LUXPOS vs Square: which POS fits a Luxembourg counter?

Short answer: LUXPOS or Square?

Square is the stronger product on price and on resilience, and you cannot buy it in Luxembourg. Square's own international availability article lists eight countries, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and Spain, and the Grand Duchy is in none of them. For a merchant in Esch or Ettelbruck the comparison ends on that line. If you also run a site in France, Ireland or Spain, read on, because Square's free restaurant tier is better than anything LUXPOS sells at that price, while LUXPOS wins the argument on Luxembourg tax output, staff languages and keeping your existing card terminal.

What LUXPOS and Square cost

The card fee is where Square is simply better. On a 40 euro card ticket Square takes 66 cents and LUXPOS takes 1.41 euro, so a restaurant doing 400 card tickets a month pays about 300 euros a year more in fees with LUXPOS than it would with Square. That gap is real and it is not closed by a cheaper subscription, because both charge 59 euros for their restaurant tier.

Which one handles Luxembourg VAT and the paperwork?

This is where the comparison turns. Luxembourg taxes a restaurant service at the super reduced rate of 3 percent but excludes the part of the service relating to alcoholic drinks, which falls to the standard 17 percent, under annexe B point 9 and article 39(3) of the VAT law. The plate and the glass of wine therefore sit at different rates on the same bill, and the rate has to be attached to the article rather than typed in at the till.

LUXPOS ships the four Luxembourg rates, 3, 8, 14 and 17 percent, preset and editable per article, splits revenue by rate on the daily close, exports the eCDF VAT declaration as XML and produces a FAIA 2.01 audit file, which is what the Administration de l'enregistrement, des domaines et de la TVA asks for in an audit. Square does none of that. You can configure a 3 percent tax rate in Square, of course, but the declaration and the audit file are your accountant's manual work. If you want the rules behind this, we wrote them up in does Luxembourg require a certified cash register.

Which one does your staff understand?

LUXPOS runs the cashier interface and prints receipts in French, German, English, Italian and Portuguese. Square supports English, French, Spanish, Catalan and Japanese, with no German and no Portuguese. In a Luxembourg dining room where the kitchen often speaks Portuguese, the floor speaks French and the guest from Trier speaks German, that is not a detail, it is who can be trained in an afternoon.

What keeps working when the internet drops?

Square wins this outright and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Square's offline mode keeps accepting cash and card payments from most major card brands, with a merchant set cap per transaction and up to 72 hours to reconnect and upload. LUXPOS states offline operation for cash sales only, with a sync on reconnect, and says nothing about card payments without a line. If your village has a flaky connection and a card heavy average ticket, that is an argument against LUXPOS that the vendor's own page hands you.

Hardware, acquiring and the terminal you already have

Square replaces your payment setup, because Square is the acquirer. That is why the hardware is cheap and the rate is low, and it is also why you cannot keep an existing contract. LUXPOS is the other way around: you can run it on the phone in your pocket for nothing, the optional LUXPOS Terminal is 199 euros once, the dedicated all in one terminal is still listed as a Q3 2026 item, and merchants who already have a terminal are referred back to their own provider. If you are two years into a terminal contract with a Luxembourg bank, that flexibility is worth more than a 19 euro reader.

Restaurant features, side by side

Square for Restaurants gives you a floor plan, split bills, tips, a kitchen display on the Plus tier and named integrations with Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat. LUXPOS includes order at table by QR code, with optional tip prompts at 5, 10 or 15 percent once a Stripe account is live, and a browser based kitchen screen with per station routing, both in the Register plan at no extra cost per order. What LUXPOS does not have is any delivery platform at all: its delivery module manages your own drivers, and the vendor states it handles no delivery fees, zones or minimum order values.

So which should you buy?

Buy Square if you trade in France, Ireland or Spain, your card volume is high and you are happy for Square to be your acquirer. It is the better deal and the safer bet during an outage. Buy LUXPOS if you ring up sales in Luxembourg, your staff room is multilingual, and you want the VAT split, the eCDF declaration and the FAIA file to come out of the same system as the sale, which also happens to be the only one of the two you can actually sign up for here. The wider field is in the best POS systems for Luxembourg, and the full Square profile, availability list included, is in our Square POS entry.

Disclosure: Thinking is published by TTA Technologies, which also builds LUXPOS. The availability fact that decides this comparison comes from Square's own help centre, and the card fee gap that favours Square comes from both vendors' own pricing pages.