SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
The short answer
SumUp is a card reader with a basic POS attached. It was built for retail and simple transactions, and a restaurant kitchen is neither. The best SumUp alternative for restaurants is Flipdish, which puts the POS, online ordering, kitchen display, delivery orders, loyalty and payments in one system.
Why SumUp stops working for restaurants
SumUp takes card payments with almost no setup. For a market stall, a pop-up or a café selling pre-made products, that's often all you need.
A restaurant is different. Once you have a kitchen that needs tickets, a menu that changes by time of day, staff who shouldn't all have the same access, or customers who want to order online, you start hitting walls. Here's where:
- There's no kitchen display system. An order taken at the counter doesn't reach the kitchen by itself, so someone has to shout it, write it down or walk it over.
- There's no delivery marketplace integration. Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders arrive on separate tablets that sit next to the SumUp terminal.
- You can't take direct orders through your own website or mobile app.
- There's no loyalty programme, so no way to reward repeat customers or run a targeted campaign.
- Multi-location reporting is limited. Two sites means two accounts and no combined view.
- Kiosks aren't supported, so a counter-service restaurant has nowhere to send kiosk orders into the kitchen queue.
None of this is a dig at SumUp. It's the wrong kind of product for a restaurant, and moving to a restaurant platform fixes everything on that list.
Think about a busy Friday evening. A table order goes in at the terminal, two Deliveroo tickets print on one tablet, an Uber Eats order lands on another, and a phone call comes in for a collection. Four sources, and the only thing connecting them is a member of staff trying to keep it all in their head. That's the situation a restaurant platform exists to remove.
Menus and staff are the other pressure point. A breakfast menu that switches to lunch at noon, a modifier like "no onions" that has to reach the kitchen exactly as typed, a new starter who shouldn't be able to refund an order - SumUp's simple setup wasn't built around any of that. You end up working around the tool instead of with it.
The best SumUp alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish
Flipdish is the SumUp alternative to pick if you run a restaurant, takeaway, café or a group of sites in the UK and Ireland.
The counter, the website, the branded app, the kiosk, the phone and the delivery tablet all feed one system. Every order shows up on the same kitchen display system no matter where it started. POS, payments, loyalty, marketing and reporting draw on the same data, so you're not stitching together numbers from five dashboards at the end of the month.
What you get with Flipdish:
- A full restaurant POS with a built-in kitchen display system
- Online ordering through your own website and mobile app
- Self-service kiosks with upselling built in
- Order management that pulls Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders into one screen
- Integrated payments, so there's one reconciliation across every channel
- Loyalty and retention marketing
- An AI phone agent that answers calls and takes orders
- Management of every location from one dashboard
- A restaurant management system covering inventory, staff scheduling and reporting
It suits a single-site independent and a group with dozens of locations, so you don't have to change systems as you grow.
Two of those pieces are worth a closer look. The AI phone agent answers the calls that would otherwise pull someone off the floor during service, and the order goes straight into the same queue as everything else. The kiosks do the same job at the counter: customers build their own order, get prompted to add a side or a drink, and the ticket appears in the kitchen without anyone typing it in.
The practical gain is fewer hands in the middle. Staff stop re-typing delivery orders, the tablets come off the counter, and the numbers you read at the end of the week match what actually went through the till. If you're coming from SumUp, that's the difference you'll notice first.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square for Restaurants goes beyond the basic Square card reader. It adds floor plans, table management, coursing and basic kitchen printing, which is enough to run a small table-service room.
The gaps show up as you grow. Square doesn't have deep marketplace integration, a built-in branded app or strong multi-location management. To get close to what Flipdish does out of the box, you'd be adding third-party tools, paying for each one and relying on connections between them that can break. You'd also be back to several logins, which is the problem you were trying to leave behind with SumUp.
3. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS for full-service restaurants with complicated floor plans. It handles tableside ordering and split bills, and its sales reporting goes down to the table.
It doesn't include online ordering, branded apps or kiosks. If you want to sell beyond the dining room, that means separate products and separate bills. A restaurant that only ever serves seated guests might not mind. One that wants takeaway, delivery or kiosks will.
4. Epos Now Hospitality
Epos Now is a UK-based EPOS company with a hospitality product that covers basic POS, stock management and links to third-party apps. Being UK-based, it offers local support.
The catch is the third-party part. Where Flipdish builds ordering, delivery and loyalty into one platform, Epos Now leans on outside apps to do it. Pricing is spread across those apps, so the monthly cost is harder to predict and support gets more complicated.
5. Zettle by PayPal
Zettle is SumUp's closest rival: another card reader with basic POS features. Switching from one to the other gets you nothing as a restaurant. Both are made for market traders, pop-ups and simple setups that only need to accept payments.
Everything SumUp lacks, Zettle lacks too. If you've outgrown SumUp, Zettle isn't the next step.
SumUp vs Flipdish: side-by-side comparison
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Card payments | ✓ | ✓ |
| Restaurant POS | Basic | Full |
| Kitchen display system | ✗ | ✓ |
| Online ordering (own channel) | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded mobile app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-service kiosks | ✗ | ✓ |
| Just Eat / Uber Eats / Deliveroo integration | ✗ | ✓ |
| Loyalty programme | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-location management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Integrated payments | Basic | Full |
| UK and Ireland restaurant support | ✗ | ✓ |
How to decide
Ask yourself a few questions about your own restaurant.
Do you want online ordering? Flipdish gives you a branded website and app for direct orders, so those orders don't carry marketplace commission.
Do you have kiosks, or plan to? Flipdish's self-service kiosks connect straight to the POS and the kitchen display, so a kiosk order lands in the same queue as everything else.
Are you on more than one delivery platform? Flipdish puts Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders on one screen. That means fewer tablets and fewer missed orders.
Do you have more than one site? You can manage menus, staff and reporting for every location from a single login.
Do you expect to grow? Then pick something you won't have to replace. Flipdish runs a single-site takeaway and a 50-location group on the same platform.
What staying on SumUp costs
SumUp's basic card reader has no monthly fee, which makes it look cheap. The cost turns up elsewhere:
- Staff time and mistakes from relaying orders to the kitchen by hand
- A separate tablet for each delivery platform, plus someone to look after them
- Marketplace commission of around 30% on every order, because you have no direct ordering of your own
- A higher cost of winning customers, since there's no loyalty programme to bring them back
- No data on how customers behave, so your marketing is guesswork
Take a restaurant doing £20,000 a month through Uber Eats at 30% commission. That's £6,000 a month, or £72,000 a year, going to the marketplace. Move a quarter of that volume to your own ordering channel and you stop paying commission on £5,000 of sales a month, which is £1,500 a month before any platform costs. Customers who've ordered from your own app are also ones you can contact again, which a marketplace order never gives you.
View Flipdish pricing and work out the numbers for your restaurant.
Making the switch from SumUp
It's less work than most owners expect. In order:
- Export your sales history and any customer data from SumUp.
- Map out your menu: categories, items, modifiers and prices.
- Pick your hardware. That's a POS terminal, receipt printer, kitchen display and card reader.
- Connect your delivery platforms.
- Set up your online ordering page or app.
- Train your staff. A few hours is usually enough on a modern POS.
- Go live, ideally on a quiet service rather than a Saturday night.
Don't switch off SumUp until the new setup has run a few real services. Keep the old reader in a drawer for the first week as a fallback.
Flipdish has an onboarding team that walks restaurants through each step, and most are fully up and running within a few weeks of signing.
The bottom line
SumUp does what it was designed to do well. A restaurant just isn't what it was designed for. If you have a kitchen, take online orders, use delivery platforms or plan to add sites, you need a platform made for food service.
Flipdish replaces SumUp and adds the rest, from the POS terminal to the customer's phone.
Request a Flipdish demo to see it running.
