One hop,
or two.
Oliver POS is a WooCommerce point of sale with a hosted service of its own. CodeBold Commerce is a WooCommerce till and stockroom that runs entirely on your server. Most of what follows comes from that one difference.
Both take sales against your WooCommerce catalogue. The questions worth asking are where your sales data sits while that happens, what stops if the subscription stops, and whether the supply side — suppliers, purchase orders, receiving, costing — is included or is somebody else's plugin.
The parts that
do not change
with a release.
Where the data goes
Our till talks to your WordPress site and nothing else — one hop. A POS with a hosted service adds a vendor cloud between the counter and your database. That is not automatically bad, but it is a party you did not have before, and it decides what happens when they change pricing or have a bad afternoon.
What the subscription buys
Every plugin in our suite is GPL. If you stop paying, the plugins keep working and your data stays in your WooCommerce database; you stop receiving updates and support. Check carefully what continues to work on any product where the till authenticates against a hosted service.
Scope of the product
We are a till and a stockroom in one install: suppliers with lead times, purchase orders, receiving, weighted-average costing, blind stock takes, transfers. A POS-first product generally leaves the supply side to a second plugin, which is where the reconciling starts.
How the shop is metered
Ours is priced by outlet, not by register, user or transaction count. Look closely at how any hosted POS counts what you owe — that is the number that grows with your festival season.
Row by row.
Our column is what the suite does today. The other column describes Oliver POS as we understand it — check it against their own documentation before you decide, because it is their product to describe.
| Feature | CodeBold Commerce | Oliver POS |
|---|---|---|
| Runs entirely on your server | Yes — the till talks to your WordPress site only | Connects to a hosted service |
| Sales written as WooCommerce orders | Yes | Yes |
| Works in a browser, no app | Yes — tablet, iPad, laptop, phone | Yes |
| Barcode scanning | USB or Bluetooth, or search by name | Yes |
| Card charged by the till | No — charged on your terminal, recorded on the order | No browser till charges a card |
| Suppliers with lead times | Free | verify |
| Purchase orders and receiving | Free | verify |
| Weighted-average costing | Free | verify |
| Blind stock takes | Free | verify |
| Transfers between outlets | Multi-outlet tier | verify |
| Offline selling | Yes, with receipt numbers reserved in advance | verify |
| Restaurant recipes and tickets | Restaurant module, multi-outlet tier | verify |
| Licence | GPL, every plugin | verify |
| Free tier | Free core on WordPress.org, not time-limited | verify current plans |
TODO: verify every claim in the Oliver POS column against their current documentation, and date this page
When to pick
Oliver POS.
A comparison page that cannot name a single reason to choose the other product is an advertisement wearing a table for a hat. Here are the honest ones.
- They have been at this longer, with a larger installed base and more third-party integrations to point at.
- A hosted service does some things a self-hosted plugin cannot — vendor-side monitoring, and support that can see your till without you sending screenshots.
- If your WordPress hosting is weak, pushing work off it can genuinely help. Ours puts the load on your server; that only works if your server is up to it.
- They publish a public pricing page with figures on it, which at the time of writing is more than we can say. TODO: remove this line once our pricing is published
Switching.
Can I move from Oliver POS without re-importing products?
What happens to past sales if I switch?
Is self-hosted always better?
How do I actually compare them?
Do not take our word.
Run both on staging.
Our core is free and not time-limited. An afternoon with your own catalogue beats any comparison table, including this one.