RaspberryPints vs Brewlytics: From Pi Project to Taproom Platform

Why This Matters for Breweries

Every brewery that has ever priced digital menu software has had the same thought: this is a list of beers on a screen — how hard can it be?

That thought is why RaspberryPints exists, and it was right. A Raspberry Pi, a TV, and an open-source project got thousands of homebrewers and more than a few taprooms a digital taplist for the cost of the hardware. It remains one of the better answers in home brewing.

The trouble starts when the same reasoning is applied to a commercial room. The software is still free. The Saturday night it stops working is not.

And there is a second complication: RaspberryPints now means two different things, and recommendations rarely say which. Getting that straight is most of the decision.

How It Works: Two Products, One Name

1. The original — open-source, self-hosted

The RaspberryPints project is a digital signage version of the common chalkboard taplist, based on the kegerface project. It lives at github.com/RaspberryPints/RaspberryPints, with community forks still maintained by individual developers.

You run it yourself. That means a Pi, a database, config files, and — if you want pour levels — flow meters and the wiring that comes with them. The software costs nothing and the setup costs a weekend, which for a homebrewer is the fun part.

2. The cloud successor — hosted, maintained

At raspberrypints.com there is now a cloud product that explicitly positions itself as keeping what people liked about a Pi-powered menu while removing "no database setup, no config files, no flow-meter wiring required."

What it offers, per its own site in September 2026:

• Update once from one dashboard; digital taplist, website embed, printable PDFs and QR codes all refresh together
• No special hardware — any TV or tablet you already own
• A free tier, with pricing tiered by tap count, no setup fees or contracts
• Keg and inventory tracking — what's on, what's next, what's low
• A public API for partners, POS vendors or your own engineers
• FlowBox hardware for automatic pour-level monitoring, listed as coming soon

That last point matters if flow-meter accuracy is the thing you're buying. Confirm its status before committing.

3. Brewlytics — a customer platform that draws menus

Brewlytics reads your Square POS (Toast and Arryved next) and builds a structured picture of both your beer and your customers. TV and print menus are one surface of that; loyalty, taste-segmented alerts and an AI bartender are others.

The comparison, in one table

Example Brewery Scenario

Fogline Brewing ran the Pi build for two years, and it worked. Their head brewer set it up, enjoyed it, and it showed twelve taps on a TV for the price of the hardware.

Then he went on holiday, an update broke the display, and a bartender spent a Friday night apologising to a room while a white screen glowed over the bar. Nobody else knew where the config file lived.

That is not a criticism of the software — it is what self-hosting means. The question was never whether the Pi build works; it is whether the person who maintains it is available at 9pm on a Saturday, and whether your taproom should depend on that.

Fogline's options at that point were three. Move to the cloud version and keep a menu that someone else maintains — a good, cheap answer, and if the menu is the whole job, the right one. Keep the Pi and formalise the maintenance. Or notice that their real problem had shifted: they now had four years of Square history and no idea which of their regulars drank hazy IPAs, and the screen had stopped being the interesting part.

Only the third of those is a Brewlytics conversation. The first two are perfectly good outcomes and we would rather you got there than paid us for the wrong thing.

Practical Checklist

• Work out which RaspberryPints a recommendation means. The Pi project and the cloud product share a name and almost nothing else.
• Name the person who owns the Pi build. If you can't, you don't have free software — you have an unassigned job.
• Check FlowBox status directly if pour-level monitoring is why you're choosing it; it was listed as coming soon in September 2026.
• Start on a free tier before paying anyone. The cloud version has one. So do we, for a different thing.
• Ask what reads your till. A menu system reads a beer list you maintain. Only something reading transactions can tell you who drank what.
• Look at your POS item history once. If what you see changes who you'd message this month, your problem moved past menus.

How Brewlytics Helps

If the customer side turns out to be the real work:

• POS Sync reads item-level Square transactions — not a beer list you retype, the actual till. (See the Square integration)
• Customer Taste Profiles turn that history into a per-person picture of what someone actually drinks. (How customer insights work)
• Taproom Menus cover TV and print from one live tap list, offline-cached so a network drop never blanks the screen. (See the menus feature)
• Campaign Automation sends taste-matched release alerts over iMessage, SMS and email to the people whose palates match the beer.

For the wider field, see the roundup of digital beer menu software.

FAQ

See the schema-ready FAQ block at the end of the page for the full set.

Ready to see what your POS already knows?

Keep the Pi if you love it. Move to the cloud version if you'd rather someone else owned the uptime. Both are reasonable, and neither needs us.

Then ask the question a menu can't answer: when the next hazy IPA goes on, who should hear about it first?

Book a walkthrough and we'll show you the taste segments already sitting in your Square history, or read more about what Brewlytics does for breweries.