SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
The short answer
If you run a restaurant on SumUp and it's starting to creak, switch to Flipdish. It's a restaurant POS with online ordering, branded apps, self-service kiosks, loyalty and AI phone ordering in the same platform, so you stop stitching separate tools together.
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp was built for market traders, mobile sellers and small shops. It takes card payments cleanly and a new member of staff can figure out the screen in a few minutes. For a stall or a small retail counter, that's all you need.
A restaurant is a different job. Orders arrive at the counter, on the phone, through your website, in an app and from delivery platforms, often in the same ten minutes. The kitchen needs tickets sent to the right station. Pizzas need half-and-half toppings, burgers need modifiers, and somebody has to hold table 12's starters until the mains are ready. When you change a price or mark something sold out, that has to show up everywhere at once, not in five places one after the other.
SumUp doesn't do most of that. Takeaways and restaurants usually hit the wall at the point where they add a second order channel, or a second site, or a busy Friday night shows that paper tickets and shouting aren't working any more.
The gaps operators mention most:
- No kitchen display system or kitchen order routing
- Limited modifier and menu customisation
- No online ordering or direct ordering channel
- No multi-location management
- Basic reporting, no forecasting
- No third-party delivery platform integration
- No loyalty or marketing tools
The best SumUp alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish
Flipdish was built for food businesses from the start, which is why it covers the gaps above without add-ons from other vendors.
What you get:
- A full restaurant POS system with modifiers, split bills, timed orders and table management
- A Kitchen Display System that replaces paper tickets and keeps the kitchen and front of house looking at the same thing
- Online ordering through your own branded website, with no commission per order
- A branded mobile app under your restaurant's name
- Self-service kiosks for walk-in customers, who tend to add more to their order when nobody is rushing them
- Order management that pulls Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders onto a single screen
- AI phone ordering that answers calls so staff don't have to
- Loyalty and marketing automation with customer segments and automated campaigns
- Centralised reporting across every location
- Integrated restaurant payments
It works for a single-site independent just as well as a takeaway chain or a multi-location group. You can start with the POS and add online ordering or kiosks later, without changing systems. SumUp can't grow with you like that.
Flipdish suits any restaurant, takeaway, café, QSR or food chain that wants one platform for the whole operation.
Other names that come up
Three other products turn up when people search for a SumUp alternative. We wouldn't point a restaurant towards any of them, but you'll see them in search results, so here's where each one stops.
Square for Restaurants has table management, floor plans, coursed ordering and a kitchen display option. Online ordering and delivery come from third-party tools, so you assemble the stack yourself and pay for each piece. Reporting is better than SumUp's and still thinner than a platform built for restaurants. It also isn't aimed at high-volume takeaway or QSR trading, and there's no built-in AI phone ordering or loyalty automation.
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS for mid-size sit-down restaurants. It handles floor plans, table management and menu engineering. It's set up for dine-in rather than takeaway or quick service, setup is more involved, and the price climbs as you add features.
Zettle by PayPal sits in the same spot as SumUp: card payments first, simple retail and café use. It has no kitchen management, no online ordering and no way of handling several order channels. A restaurant with a complex menu will outgrow it the same way it outgrew SumUp.
Moving from one card-reader-first product to another solves nothing. The problem is that the tool wasn't designed for restaurants, and Flipdish was.
SumUp vs Flipdish
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Card payments | ✓ | ✓ |
| Restaurant POS | Basic | Full-featured |
| Kitchen Display System | ✗ | ✓ |
| Online ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded mobile app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-service kiosks | ✗ | ✓ |
| Delivery platform aggregation | ✗ | ✓ |
| Loyalty programme | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-location management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Advanced reporting | ✗ | ✓ |
| Integrated payments | Basic | ✓ |
What a restaurant actually needs from its system
Kitchen management
A kitchen display system puts every ticket on a screen in the kitchen. When online and in-person orders go into the same system, the cooks work from one queue instead of a printer for the till, a tablet for the website and another tablet for each delivery app. The wait time a customer sees at checkout comes from what the kitchen is really dealing with, not a guess someone typed in months ago.
One queue for every channel
Walk-ins, phone calls, website, app, Just Eat, Uber Eats, Deliveroo. If each of those lands on a different device, somebody ends up retyping orders, and retyped orders have mistakes in them. Flipdish's order management collects them all in one place.
Direct ordering without commission
An order through Just Eat or Uber Eats can cost you 20 to 35% in commission. On a €25 order, that's €5 to nearly €9 gone before you've paid for the food. With your own online ordering and a branded app, customers order from you directly and you keep the margin. Marketplaces still bring in new customers, so most restaurants keep them running. The aim is to move the regulars over to your own channel.
Reporting that answers real questions
SumUp gives you daily totals. A restaurant platform tells you what sold by item, by modifier, by hour and by location. That's how you find out the Tuesday lunch shift is overstaffed, or that one side dish never sells and still sits on the menu. It also feeds ordering from suppliers, since you can see what you actually used last month.
Loyalty without another subscription
Getting a regular to come back one more time a month is cheaper than finding a new customer. When loyalty and marketing live in the same system as your orders, you can send a win-back offer to people who haven't ordered in six weeks, or a reward to your biggest spenders, without exporting a spreadsheet into a second tool.
A Friday night, side by side
Picture a takeaway at 7pm on a Friday. On SumUp, the counter staff take card payments and ring up items by hand. Website orders come in through a different tool, delivery orders on two tablets, and someone reads each one out to the kitchen or prints it. Three people are checking three screens, and a customer who rang to ask where their order is gets put on hold while somebody goes looking.
On Flipdish, all of it arrives in the one queue and appears on the kitchen screen in the order it needs to be cooked. The AI phone agent picks up the calls. A kiosk takes the walk-in who'd rather tap than queue. Staff spend the evening making food and handing it over.
What SumUp really costs a restaurant
SumUp charges per transaction instead of a monthly fee. At low volume that looks cheap. As sales grow, the fees grow with them, and you still don't have anything that cuts waste, lifts the average order or brings customers back.
Restaurants on SumUp often end up paying for other software next to it: one for online ordering, another for the kitchen, something to collect delivery orders, a separate loyalty app. Added up, that monthly bill is often higher than one platform that does the lot. And it means several logins, several screens and several sets of data that never talk to each other. When you want to know how a promotion affected sales, you're comparing three exports by hand.
Switching from SumUp
It's usually less painful than people expect. There are four things to deal with.
- Menu. Your current menu has to be built in the new system. Flipdish's onboarding team does this with you.
- Hardware. SumUp hardware won't transfer. Flipdish has a range of restaurant POS hardware to replace it.
- Staff training. A proper restaurant POS does more than SumUp, so give your team a short session before go-live. The onboarding team covers training as well.
- Records. Export your SumUp sales history before you switch if you need it for accounting or VAT.
Pick a quiet day of the week for the changeover, not a Saturday. Run the first service with someone from your team who has already used the system standing nearby. Keep the old card reader in a drawer for the first week in case something unexpected happens. You probably won't need it, but it costs nothing to have it there.
If you run more than one site, switch one location first. Whatever goes wrong at site one, you'll have fixed before site two goes live, and the menu you built can be copied across instead of rebuilt.
Ready to move beyond SumUp?
Outgrowing a card reader is a good problem, because it means the business is busier. Flipdish is made for that point, whether you run one takeaway, a few cafés or a QSR chain, and it handles the POS, ordering, kitchen, loyalty and payments from one place.