Best Digital Menu Boards for Quick-Service Restaurants: WAND Digital vs Raydiant

Digital menu boards are now table stakes for small and midsize business owners and operators in the fast casual and quick-service restaurant (QSR) industry. For franchisors and franchisees who are ready to make the investment in digital menus for drive-thrus and indoor service, we’ve pulled together comparisons of the best platforms on the market for QSRs. In this article, we’ll compare WAND Digital’s menu system and Raydiant’s.

Raydiant’s software and hardware (a plug-and-play device) are not specifically made for QSRs and fast casual restaurants but any business with digital signage needs.They run the gamut when it comes to industries served, which means their software and hardware were created for broad use, not just for QSR drive-thru digital menus or indoor digital menus. 

Raydiant’s content management system (CMS) integrates with several point-of-sale (POS) systems, including Square and Toast. The CMS connects customers to an overwhelming and unfocused stack of features and media like employee rewards, sales gamification, mobile apps, widgets, emotion detection, 250,000+ drag-and-drop templates, music, video clips, news feeds, social sharing, trivia games, entertainment, etc. This lack of focus could be distracting for small to midsize QSRs who are looking to take the first step of swapping static manual menus with dynamic digital menus or are just getting a foothold in upgraded technology.

Because WAND Digital is centered on QSRs and fast casual restaurants, we won’t take you down a rabbit hole of distracting or complicated features that are not focused on what it takes to run and scale a QSR successfully. WAND Digital’s software is specifically made to help QSR and fast casual restaurant owners and operators get up and running quickly and seamlessly with digital menu boards. With our installation and onboarding services, content management resources, and award-winning menu design, you’ll be able to easily make updates to menu items, prices, descriptions, calories and sizes, as well as upload brand assets, schedule day-parting, and deploy a premium outdoor and indoor experience from one store to hundreds in minutes.

Designed for maximum performance, WAND is hosted by AWS and backed by an offline automatic playback system. WAND software integrates with POS systems like Revel, Toast, PAR Technology’s Brink (all leaders in the QSR industry) and more, so you have a single source of truth for powering, managing, and revising your digital menus.

Raydiant does not make display screens and recommends their customers to source their own from places like Walmart, Best Buy or Costco, leaving it up to customers to figure out industrial-grade requirements and which ones fit best for their locations. Additionally, Raydiant hires out Geek Squad for installation. In regards to their hardware, Raydiant makes a mini computer that plugs into an HDMI port. Each device plays to each individual screen to be controlled independently from their cloud-based CMS.

WAND Digital can outfit your QSR or fast-casual restaurant with POS integrations, state-of-the-art hardware, and more tech to fit your needs. WAND will help you procure industrial-grade digital menu boards for your drive-thrus that withstand the weather in any region and climate that your stores are located in as well as best-in-class displays for your indoor spaces. Because we are experts in digital signage for the QSR industry, we can cater to your specific needs and goals from start to finish. We also offer 24/7/365 operational support.

Overall, Raydiant offers a lot across the gamut of digital signage needs. Though, perhaps their lack of focus on QSRs and overwhelming amount of features and technology options could leave you self-navigating the transition to digital menus.

Disclaimer: All information was obtained from public sources on or around the date of publishing this article and may have changed since then. References to Raydiant are for illustrative and educational purposes only. We are not affiliated with or sponsored by Raydiant.