SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp is a card reader with some extras. For a market stall, a coffee cart or a small shop that's plenty. A restaurant runs into the edges fast, usually in the middle of a busy Friday service.
The same gaps come up again and again:
- There's no kitchen display system, so orders get shouted across the pass or printed, and tickets get lost or misread.
- You can't see sales across several sites from one screen.
- SumUp doesn't give you your own branded ordering website or app, so online orders go through someone else's platform or not at all.
- Table management is thin. No proper floor plan, no course management, no split bills.
- Stock is tracked by product, not by ingredient. You can log a burger but you can't see that you're down to your last case of buns.
- There's no loyalty programme, so if you want repeat customers you pay for a separate tool and try to connect it yourself.
If three or four of those sound familiar, a different card reader won't fix it. You need a system built around how a restaurant actually runs.
Where the gaps cost you the most
Some of those gaps are annoyances. Four of them cost real money.
The kitchen is the first. Without a kitchen display system, every order has to reach the cooks some other way. Printers run out of paper, a runner forgets a ticket, a modifier like "no nuts" gets scribbled out. One wrong allergy order is worse than any monthly software fee. A KDS puts the order, the modifiers and the timing on a screen where the whole line can see it.
Online ordering is the second. If you don't have your own ordering website or app, customers who want delivery or collection go to a marketplace, and the marketplace owns that customer relationship. With Flipdish online ordering, the customer orders from you, you have their details, and you can market to them again.
Then multiple sites. Two locations on SumUp means two sets of numbers that you add together yourself. By the third site you're spending part of every week on spreadsheets. Menu changes are the same story: change a price or drop a sold-out dish, and you do it once per site.
Stock is the last. Tracking products tells you what you sold. Tracking ingredients tells you what you need to order, and where food is going missing. Ingredient-level inventory is the difference between guessing at your food cost and knowing it.
Flipdish
Flipdish is a restaurant platform. POS, online ordering, kiosks, payments, loyalty and phone ordering sit in one system instead of six apps that don't talk to each other. Independent restaurants, pub groups, QSRs and franchise operators across the UK and Ireland use it.
Here's what's in it:
- A restaurant POS system with a kitchen display system, table management and multi-location support
- Online ordering through your own branded website and mobile app
- Self-service kiosks that cut queue time and tend to raise average order value
- Integrated payments that run through the same system as your POS
- Loyalty and marketing tools tied to your customer data
- AI phone ordering, so a call during the dinner rush doesn't go unanswered
- One set of reports across every site
If you're leaving SumUp because it only does payments, Flipdish is the one to look at. It covers the whole restaurant, so you don't end up patching gaps with extra subscriptions.
Payments deserve a mention because that's what SumUp does well and what you'll worry about losing. On Flipdish the payment runs through the same system as the POS, so the sale, the receipt and the report all come from one record. Nobody has to match a card terminal's daily total against the till at closing time.
Kiosks work the same way. A customer orders at the screen, pays, and the order goes to the kitchen display with everything else. Your counter staff can spend the time on food and drinks instead of keying in orders, and the queue gets shorter.
Who Flipdish suits
A single café that wants a till, a card reader and its own ordering app gets all three in the same system, with kiosks and loyalty available if it grows into them.
A takeaway gets the most out of online ordering, the phone agent and the kitchen display, because most of its orders don't come from someone standing at the counter.
A pub group or restaurant group gets the multi-location reporting and central menu management, plus table management for the dining room and kiosks for the busy bar or counter.
Franchise operators need the same menu and reports across every unit, and central management plus per-site reporting is what makes that workable.
SumUp vs Flipdish
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| POS system | Basic | Full restaurant POS |
| Kitchen display system | No | Yes |
| Online ordering | No | Yes - branded website and app |
| Self-service kiosk | No | Yes |
| Multi-location management | Limited | Yes |
| Loyalty programme | No | Yes |
| AI phone ordering | No | Yes |
| Integrated payments | Card reader only | Full integrated payments |
| Inventory management | Product-level only | Ingredient-level |
| UK and Ireland support | Yes | Yes |
What about Square, Lightspeed, Epos Now and Zettle?
They show up in most searches for a SumUp replacement, so here's where each one sits. None of them is a recommendation.
Square for Restaurants is Square's upgraded product. It adds table management, a kitchen display system and online ordering. It's aimed at smaller cafés and independent restaurants that want a step up from card readers, and it's less suited to complex multi-site operations.
Lightspeed is a cloud POS used in hospitality and retail. Its table management and reporting are decent. Its integrations with third-party delivery platforms go less deep than Flipdish's, which matters if marketplace orders are a big share of your sales.
Epos Now has a hospitality version with course management and its own EPOS hardware. It's built for pubs and table-service restaurants that want a traditional till setup, and it has fewer online ordering features out of the box than Flipdish.
Zettle by PayPal sits in the same market as SumUp. It takes card payments and does basic stock tracking, but it isn't made for full-service restaurants. Going from SumUp to Zettle swaps one card reader for another. You'd still have no kitchen display, no ordering and no multi-site tools.
Every one of these does part of the job. Flipdish does the job end to end, which is why it's the only one this article recommends.
What to check before you switch to anything
A few questions are worth asking whichever system you're looking at.
Do all your channels land in one place? Online orders, kiosk orders and counter orders should reach the same kitchen queue. If one channel lives on a separate tablet, someone has to retype orders, and that's where mistakes creep in.
Can you manage several sites from one login? If you have more than one location, or you're planning another, you need menus, reports and staff permissions in one place. Changing a price at five sites shouldn't mean five logins.
What happens to marketplace orders? If you take orders from Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo and your POS can't receive them, your staff end up minding a tablet for each one. Look for marketplace order management inside the POS itself.
What does payment processing really cost? Add up hardware, monthly fees and transaction rates. The price of the card reader is the smallest part of it.
Is there a kitchen display system? A KDS means fewer wrong orders, quicker tickets and no printer jamming halfway through service.
What a service looks like on Flipdish
SumUp takes the card payment. Flipdish runs the restaurant around it.
Say a customer orders from your Flipdish website. The order appears on the kitchen display system next to the counter orders, the kiosk orders and the delivery platform orders. Your kitchen staff watch one screen. Nobody checks a second tablet or asks the front of house what came in.
Reporting rolls up across all your sites. You can see what's selling, which location is lagging and where margin is leaking, without exporting spreadsheets from three different tools.
Loyalty works the same way. A customer who earns points on an online order can spend them at the counter, and you don't have to manage a separate app to make that happen.
When someone phones in an order, the AI phone agent takes it, handles the payment and sends it to the kitchen. Your staff don't have to pick up the phone mid-rush, and the customer doesn't get an engaged tone.
Making the switch from SumUp
Moving off SumUp is usually easy. SumUp doesn't hold your menu structure or customer data the way an older EPOS system does, so there's less to untangle.
Before you switch:
- Export your product list from SumUp.
- Write down your table layout and menu structure.
- List the delivery marketplaces you need connected.
- Decide whether you'll keep your current card terminal or move payment processors.
Flipdish's onboarding team handles setup and migration for restaurants of any size, so you're not rebuilding your menu by hand on a Sunday night.
Ready to move on from SumUp?
If SumUp is holding your restaurant back, Flipdish puts POS, online ordering, kiosks, payments, loyalty and AI in one platform made for restaurants.
Talk to the Flipdish team and ask what a migration would look like for your business.