Home › Blog › Kitchen Display System vs Kitchen Printer (Paper Chits): Which Should Your Kitchen Use?

Kitchen Display System vs Kitchen Printer (Paper Chits): Which Should Your Kitchen Use?

4 Jul 2026 • 9 min read

Every kitchen has to answer one question: how does an order get from the till to the person cooking it? For decades the answer was a kitchen printer spitting paper chits. Increasingly it's a Kitchen Display System (KDS) — a screen. Both work. This is an honest look at where each wins, and why the smartest setup for many restaurants is a hybrid of the two.

The case for the kitchen printer

Paper has real virtues, which is why it's lasted:

• Dead simple. A chit is a chit. Anyone understands it instantly, no training.
• Works with no network. A LAN printer keeps printing even if the internet is down.
• Physical hand-off. Some kitchens like a ticket they can grab, spike, and physically move with the dish.
• No screen to fail. No glare, no sleeping display, no dead battery.

The costs are equally real: paper and ribbons forever, chits that curl or fall off the rail, no timing information, no recall of a cleared order, and a separate printer for every station.

The case for the KDS

A screen does things paper simply cannot:

• Live timing. Every ticket ages with a timer and colour warnings, so the pass protects its slowest order.
• Nothing gets lost. Tickets don't blow away or smudge.
• Station routing. One screen filters to show each station only its items — no printer per station.
• Bump and recall. Clear a finished ticket in a tap; bring back the last one if it's cleared too early.
• All-day totals. "14 lattes, 6 mains" across all tickets, so a station can batch.
• No consumables. No paper, no ribbons, ever.

The historic weakness — and the reason some kitchens hesitated — is reliability if the software is a web page that goes blank when the Wi‑Fi drops. That is a solvable problem, and it's the thing to scrutinise.

Head to head

The offline question — the one that actually matters

If you take nothing else from this comparison: a printer's biggest advantage over a KDS is that it keeps working with no network. So the deciding question isn't "screen or paper" — it's "does this KDS keep working offline?" A KDS that caches the live board locally and queues actions (start, bump, item-done) to replay on reconnect removes the printer's last real edge. Shopways' native iPad KDS does this, and can fall back to a printed chit as backup. We cover it in the complete KDS guide and in why offline matters.

Why hybrid is often the right answer

You don't have to choose. The most comfortable setup for many restaurants is hybrid: the KDS shows every order and a chit prints. You get the screen's timing, routing and recall, with paper as a familiar backup and for any station that prefers it. It's also the least stressful way to migrate — keep the printer while the team learns to trust the screen, then quietly retire the paper once they do. Shopways supports exactly this: auto-print chits on, KDS still running, both in sync.

So which should you use?

• Tiny kitchen, one person, no stations: a printer (or even the KDS alone) is fine.
• Multiple stations, timing pressure, remakes hurting you: a KDS pays for itself in accuracy and speed.
• Nervous about reliability or change: run hybrid — KDS plus chit — and switch fully when ready.

The trend is clearly toward the screen, but only a KDS that survives an outage deserves to replace paper outright. Choose on offline behaviour first, features second.

Frequently asked questions

Can I run a KDS and a printer at the same time?

Yes — that's hybrid mode. Shopways can print a chit on send while also showing the order on the KDS, which is the recommended way to transition.

Is a KDS cheaper than a printer over time?

Usually, because there are no paper or ribbon costs and fewer remakes from misread chits — provided the KDS is included in your plan rather than metered per screen.

What happens to the KDS if the internet drops?

With a native, offline-capable KDS like Shopways', the board keeps working from a local cache and actions sync on reconnect, with a printed-chit fallback. Always test this before relying on it.

← Back to all articles