SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
The short answer
If you run a restaurant, takeaway, café or QSR and you've outgrown SumUp, look at Flipdish. SumUp is a card reader company that has added some POS features. Flipdish is a restaurant platform from the ground up. That's most of the difference.
Once you're busy, you need orders reaching the kitchen on a screen, online ordering, delivery app orders in one place, loyalty and reporting across sites. SumUp doesn't offer these. Flipdish does.
Where SumUp stops being enough
SumUp started with market traders, pop-ups and small retail shops taking card payments, and the reader is still the core of the product. If you sell coffee from a van, that's fine. The trouble starts when the business gets a kitchen, a website and a second site.
Take the kitchen first. Orders rung up on a SumUp terminal don't go to a kitchen display system on their own. You end up with a separate printer, or someone calling orders through the hatch. That works on a quiet Tuesday. On a Friday night, tickets get missed or misheard, and the kitchen slows down.
Online ordering is the next gap. SumUp has no direct ordering channel for your own website or branded app, so if you want one you have to buy a second system. Now you have two menus to keep up to date and two sets of numbers to reconcile.
Delivery apps make it worse. If you're on Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo, each one sends orders to its own tablet, and SumUp doesn't pull any of them into the till. Someone on the counter ends up watching three screens.
With more than one site there's no central view. You log in to each location separately, and a menu change means doing it several times.
SumUp also has no loyalty scheme, no SMS campaigns and no customer database you can use for marketing. You know what was sold, but not who bought it. There's no stock tracking either, so waste and food cost stay in a spreadsheet, if they're tracked at all. And rota planning, shift scheduling, holiday tracking and payroll links aren't part of it.
A sole trader doing a handful of card payments a day won't miss any of this. A restaurant doing 200 covers a day, or a takeaway handling 100 online orders a night, will.
What to decide before you switch
Work out which of these apply to you:
- Orders need to reach the kitchen without anyone relaying them
- Customers order from your own website or app
- Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders need to land in one place
- You want points, stamps or SMS offers to bring people back
- You run, or plan to run, more than one site
- You want to track stock, waste and food cost
- You want card processing to be part of the same system, not a separate contract
If most of those are a yes, you need a restaurant management system. A POS on its own is just the till. The rest of the list is what stops you spending your evenings copying orders from one screen to another.
Flipdish
Flipdish is built for restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and multi-location groups. Independent restaurants use it, and so do national QSR chains, pub groups and franchise operators. It covers a single-site takeaway and it covers a group running a lot of locations.
What you get:
- Restaurant POS with kitchen display system integration
- Online ordering through your own website and mobile app
- Self-service kiosks for quick service and fast casual
- Order management that brings Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders into one place
- Customer loyalty and marketing, including SMS campaigns and automated offers
- AI phone ordering, which answers inbound calls and takes the order
- Menu management and reporting across all your locations from one place
- Staff scheduling
The practical effect is that an order from the counter, the website, the app, a kiosk, a phone call or a delivery app ends up in the same system and goes to the same kitchen screen. Nobody retypes anything. Your menu lives in one place, so a price change or a sold-out item is a single edit.
Payments sit in the same system as the POS, ordering, loyalty and reporting. You deal with one provider for the whole stack, not a card terminal company, an online ordering company and a loyalty app that don't talk to each other.
Direct ordering matters for your margins too. Orders that come through your own website and app don't carry the commission the delivery marketplaces charge. Flipdish gives customers a reason to order from you directly, with loyalty points and offers, and you keep more of each sale.
Some examples of who this suits. A takeaway taking 100 online orders a night can stop managing those orders across tablets and a separate website plugin. A café opening a second site can see both on one dashboard and push the same menu to each. A quick-service restaurant can add kiosks and have those orders arrive in the kitchen the same way as everything else.
What changes on a busy night
Picture a Friday at 7pm on the SumUp setup. Two delivery tablets are beeping. The phone is ringing. A few people are queuing at the counter, and the website orders are in a separate dashboard nobody has checked for ten minutes. One person is trying to answer the phone, write the order on a pad and shout it to the kitchen.
On Flipdish the same night looks different. The delivery app orders, website orders and counter orders all arrive on the kitchen screen in the order they came in. The phone gets picked up by the AI phone agent, which takes the order and sends it through like any other. The person who used to answer the phone is free to run the counter.
It's the same menu and the same staff. The difference is that nobody has to be the link between the systems.
The marketing side works the same way. Every direct order, whether it comes from the app, the website or a kiosk, builds up a customer record. You can see who ordered, how often and what they ordered. That lets you send an SMS offer to people who haven't been in for a month, or set up an automated reward for a fifth order. With SumUp, the card payment happens and the information about the customer stays out of reach.
SumUp and Flipdish side by side
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Card payments | ✓ | ✓ |
| Restaurant POS | Basic | Full |
| Kitchen display system | ✗ | ✓ |
| Online ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Just Eat / Uber Eats / Deliveroo aggregation | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-service kiosks | ✗ | ✓ |
| Customer loyalty | ✗ | ✓ |
| SMS marketing | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-location management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Inventory management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Staff scheduling | ✗ | ✓ |
SumUp is simpler and cheaper to start with. Past that, there's very little in the table it can do that Flipdish can't.
What switching involves
There are three things to plan for.
Hardware first. SumUp uses its own card readers and tablets, and those won't run a restaurant POS. You'll need a tablet or dedicated terminal, a card reader, a receipt printer and a kitchen screen. Flipdish sells POS hardware as part of the package, so you're not matching up kit from different suppliers.
Then setup. Someone has to program the menu, train the staff and connect the other systems. Flipdish handles onboarding with you, which is worth having when you're changing the system the whole shop runs on. Do the changeover on a quiet day, not the week of a big event.
Fees are the last one. SumUp charges mostly through transaction fees. A full restaurant platform charges a monthly subscription. Comparing those two numbers alone gives you the wrong answer. Add up what you pay in marketplace commission, what you pay for any extra systems you've bolted on, and the staff time spent keying orders in by hand. Then compare. Direct ordering through Flipdish can cut the commission part of that.
How to choose
Go through these questions.
Do you take orders at a counter or at tables? Then you need a proper restaurant POS, and a card reader won't cover it. Do customers order online? You want ordering built into the POS, because a workaround means double entry. Are you on Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo? You need those orders in one inbox. Do you want to run loyalty campaigns? You need a customer database that you own. Do you run more than one site, or plan to? Then you want central menus and reporting from day one, because adding them later is harder.
A yes to any one of those means SumUp is the wrong tool. Flipdish covers all five.
The bottom line
SumUp is a good card reader. It isn't a restaurant management platform, and it doesn't claim to be one. When a card reader stops being enough, Flipdish is the replacement that covers everything in one system - from the moment someone finds your restaurant online, through paying, to getting rewarded for coming back.
For more restaurant technology comparisons, visit restauranttech.co.uk.
Ready to move on from SumUp? See how Flipdish works for restaurants like yours.