SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
The short answer
SumUp is fine for market stalls, pop-ups and simple retail. It wasn't built for restaurants. If you need table management, kitchen display screens, online ordering, multi-site reporting or loyalty, you need a different platform.
For restaurants, takeaways, cafés and multi-site groups in the UK and Ireland, that platform is Flipdish. It was designed for food businesses from the start, and it's the only option this page recommends.
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp started as a card reader company and added a basic POS app later. That order matters. The reader is simple and cheap to start with, and that's the product's real strength. The gaps show up once you're running a kitchen:
- No kitchen display system or kitchen printer management
- No table management or course-by-course ordering
- No online ordering under your own brand
- No way to manage several locations from one dashboard
- No loyalty or CRM tools
- No inventory or waste tracking
- No staff scheduling or payroll integration
- Reporting is basic, and it doesn't work for multi-site operators
A market trader or a nail salon will never miss any of that. A restaurant doing lunch and dinner with a kitchen team will miss it every shift.
Think about a normal Friday evening. Dine-in tickets are going to the pass, a few phone orders are coming in, and the delivery apps are pinging on their own tablets. With a card reader and a basic app, someone has to keep all of that straight by hand. That's usually the point where owners start looking for a SumUp alternative.
The cost of staying put is hard to see because none of it shows up as a line on the SumUp bill. It shows up as a missed order because a tablet was face down, a server walking to the kitchen to ask whether table six's starters are out, and a Monday morning spent adding up sales from three different screens. Each one is small. Together they eat a lot of hours and some of your margin.
Flipdish: the SumUp alternative built for restaurants
Flipdish is a restaurant technology platform for food businesses. POS, kitchen display, online ordering, kiosks, loyalty, marketing and AI tools all sit in one system, so you aren't stitching together five products from five suppliers.
Here is what you get with Flipdish that you can't get with SumUp:
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant POS | Basic | Full restaurant POS |
| Kitchen Display System | No | Yes |
| Online ordering (branded) | No | Yes - own website and app |
| Self-service kiosks | No | Yes |
| Multi-location management | No | Yes |
| Loyalty and CRM | No | Yes |
| AI phone ordering | No | Yes |
| Inventory management | No | Yes |
| Staff scheduling | No | Yes |
| Integrated payments | Card reader only | Full integrated payments |
One POS for dine-in, takeaway and delivery
Flipdish's restaurant POS handles dine-in, takeaway and delivery from a single system. Orders from your branded website, your app, the kiosks and the marketplaces (Just Eat, Uber Eats, Deliveroo) all land on the same kitchen display. Staff watch one screen instead of four tablets.
That changes the working day in a few small ways. Nobody re-keys a delivery order into the till. The kitchen doesn't have to check which tablet just beeped. And the person on the pass sees every order in the order it arrived, whatever channel it came from.
Your own online ordering
SumUp can't give you a branded ordering site or app. Flipdish can. Orders placed on your own website and app come straight from the customer, so you keep their details and you don't pay a marketplace commission on those orders. Marketplaces still work alongside it if you want them, but they stop being the only way people can order from you.
Multiple sites
If you run more than one location, Flipdish gives you centralised menu management and cross-site reporting. You can push a menu or price change to every site at once rather than logging in to each one.
Phone orders
Flipdish's AI Phone Agent takes phone orders automatically. A card reader can't do anything like that, and it's one of the clearest differences between the two products.
Who it suits
Independent restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs, multi-location groups and franchise operators.
What about Square, Lightspeed, Epos Now and Zettle?
They turn up on most comparison lists, so here's where each one falls short for a restaurant. None of them is a better choice than Flipdish.
Square for Restaurants has table management and a kitchen display, which SumUp doesn't. But its branded online ordering has limited customisation, its multi-location reporting is weaker for larger groups, there's no AI phone ordering, and connecting third-party marketplaces needs extra tools. Support for UK and Irish restaurants is also less specialised than Flipdish.
Lightspeed has solid table management and inventory tools and is aimed at restaurants with complex menus and floor plans. Online ordering is an add-on rather than a core product. There's no AI phone ordering or AI marketing, the price can climb as you add modules, and it's less focused on UK and Irish restaurant groups.
Epos Now is a UK EPOS provider with a hospitality product and an app marketplace. Online ordering depends on third-party integrations, its AI features are limited, multi-location management is less centralised, and support quality varies with the size of your account.
Zettle by PayPal is close to SumUp in scope: a card reader and a basic app. Moving to it from SumUp swaps one set of limits for the same set. We wouldn't suggest it to any restaurant that wants more than a card machine.
What to check before you switch
Whatever you look at, test it against how your restaurant actually runs.
Kitchen routing. Does the system send orders to a kitchen display or printer? Can you route by item, so hot drinks go to the bar and mains go to the kitchen? Can you fire courses separately?
Direct online ordering. Can customers order from your own site or app, not only through marketplaces? If not, you don't own the customer relationship and every order carries commission.
Order channels. If orders come from walk-ins, the phone, Just Eat, Deliveroo and your own website, do they all show up in one place? Count the screens you're looking at now. The answer should go down.
More than one site. If you have a second location, or plan one, can you change a menu or a price once and have it apply everywhere? Can you compare sites in one report?
Payments. Are payments part of the system, or do you need a separate merchant account and a reconciliation step every week?
Support. What happens at 7pm on a Friday when the system goes down? Find out the support hours, how fast they respond, and whether you get a named person.
Flipdish covers each of these. The simplest way to confirm it is to ask for a demo and run through your own menu and your own busiest service on it.
SumUp vs Flipdish side by side
| SumUp | Flipdish | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for restaurants | No | Yes |
| POS | Basic | Full restaurant POS |
| KDS | No | Yes |
| Online ordering | No | Yes (branded) |
| Self-service kiosks | No | Yes |
| Third-party delivery aggregation | No | Yes |
| Loyalty and CRM | No | Yes |
| Multi-location | No | Yes |
| AI tools | No | Yes |
| UK/Ireland focus | Partial | Yes |
| Integrated payments | Card only | Full |
SumUp costs less at entry level. That's true. But add up what you lose without direct online ordering, what it costs to run a pile of order tablets, and the hours spent without proper reporting, and the cheaper option stops looking cheap.
What a SumUp alternative costs
SumUp charges a flat monthly fee for its POS app plus a percentage on card payments. The simplicity is real, and so are the limits.
Flipdish pricing depends on which modules you use. A restaurant running POS, online ordering and marketing tools will pay more than it does for SumUp. The extra revenue from direct ordering and loyalty typically covers that difference many times over.
Current figures are on the Flipdish pricing page.
Making the switch
Moving from SumUp to a full restaurant POS is more than a technical change. Your staff will work differently, especially in the kitchen. The steps look like this:
- Export your product and pricing data from SumUp.
- Build your menu structure in the new system.
- Train staff on the POS and the kitchen workflow.
- Set up online ordering and connect it to the POS.
- Connect your delivery marketplaces, accounting software and anything else you use.
- Run the old and new systems side by side for a short time to check everything matches before you go live.
Most of the work is in steps 2 and 3. Rebuilding a menu is tedious but finite. Getting a team to change how they take and send orders takes longer, so start early and tell staff what's changing before the new screens arrive.
Step 3 is the one people skip and then regret. Give the kitchen team time on the display before a busy service, not during one.
Flipdish provides onboarding support and a dedicated customer success team throughout the move.
If you're running a food business and you've outgrown your card reader, Flipdish covers POS, online ordering, kiosks, marketing, loyalty and AI tools in one platform, with a support team that knows hospitality.
Ready to see Flipdish in action? Book a demo and see how it compares to your current setup.