Local or cloud: choosing without regretting it in a year

Both editions run the same code against the same database schema. The difference is not features on a list — it is where the software lives, and everything else follows from that one fact.

Five questions settle it. The first two decide it outright; the rest are about which kind of work you would rather do.

1. Do you take online orders?

If customers order from a phone, from a QR code on the table, or through your own website, you need the cloud. Not as a preference — a PC behind a shop router has no address a customer’s phone can reach from the street, so the customer app, the QR menu, online payment and driver dispatch have nothing to attach to.

This one question ends the discussion for a lot of restaurants, and it is worth asking before any other.

If everything you sell is sold over the counter or at the table by your own staff, keep reading.

2. Will you have a second branch?

A Local Edition licence covers one branch, on one machine. Two branches means two licences and two independent islands: no shared stock, no menu pushed to both, no staff moving between them, and no report that adds the two together. Two computers in two buildings cannot see each other without a server in the middle, and removing that server is the entire idea of the local edition.

If a second location is a plan rather than a daydream, start on the cloud. Migrating one branch up later is possible — see below — but running two islands for a year and reconciling them by hand is a job nobody enjoys twice.

3. How good is your internet, really?

Not “do you have internet” — everybody has internet. The question is what happens on the bad day.

The cloud POS keeps selling from an offline queue when the line drops and syncs when it comes back, which covers an outage of minutes or hours. The local edition never asked for the line at all, which covers a place where the connection is out for days, is metered, or is shared with a building that saturates it at seven every evening.

If your last three outages were annoyances, either works. If any of them cost you a service, that is a real argument for local.

4. Who should be responsible for the data?

There is a version of “your data is yours” that means we hold it and you can export it any time, and a version that means it is on a disk in your building and nobody else has a copy. Both are honest; they hand the risk to different people.

On the cloud, backups, redundancy and recovery are our problem. On a local install they are yours: the machine writes a backup every night at three, keeps it for a week nightly, a month weekly and a year monthly — under forty files — and somebody in the restaurant has to copy that folder to a USB disk. Owning the data means owning that habit. There is no third party to blame for a copy nobody made.

5. Would you rather pay money or pay attention?

This is the real trade, and it is not the one the price list shows.

Local trades a recurring bill for recurring attention. That is a good trade for an owner who is on site every day and would rather control the machine than the invoice. It is a bad trade for an owner who is rarely in the building, because every job in that column happens in the building.

The choice is reversible — deliberately

Both editions share one database schema, and every record is keyed by a GUID rather than by a counter. That is not a detail: it is what lets two databases that never knew about each other merge under one account without colliding on a single id.

So a local branch can export a signed package of itself and a cloud account can import it as one of its branches. The screen is in the dashboard and works in both directions — a cloud branch can also come back down onto a machine, which is what an owner who is closing a location and keeping one till actually needs.

Two rough edges are worth knowing before you plan a move rather than after: order numbers can collide between branches, and a menu that exists on both sides needs a human to say which items are the same item. Neither is a wall; both are an afternoon.

The short version

Buy local if you sell over the counter, run one branch, are in the building every day, and your internet is not something you would bet a Friday night on.

Rent the cloud if customers order online, if there will be a second branch, or if you would rather the backup, the server and the update schedule were somebody else’s job.

If you genuinely cannot tell, start on the free cloud plan. It costs nothing to run a month of real orders through it, and a month of real orders answers question 3 better than any table can.