uniCenta

uniCenta was forked from Openbravo POS around 2010, after Openbravo moved its retail edition behind a commercial license, to keep a free, GPL point-of-sale option for small shops. That rescue mission still shapes the project: the software costs nothing and hides no feature behind a paywall, but the herbiehp repository hosting its source has not been pushed since January 2015, so fixes now depend on the community rather than a funded team.

Why uniCenta instead of Lightspeed POS

Lightspeed POS bundles register software with hosted inventory sync, an app marketplace and its own payment processing, billed per register every month. uniCenta covers the same checkout core — barcode scanning, till management, receipt and kitchen printing, customer accounts — as a single Java application installed once on Windows, macOS or Linux and pointed at a local Apache Derby, MySQL or PostgreSQL database. There is no seat count and no monthly invoice; the trade-off is that you run the server, back up the database and manage accounts yourself instead of leaving that to Lightspeed's cloud.

For a single counter or a handful of terminals on one LAN, that trade favors uniCenta: multi-location, multi-terminal setups spanning bars, cafés and general retail run off shared config screens rather than a cloud dashboard. It does not offer Lightspeed's integrated card processing, e-commerce sync or vendor app ecosystem — teams that need those end up layering a gateway and import scripts on top themselves.

What it does well

• Switchable retail, restaurant and bar sales screens, so one install serves a café counter and a back-room stockroom.
• Runs against Apache Derby out of the box, or MySQL, PostgreSQL, HSQLDB or Oracle when a team needs a shared database.
• Multi-location and multi-terminal management from one install, useful for agencies rolling the same POS out to several clients.
• Configurable ticket, receipt and kitchen-printer layouts, plus category and product import for onboarding a catalog quickly.
• Customer accounts with running debt and credit tracking, handy for shops that run tabs or account billing.
• Ships in 17 languages, useful for teams deploying the same install across regions without a per-locale fee.

Limitations

• The herbiehp source repository has not been pushed since January 2015; a GitHub issue asking whether anyone still maintains it went unanswered.