A question comes up in almost every conversation with a retail operator: my point-of-sale vendor offers a website, so why would I need anything else? It is a reasonable question and it deserves a descriptive answer rather than a sales one.
Buddy is a certified partner of every system named below. Nothing here is a ranking, and there is no best. The useful frame is architectural. A point-of-sale system is a system of record: it owns the register, the inventory count, the compliance reporting, and the transaction. A storefront is the customer-facing layer that sits on top of that record. Those are two different jobs, and each system below was designed with a different balance between them.
Flowhub
Flowhub is built around the counter. Speed of checkout, hardware that holds up in a busy retail environment, inventory accuracy, and the reporting a manager needs to run a shift are where its design attention goes. Retailers who choose it usually choose it for how the floor runs.
Its customer-facing offering follows from that. There is a menu that reflects live inventory so shoppers see what is genuinely on the shelf, and ordering that flows back into the same system the staff already work in. For a store whose priority is a correct menu attached to a correct register, that covers the requirement.
Where operators tend to want more is in everything that is not the menu. Deep control of the page a shopper lands on, brand and category destinations built the way marketing wants them, and content pages that are part of the same site as the products rather than beside them. Those are storefront concerns, and the register was never intended to be a site builder. Details are on the Flowhub integration page.
Dutchie
Dutchie’s footprint is the widest of the group. It covers the register and the ordering experience, and for many retailers it also functions as their discovery surface, because shoppers encounter menus through Dutchie itself. That reach is genuinely valuable and is a real reason retailers stay.
The trade-off is the one that comes with any shared surface. The shopping experience is broadly consistent across the retailers using it, which is what makes it dependable, and consistency is the opposite of differentiation. An operator who wants their site to look and behave unlike every other store in their metro is asking for something a shared experience is not designed to provide.
This is where the keep-your-register framing matters most. The choice is not between Dutchie and a storefront. Retailers commonly keep Dutchie doing what it does well and put a distinct storefront in front of it. That pattern is laid out on the comparison of how dispensary websites get built, and the connection itself on the Dutchie integration page.
Treez
Treez leans toward the operator running a more complex business: multiple locations, structured inventory practices, and a preference for configuring the system to match how the company already works. Its strength shows up in the back office more than at the counter.
Its customer-facing side is proportionate to that focus. Shoppers can browse and order against accurate inventory, which is the requirement. Operators who have invested in configuring Treez to their exact workflow often then find their front end is the least configured thing they own, which is the moment a separate storefront becomes interesting. See the Treez integration page.
iHeartJane
Jane is a shopping and discovery product first. Its design centre of gravity is the browse experience: how products are presented, how a shopper moves through a catalogue, and how a retailer’s inventory appears inside a marketplace that shoppers visit on its own terms.
That marketplace presence is the value and also the shape of the limit. Traffic that arrives through a marketplace is traffic the marketplace introduced, and the retailer participates in it rather than owning it. Operators who want a destination of their own, at their own address, are describing something adjacent to what Jane set out to build rather than a shortcoming in it. See the Jane integration page.
Alpine IQ
Alpine IQ is the one item here that is not a register at all. It is built for the customer relationship: loyalty, audience segmentation, and messaging. It answers who your shoppers are and how you talk to them, which neither a point-of-sale nor a storefront answers on its own.
Because it sits beside rather than underneath, the gap it leaves is different in kind. Alpine IQ can tell you a segment exists and can reach it. What that message points at, and whether the destination reflects the same understanding of the shopper, is decided by the storefront. See the Alpine IQ integration page.
The line that runs through all five
Read the five descriptions together and a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with quality. Each product is strongest at the job it was designed for, and each one’s customer-facing layer is sized to serve that job rather than to be the whole of a retailer’s digital presence.
That is a sensible way to build software. It also means the question a retailer should ask is not which of these is best, because they are not competing for the same role. The question is which one is your system of record, and then, separately, what do you want the thing sitting on top of it to do.
If the answers are “the register I already run” and “a store that is unmistakably mine,” those are compatible answers. Nothing has to be replaced for both to be true.