen.

It’s hard to get the integration built. It’s often hard to find someone at the bank or the acquirer who can tell you what’s genuinely supported versus what’s on a roadmap slide. The gap between the pitch and a working install is wide.

So in practice, the market didn’t move. Middleware is still how point-of-sale integration actually happens in Australia — Linkly and mx51 dominate, with acquirers running their own alongside them, like ANZ Worldline’s TIM and Tyro’s. The smart terminal changed the hardware. It hasn’t yet changed the plumbing.

Worth knowing before you buy a terminal partly because of what its screen might one day run.

Compare EFTPOS machines by type, not by brand

This is where genuine differences show up. There are six broad categories, and the right one for you is usually obvious once it’s laid out.

Countertop terminals

A keypad, plugged in, in a cradle, that never moves.

These are frequently the ones that work best, and the reason is unglamorous: they don’t have to do anything hard. Big fat cables, hard-wired in. They don’t run out of power. They don’t struggle with an internet connection. The link to the point of sale is a physical plug. It just works.

If you’re a high-traffic business, this is what you want. Go and look at Aldi, Woolies or Coles — every one of them runs this style of terminal. That’s not an accident.

Portable smart terminals

Big screen, take it out of the cradle, carry it to the customer. This is what you’ll see across most restaurants now, and the flexibility is real.

So is the failure mode. They can drop out. They can be stubborn on a poor internet connection, or a poor 4G/5G connection if they’re running on a SIM. Every convenience you add — battery, wireless, mobility — is another thing that can fail at 7pm on a Saturday.

That’s not an argument against them. It’s an argument for being honest about whether you need one.

Unattended terminals

An unattended terminal is one with nobody standing next to it — a vending machine, a car park. There’s no attendant, hence the name.

It’s a more complicated space with different obligations attached, and it’s worth getting specific advice rather than assuming a standard terminal will do the job. We won’t go deep on it here, but if that’s your business, ask the question early.

Semi-attended terminals and kiosks

Semi-attended sits between the two. Think of the self-service screens at McDonald’s, or KFC — a terminal attached to a kiosk, with a staff member nearby to step in when someone gets stuck.

The driver is almost always labour cost. Kiosks let a site run more orders through fewer people. If you have an app-based ordering channel as well, the kiosk catches everyone who doesn’t use it and doesn’t want to queue.

Tap to Pay on mobile

The fourth category isn’t really a terminal at all, though it’s still a card-present transaction: turning a phone into the payment device.

You’ve seen the ads. No terminal, no monthly terminal fee — which makes it genuinely good for tradespeople. A carpenter finishes a job, pulls out a phone, done. For someone taking a handful of payments a week, avoiding a terminal rental is a real saving.

The catch is on the other side of the transaction. Australian uptake has been slower than you’d expect, and we think it’s mostly cardholder trepidation. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes: a tradie you’ve just met holds out a phone and asks you to tap your card on it. If you don’t understand payment security, that feels different to tapping a terminal — is this thing going to help itself to my account? It’s not a rational fear, but it’s a real one, and it’s slowed adoption.

It’s not limited to iPhones, either. Both Apple and Android support it, and in our view Android is more widely used here — go looking and you’ll find hundreds of Android devices with an NFC chip in them at every price point. Our experience integrating our own POS into this is that not all devices are equal. Some work noticeably better than others. Cheap NFC hardware is cheap for a reason.

Where mobile does something a terminal can’t is pay-at-table. Walk to table one, take the payment. Walk to table two, take the payment. No returning to the POS station between each one to select the next table — and that station can easily be twenty or thirty metres away if you’ve got a garden or multiple service areas. Over a busy service, that adds up.

Integrated vs standalone: the difference that causes the most grief

This is the one worth slowing down on, because it’s where most merchant frustration actually originates.

Standalone means you key the amount in. Someone buys something for twenty dollars, you punch twenty dollars into the terminal. Out of the box, turn it on, take the payment. Nothing complicated, and it works.

Integrated means your point of sale tells the terminal what to charge. You scan a four-dollar block of Cadbury — assuming it’s on special, because they’re about seven bucks a block now — and the terminal already knows the amount. The customer taps. No keying, no typos.

Integrated is better. It’s also where things break, and the reason is structural.

An integrated terminal relies on your POS company having built a proper integration into one of the middleware layers — Linkly, mx51, or an acquirer’s own, like ANZ Worldline’s TIM or Tyro’s. If that integration is substandard, there is very little the payment company can do about it. And to be fair to them, there’s very little Linkly can do about it either.

What happens next is predictable. The merchant has problems, and the blame goes to the bank, to the broker, to us, to the terminal provider — to everyone except the POS provider whose integration is the actual cause.

That matters for you in a practical way: when you’re comparing EFTPOS machines for an integrated setup, you’re also comparing your POS provider. Ask them which middleware they integrate with, how long that integration has been live, and how many merchants are running it. A great terminal behind a poor integration is a poor experience, and no amount of switching banks will fix it.

Unless you already have a genuinely robust POS solution, that question deserves as much attention as the terminal itself.

Functionality is set by your bank, not your terminal

Here’s something that catches people out: not all terminals have the same functionality, and the difference is usually acquirer-led rather than terminal-led. Same hardware, different bank, different feature set.

Tipping is the clearest example.

Personally, as a customer, I’m not a fan — the waiter standing over you watching you decide whether to tip. Plenty of people feel guilty and tip anyway, and that’s exactly why it works.

We’ve had restaurant owners tell us their staff are making hundreds of dollars more a week through tipping once that functionality was switched on. And the flow-on effect was the one they cared about: their rostering problems disappeared. They used to struggle to fill shifts. Now staff want the shifts, because the shifts are worth more.

One of those merchants had two options in front of him. Option two cost slightly more — about five basis points more — and had tipping. He took it without hesitating, because five basis points was nothing next to solving a staffing problem he’d been fighting for months.

That’s the real lesson in comparing EFTPOS machines. The cheapest rate isn’t automatically the best deal. The right question is which option changes something in your business — and then whether the difference in cost is worth it. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it very obviously is. You can only answer that if someone puts the options side by side and explains the trade-off honestly, which is what we do.

So how should you compare EFTPOS machines?

Forget the badge on the front. Work through four questions instead.

1. What form factor does the business actually need? Fixed till, table service, unattended, kiosk, or phone-in-pocket. Get this wrong and nothing else matters.
2. Integrated or standalone? If integrated, vet your POS provider’s integration as seriously as the terminal.
3. What functionality do you need switched on? Tipping, surcharging, split payments, pay-at-table. This is set by the acquirer, so it’s a question about which bank you’re on, not which box is on the counter.
4. What’s the total cost, including the things that aren’t the rate? Terminal rental, transaction pricing, contract term, and what happens when something breaks. Our EFTPOS fees guide breaks down where the money actually goes, and the fee calculator will give you a number for your own turnover.

Answer those and the shortlist writes itself. Nearly every “which terminal is best” argument dissolves once you’ve been specific about what the business does.

If you’d rather not work through it alone, that’s the job — putting the real options in front of you, explaining what actually separates them, and letting you pick. Tell us what your business does and we’ll come back with two or three that genuinely fit.

FAQ

Are all EFTPOS machines basically the same?

Structurally, yes — most are hardware running a payment application that sends a message to the bank. The meaningful differences are form factor, whether the terminal integrates with your point of sale, and which features your acquirer has enabled.

What’s the difference between an integrated and a standalone EFTPOS machine?

Standalone means you key the sale amount into the terminal manually. Integrated means your point-of-sale system sends the amount to the terminal automatically. Integrated is faster and removes keying errors, but it depends on your POS provider having built a solid integration through middleware such as Linkly, mx51, or an acquirer’s own layer like ANZ Worldline’s TIM.

Why is my integrated EFTPOS terminal dropping out?

If the terminal itself is fine on standalone transactions, the fault often sits with the point-of-sale integration rather than the terminal, the bank or the broker. Raise it with your POS provider first — they own that integration, and neither the acquirer nor the middleware provider can fix it for them.

Is Tap to Pay on a phone as good as an EFTPOS terminal?

For low-volume merchants like tradespeople it can be excellent, mainly because there’s no monthly terminal rental. The trade-offs are hardware quality — cheaper NFC devices perform noticeably worse — and some customers are still wary about tapping their card on a stranger’s phone.

Why does my terminal not have tipping when another business has it?

Terminal functionality is usually determined by the acquirer, not the hardware. Two merchants can run identical terminals with different features enabled because they’re with different banks.

Which EFTPOS machine is best for a restaurant?

Usually a portable smart terminal, because staff take payment at the table. Check that tipping and pay-at-table are available on your acquirer, and be realistic about your Wi-Fi and mobile coverage — portability introduces failure modes a countertop terminal doesn’t have. Our guide to the best EFTPOS machine goes through the shortlist.