Compare / Shopify, Block and Lightspeed
Rutba vs Shopify, Square and Lightspeed
Commerce and point-of-sale platforms that are excellent at selling. The comparison is about everything that happens after the sale.
Checked 1 September 2026Shopify pricing (representative of the category) ↗
What Shopify, Square and Lightspeed is
Storefront, checkout, payments and point-of-sale platforms with strong retail features, payment processing built in, and large app stores for the rest.
Who it genuinely suits
- Retailers whose primary need is to sell online or in person, quickly and well
- Businesses that want payments and platform from one vendor
- Anyone whose operation genuinely is the storefront
Where they win
What Shopify, Square and Lightspeed does better than us.
Every comparison page on this site has this section and none of them is empty. If it were, you would be right to discount the rest of the page.
The storefront and the checkout
Conversion, themes, payment methods, fraud handling, and a checkout that has been optimised against more traffic than we will see for years.
Payments are built in
One vendor for the platform and the processing. Card capture is not even built on our side yet, and our sub-processor list says so.
Retail hardware and the app stores
Terminals, readers, peripherals, and a very large ecosystem of retail apps.
Where we win
What Rutba does that this does not.
Argued from how the products are built rather than from a feature list, because feature lists are the part of a comparison that goes stale first.
The till and the store read the same stock as the warehouse
Not a synced copy on a schedule — the same quantity. Overselling between channels is a class of problem that stops existing rather than being managed.
The books are downstream of the trading, not an export of it
Takings, tax and cost of sale post as the sale happens rather than arriving nightly as a summary journal.
Purchasing, suppliers and production are in the same system
Commerce platforms stop at the sale. A retailer who also buys, makes or distributes needs the other half, and that is where the app-store subscriptions accumulate.
And the one that is not a feature
Shopify, Block and Lightspeed will not build what you ask for. We will.
That is not a criticism of them — a vendor at their scale has to weigh your request against every other customer it touches, and schedule it behind a roadmap set a year out. Your request is a rounding error in their planning, honestly so. We are small, and the people building the product are the people you talk to: what helps everyone goes into the product at no extra charge, what is specific to you is quoted as the work it is, and when the answer is no you get the reason.
Side by side
The same six questions the hub asks of everyone.
| Question | Rutba | Shopify, Square and Lightspeed |
|---|---|---|
| Runs the businessCRM, stock, orders, production and the ledger, from one vendor | Included | Partly |
| Runs the dayMail, files, documents, chat and meetings, included rather than licensed separately | Included | Not covered |
| One set of recordsDo the modules share the records, or integrate copies of them | Included | Partly |
| Buy it yourselfCan you subscribe and start without a partner or a sales cycle | Included | Included |
| Parts sold separatelyCan you take one piece without committing to the platform | Included | Included |
| Run it yourselfIs there a path to your own hardware | Partly | Not covered |
On price: We do not reproduce Shopify, Block and Lightspeed’s prices here. A list price is published and fair to quote, and it is stale within a quarter — which would make this page quietly wrong in a way you could not see. Read today’s number from them, and ours is on our pricing page in full, tier by tier.
Moving
What leaving Shopify, Square and Lightspeed actually involves.
The question that decides this is not whether you should move but whether you can. This is the honest version, including the parts that do not come across.
- 1
Products, variants, customers and order history export well from all three.
- 2
The storefront itself — theme, content, SEO — is a rebuild, and it is the part to plan around. Preserve URLs and redirects.
- 3
Payment processing arrangements are separate contracts and do not move with the platform.
- 4
Run the two in parallel through one quiet period before switching the till.
No customer has done this yet. The steps above describe the mechanism — what exports, what imports, what has to be rebuilt — rather than a migration we have run. When one has been run, this section will say whose it was.
Our actual recommendation
If you sell and do little else, they are the right answer and we would say so. The comparison starts to matter when the stock, the purchasing and the books have become four more subscriptions around the storefront.
If you did move
The products this comparison is about.
With their real availability labels, which apply inside a comparison exactly as they do everywhere else on this site.
Rutba Commerce
Available nowE-commerce platform & POS system
An online storefront, the CMS behind it, and a point-of-sale till that shares the same products, prices, and stock levels — so the shop floor and the website never disagree.
- One product catalog behind web and counter
- Live stock levels at the till and on the product page
- Content and landing pages without a second CMS
Includes: Storefront · CMS · Point of Sale
From $29 per user / month
Rutba Inventory
Available nowInventory management & warehouse (WMS) software
Stock levels, multi-location transfers, stocktakes, and valuation — the single source of truth every other part of the business reserves and deducts against.
- Live stock across unlimited locations and bins
- Transfers with in-transit visibility
- Scheduled and rolling stocktakes with variance reporting
Includes: Stock · Warehouse Control
From $22 per user / month
Rutba Orders
Available nowOrder management (OMS) & delivery software
The order hub where web, counter, and phone orders all land — picked, packed, dispatched, delivered, and returned, with a rider app for the last mile.
- One queue for web, counter, and phone orders
- Pick and pack workflows with stock reserved automatically
- Delivery runs assigned to drivers, tracked live
Includes: Orders · Rider
From $19 per user / month
Rutba Books
Available nowAccounting & bookkeeping software
Invoicing, bills, banking and reconciliation on one side; the ledger, tax, budgets and the financial reports on the other — fed automatically by every sale, pay run and stock movement happening elsewhere in the business.
- Two apps on one ledger - the daily bookkeeping surface and the accountant’s workbench, neither hiding anything from the other
- Sales invoices, bills, receipts, supplier payments and credit notes, with per-line tax
- Bank statements read in whatever your bank emits - CAMT.053, MT940, OFX/QFX or CSV - and matched, with reconciliation that must reach zero
Includes: Books · Accounts
From $14 per user / month
Head to head
Shopify, Square and Lightspeed against the others.
You are comparing Shopify, Square and Lightspeed to something, and it may well not be us. These are written to the same standard as this page — sourced, dated, and naming where each product wins.
Weighing this against Shopify, Square and Lightspeed?
Tell us what you run and how you use it. We will be specific about what would improve, what would get worse, and whether the move is worth it at all.