SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
SumUp sells card readers and a basic till app. The readers are cheap and payments go through quickly. If you run a market stall, a pop-up or a small shop, that's often all you need.
A restaurant is a different job. Say you take phone orders, run a kitchen queue, get Just Eat or Uber Eats orders on a tablet by the door and want a loyalty scheme. SumUp doesn't do any of that, so you bolt on more tools, and each one has its own login. This guide covers SumUp alternatives for restaurants in the UK and Ireland, and why Flipdish comes first.
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
Picture a Friday night. An order comes in at the counter. Another arrives through your website. The phone rings. A Deliveroo tablet beeps in the corner. With SumUp at the till, those four orders live in four places, and someone has to read them out to the kitchen or copy them across by hand. That's where mistakes start: a missed modifier, a duplicate ticket, an order nobody saw.
SumUp is built to take a payment. A restaurant needs a few other things:
- Orders have to reach a kitchen screen or printer, not just print a receipt for the customer
- Online orders from your website, your app and the delivery platforms need to land in the same place as counter orders
- A menu change has to reach every site at once, not one site at a time
- Staff need their own permissions, clock-ins and shift reports once the team gets bigger
- Customer details from every channel need to feed your loyalty scheme and your marketing
Reporting is the other pain point. SumUp can tell you what went through the card reader. It can't tell you which channel an order came from, how much of your week's takings arrived through delivery apps, or whether one site is quietly doing worse than another. If you want to know which dishes sell at which location, or whether the website is growing while the counter stays flat, you need every order in the same system.
Phone orders are another. Someone has to answer, write the order down, read the card number or arrange to take cash at the door, and walk the slip to the kitchen. During a rush that person isn't doing anything else.
Plenty of restaurants patch the gaps with separate apps. A loyalty app here, an aggregator tablet there, a spreadsheet to tie it together. The data ends up in three dashboards, nobody trusts the totals, and the kitchen is working from several queues instead of one.
The best SumUp alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish
Flipdish is made for restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and multi-location groups. It puts the restaurant POS, online ordering, self-service kiosks, kitchen display, integrated payments, loyalty and marketing in one platform, so you aren't stitching products together.
Every order goes into one kitchen queue, whether it came from the counter, the website, the phone or a kiosk. The kitchen display system replaces paper dockets with a live digital queue, which cuts down on lost tickets and misread handwriting. Counter staff use a fast POS that copes with complicated menus and lots of modifiers. A kiosk customer orders at their own pace and the order goes straight through to the kitchen.
Delivery apps are covered too. Flipdish connects to Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo through its order management system, and those orders show up on the same kitchen screen as everything else. No separate tablet and no re-keying.
If you have more than one site, multi-location management lets you change menus, compare sales and manage staff from one portal. Change a price centrally and it updates at every location straight away.
Loyalty and marketing sit in the same system, which matters more than it sounds. A customer who orders on the app on Tuesday and walks in on Saturday is one person with one history, not two unconnected records. You can send an offer to people who ordered a month ago and haven't been back, without exporting anything from one tool and importing it into another.
There's also AI phone ordering. It answers inbound calls, takes the order, suggests add-ons and takes payment, so nobody has to leave the pass to pick up the phone. The order goes to the kitchen like any other.
Then there's direct ordering. Flipdish builds branded mobile apps and ordering websites for your restaurant. Customers order from you, and no third-party platform takes commission on those orders.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square has a restaurant product with floor plans, order routing and basic menu management. For a single table-service site with a simple menu it does more than SumUp. The catch is cost. Loyalty, advanced reporting and online ordering are extra modules, and the monthly bill grows as you add them. It's a weaker fit for multi-location groups and busy quick-service counters, and it doesn't pull phone, kiosk, app and delivery orders into one system the way Flipdish does.
3. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed has table management, course ordering, menu management and a long list of integrations. It's aimed mainly at table-service restaurants, and its reporting works reasonably well at one site. Pricing climbs as you add modules or locations, so get a quote for the full setup you need before you compare it with anything else.
4. Epos Now Hospitality
Epos Now covers food and drink menus, course ordering and kitchen printing, and it has a big marketplace of integrations. That flexibility has a price: you end up assembling the solution from several parts. Multi-site management exists but can feel disjointed, because the pieces weren't designed as one product.
5. Tevalis
Tevalis is a UK hospitality POS used by pubs, restaurants and leisure venues. It handles enterprise reporting, stock control and table management. It suits bigger operations, especially pubs, hotels and leisure estates. A takeaway or a small restaurant group looking for online ordering, kiosks and direct sales will find it less of a match.
What to look for when switching from SumUp
Before you compare vendors, write down what your restaurant actually needs. This table is a decent starting point.
| Requirement | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Kitchen order routing | KDS or kitchen printer integration |
| Online ordering | Native ordering, not a patched-in third party |
| Delivery platform integration | Direct connection to Just Eat, Uber Eats, Deliveroo |
| Multi-site management | Centralised menu and reporting tools |
| Loyalty and marketing | Built-in CRM, not an add-on |
| Integrated payments | Processing built in, not a separate terminal |
| Room to grow | Still works when you open site two |
If most of those apply to you, a card reader with a till app won't cover it.
A quick way to test any platform: ask the vendor to show you one order from a delivery app arriving in the kitchen, with a modifier, and then show you the same order in the sales report. If they have to switch between three screens to do it, you've learned something.
How much does switching cost?
The cost depends on four things:
- Hardware: POS terminal, KDS screen, card readers and kiosks if you want them
- Software: a monthly or annual subscription, usually per site
- Setup and onboarding
- Trading disruption while you move over
Flipdish publishes its prices at flipdish.com/pricing, so you can add it up before you speak to anyone.
The number that tends to matter most is delivery commission. Every order that moves from a delivery app to your own website or app is an order where you keep the commission. Count how many delivery orders you take in a month, work out what the apps charge on them, and compare that with the subscription. That tells you more than any feature list.
A few practical things help the changeover go smoothly. Pick a quiet day or week to switch rather than a bank holiday weekend. Get your menu, modifiers and prices written down in one place before you start. Train the front-of-house team on the new till before it goes live, not during service. And keep your old card reader handy for the first few days in case you need it.
Making the decision
SumUp is a payment tool. A restaurant platform runs the kitchen, the customer relationships and the data behind them.
That isn't a criticism of SumUp. It does what it was designed to do. The trouble starts when a restaurant asks it to do things it was never designed for. A reader that prints receipts and a platform that routes orders, runs the kitchen screen, handles loyalty and drives direct sales are different products.
If you're taking orders through several channels, managing a team, comparing sites or planning a second location, you need something built for that.
Why Flipdish is the best SumUp alternative for restaurants
Flipdish is the one platform here that brings POS, online ordering, kiosks, kitchen display, payments, loyalty, marketing and AI tools together in a single product made for restaurants. There are no bolt-on apps to look after. Every order channel feeds the same data, and customer records from the counter, website, phone and kiosk build into one profile that your marketing can use.
For independent restaurants heading for a second site, and for groups already running several, Flipdish is the strongest option in the UK and Ireland. You can see the full range on the Flipdish products page and the costs on the pricing page.