SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
Is SumUp right for a restaurant?
SumUp is a card reader with a basic till app attached. For a market stall, a barber or a pop-up selling a handful of items, that's enough. Tap, beep, done.
A restaurant asks a lot more of its software. One customer wants no onions and extra sauce. A table of six wants the bill split four ways. The kitchen needs the ticket the second it's rung in, and the Deliveroo tablet is chirping next to the till. SumUp wasn't built for that kind of shift, and you notice quickly.
If you run a restaurant, takeaway, café or QSR and you're weighing up SumUp, or you're already on it and hitting walls, this is what to look at instead.
Where SumUp runs out
The till side of SumUp lists items and takes payment. Most of what a restaurant leans on every day isn't there:
- Modifiers and options, such as extra toppings, removed ingredients or a choice of sauce
- Table management, meaning seat maps, courses and split bills
- A kitchen display, so orders reach a screen instead of a shout
- Online ordering, with no branded website, app or direct channel
- Delivery marketplace integration, so nothing syncs from Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo
- Loyalty and customer data
- Reporting across more than one site
- Stock tracking and waste recording
Every gap ends up as a person doing something by hand. Someone retypes marketplace orders into the till. Someone carries tickets to the kitchen. Someone works out a split bill on a phone calculator. For a restaurant turning over more than a few hundred pounds a week, that's lost time and avoidable mistakes. And with no direct ordering channel, more of your orders come through marketplaces that take a commission on each one.
Flipdish
Flipdish was built for restaurants and takeaways, and it puts the whole operation on one platform: POS, online ordering, branded apps, self-service kiosks, payments, kitchen displays, loyalty, marketing and AI tools. If you're leaving SumUp, it's the one to move to.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
- The POS handles modifiers, multi-course orders, table management and split bills from the same screen
- Your own branded website and mobile app take orders with no marketplace commission on them
- Self-service kiosks suggest add-ons at order time and take pressure off the counter
- The Kitchen Display System sends orders straight to kitchen screens, so no paper and no verbal handoffs
- Marketplace order management pulls Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders into the POS, so nobody re-enters them
- The AI Phone Agent answers calls, takes orders and processes payments without a staff member picking up
- Automated campaigns, SMS marketing, vouchers and a customer CRM sit in the same place as everything else
- Every site reports into one dashboard
The practical difference is that your staff stop being the glue between systems. An online order, a kiosk order and a counter order all arrive in the same place, in the same format, and the kitchen sees them the same way. When a customer orders through your own app, you also keep their details, which a marketplace order never gives you.
Flipdish suits independent restaurants, growing chains, franchise groups and QSRs. It runs a single site and it runs hundreds of them, and you don't change systems as you grow.
A café with one till and a takeaway doing half its sales on delivery apps will use different parts of it. The point is that they're all there when you need them, and you aren't paying separate suppliers for each one.
Take a Friday evening. Phone orders are coming in, two delivery apps are live, the dining room is half full and a kiosk is running at the counter. With separate tools, someone has to watch four screens and make sure nothing gets dropped. With Flipdish, those orders land in one queue, the kitchen works from one set of tickets, and the end-of-night report counts all of it together.
Square, Lightspeed, Epos Now and Zettle
These are the names that usually come up next to SumUp. They each cover part of what a restaurant needs. None of them covers all of it.
Square for Restaurants
Square has a restaurant version of its product that goes further than SumUp on table service. It has basic floor plan management, course splitting and a free tier for smaller venues. The gaps show up once you want more than a dining room: marketplace integration is limited, there's no branded online ordering system built to grow a direct channel, and the tools for managing several locations are weak. You'd end up adding other software around it.
Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed is a mature cloud POS with solid table management and reporting. It leans towards full-service and fine dining rather than QSR or takeaway. Licensing costs more than most of the others, and marketplace orders need third-party middleware to reach the till. That's another supplier and another thing to break.
Epos Now
Epos Now sells into both retail and hospitality, and much of its feature set comes through an app marketplace. The core product is retail-first, so restaurant functions such as kitchen workflow have to be built up with paid add-ons. The bill grows as you add them.
Zettle by PayPal
Zettle, formerly iZettle, competes with SumUp at the card reader end of the market. Its POS interface is a step up from SumUp's, but the limits are the same for a restaurant: no kitchen routing, no online ordering, no delivery integration. A stall or a pop-up can live with that. A restaurant can't.
Side by side
| Feature | Flipdish | Square for Restaurants | Lightspeed | Epos Now | Zettle |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurant POS | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Basic |
| Online ordering (own channel) | ✓ | Limited | Via third party | Via third party | ✗ |
| KDS | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Add-on | ✗ |
| Self-service kiosk | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Marketplace integration | ✓ | Limited | Via middleware | Via middleware | ✗ |
| Loyalty and CRM | ✓ | Basic | Limited | Via add-on | ✗ |
| Multi-location management | ✓ | Limited | ✓ | Limited | ✗ |
| AI phone ordering | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
What to look for when you leave SumUp
Start with direct ordering. Marketplace commission is the biggest cost in takeaway and delivery. A branded website and app give you an order channel where the money comes to you, less payment processing fees. Flipdish's online ordering is built to grow exactly that channel.
Then the kitchen. If orders reach it verbally or on handwritten slips, a Kitchen Display System cuts errors and speeds up service. Check that the POS and the KDS were built together and not bolted on later.
Upselling matters too. A cashier in the middle of a rush forgets to offer the side or the drink. A kiosk or an online menu with built-in prompts asks every single time.
And think about site two. If you plan to open another location, or already run more than one, you want shared menu management, reporting across sites and user permissions from the first day. Adding those later is expensive and disruptive, and it usually happens while you're busy with something else.
Moving over from SumUp
- Export your item list and prices from SumUp.
- Map out your modifiers and item variants. This takes longer than people expect, especially for pizza, burgers or anything with sauces and sides.
- Decide which channels to switch on at launch. POS only, or POS plus online ordering.
- Work out your payment processing setup, integrated or a separate terminal.
- Pick a quiet time to go live. Midweek lunch is usually safer than a Friday night.
- Train the team on the new screens before the first busy service, not during it.
Do the training properly. Walk through the awkward orders, the ones with three modifiers and a split bill, not only the easy ones. Most of the stress in a switch comes from staff finding the new till for the first time with a queue in front of them.
What it costs
SumUp takes a fee on every transaction. The basic card reader has no monthly charge, but the restaurant POS product carries a subscription.
Flipdish pricing is on the Flipdish pricing page. POS, online ordering and payments come in a single agreement, so you aren't adding a subscription for each area.
Take a restaurant doing £15,000 a month, with £5,000 of that on delivery marketplaces at 20% commission. That's £1,000 a month going to the marketplaces. Move half of those orders to your own app and website and you save around £500 a month, or £6,000 over a year, before the payment processing fees that apply to direct orders.
SumUp does its job as a card reader. It just wasn't built for restaurants. If you need one platform for every order channel, the kitchen, your team and your direct customers, Flipdish is the one to pick.
For more restaurant technology comparisons, visit restauranttech.co.uk.
Want to see Flipdish running in a restaurant like yours? Request a demo and talk to a restaurant technology specialist.