SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp is a card reader with a basic POS attached. It was built for retail: you ring up a product, the customer taps, that's it. It suits market stalls, pop-ups and small shops, which is why so many new businesses start with it.
A restaurant order is messier. The burger comes with no onions and extra cheese. A table of six wants to split the bill four ways. The kitchen needs the ticket the moment it's sent, and the bar needs a different one. The menu changes on Thursday because the fish didn't arrive. Then there are delivery apps, staff who shouldn't be able to issue refunds, and a manager who wants Saturday's numbers for every site without phoning each one.
SumUp doesn't do most of that, and that's fine, because it never set out to be a restaurant system. The friction shows up later. You get a busy kitchen, or you add delivery, or you decide you want your own website and app so customers stop ordering through a marketplace that takes a cut of every order.
This guide covers what to look for in a SumUp alternative, and why Flipdish is the one to choose if you run a restaurant, takeaway, café or restaurant group in the UK or Ireland.
Where the money goes when you outgrow a card reader
The cost of staying on a basic setup rarely shows up as a single line on a bill. It leaks out in smaller ways.
Marketplace commission is the obvious one. Every order that comes through a delivery app costs you a percentage, and the customer belongs to the app, not to you. Orders placed on your own website or app with Flipdish carry zero commission, and you keep the customer's details, so you can send them an offer next week without paying anyone to do it.
Labour is the quieter one. Someone is retyping tablet orders into the till. Someone is answering the phone during the lunch rush and writing orders on a pad. Someone is pulling sales figures from three places on Monday morning to work out how the weekend went. None of those tasks is hard. They just eat hours, and they go wrong when the restaurant is busy.
Mistakes are the third. A missed modifier or a ticket that never reached the kitchen means a remake, a refund and an annoyed customer. Routing orders straight from the till to the kitchen screen removes the step where things get lost.
What to look for in a SumUp alternative
Start with what's going wrong today. That tells you what you need.
If your kitchen works from shouted orders or paper dockets, you need order routing, ideally a kitchen display system that replaces the dockets. If you pay commission on every online order, you need ordering on your own website and app. If you have two or more sites, you want one place to manage menus and see sales, not a spreadsheet per location.
Delivery is the next thing to check. When orders from Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo arrive on separate tablets and someone retypes them into the till, you're paying a staff member to do a job software should do. Those orders should land in your POS directly.
Then there's getting customers back. Loyalty and promotions that you run yourself mean you don't pay a third-party platform every time you want to reach a regular. And look at payments: what you're charged per transaction, and whether the card reader and the till actually talk to each other.
Flipdish: the SumUp alternative built for restaurants
Flipdish is a restaurant technology platform made for food service. POS, online ordering, kiosks, marketing, loyalty, payments and AI tools sit in one place, so you aren't stitching together a separate supplier for each job.
Here is what Flipdish gives you that SumUp can't:
- A full restaurant POS system with kitchen display, order routing and table management
- Branded online ordering on your own website and mobile app, with zero commission on direct orders
- Self-service kiosk support for QSRs and high-volume sites
- Order management that brings Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders onto one screen
- Loyalty and marketing tools, including automated campaigns and a customer CRM
- An AI phone ordering agent that takes phone orders automatically
- Reporting for every location from a single dashboard
- Integrated payments with competitive rates
It's worth thinking through what that looks like on a normal Friday night. A customer orders from your own app, and the ticket prints or appears on the kitchen screen without anyone touching it. A Deliveroo order comes in at the same moment and shows up on the same screen, so the kitchen isn't juggling two systems. The phone rings, and the AI agent takes the order while your front-of-house staff keep serving the tables in front of them. At close, you see the night's sales for all sites in one report.
None of that is possible on a card reader with a till app. All of it is what Flipdish is for.
Groups get the most out of it. If you run four sites, a menu change on Monday happens once and reaches all four, instead of four people editing four menus. A price rise, a new special, a dish pulled because the supplier let you down: you make the change in one place. Reporting works the same way, so you can compare sites without exporting anything.
Kiosks are the other piece. In a busy quick-service restaurant, a self-service kiosk takes the ordering queue off the counter and sends orders to the same kitchen screen as everything else. It's one more channel feeding the same system, not another system to manage.
Flipdish is used by independent restaurants, takeaway chains, franchise groups and multi-location operators across the UK and Ireland. It fits independent restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs, pizza chains and casual dining groups.
Other SumUp alternatives, and where they stop
You'll come across a few other names while you search. Each one covers part of what a restaurant needs, and none covers all of it the way Flipdish does.
Square for Restaurants adds table layouts, course management and some menu complexity on top of Square's payments. It's aimed at smaller restaurants and cafés. The online ordering, marketing automation and multi-location management are thinner than what you get from Flipdish, so it only holds up if you're mostly dine-in with very little delivery.
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS with good table management and floor planning, aimed at mid-size restaurants and hospitality venues. It charges per terminal and per integration, so once you add online ordering, delivery and marketing the bill grows. It has no native branded apps and no AI phone agent.
Epos Now is a UK POS provider with both retail and hospitality products. It handles basic order management and connects to some delivery platforms. Its hospitality product is less specialised for food service than Flipdish, and branded apps and loyalty aren't included as standard.
iiko is a POS and restaurant management platform used across Europe and the Middle East, with strong inventory and supply chain features. It takes longer to implement than Flipdish and is much less common in the UK and Irish markets, which matters when you want local support and people who've set it up before.
If you're comparing them side by side, ask each one the same questions. Can customers order from my own app? Do delivery orders land in the POS? Can I see every site in one report? What do I pay when I add a second terminal? With Flipdish the answer to the first three is yes, and the pricing is on the pricing page.
SumUp vs Flipdish: a direct comparison
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant POS | Basic | Full restaurant POS |
| Kitchen display system | No | Yes |
| Online ordering (own channel) | No | Yes |
| Branded mobile app | No | Yes |
| Self-service kiosk | No | Yes |
| Just Eat / Uber Eats / Deliveroo integration | No | Yes |
| Loyalty and marketing | No | Yes |
| AI phone ordering | No | Yes |
| Multi-location management | No | Yes |
| Integrated payments | Yes | Yes |
The gap is big. SumUp was designed to get any small business taking card payments quickly. Flipdish was designed to help restaurants bring in more revenue, cut costs and run service more smoothly.
What about staying on SumUp?
Some do, and for a one-day event or a food truck with five items it's a reasonable place to be. You don't need a kitchen display for a stall.
Once you have a kitchen, a delivery channel or a second location, the card reader becomes the thing holding you back. At that point you need a restaurant platform, and Flipdish is the one to pick.
How to move from SumUp to Flipdish
Start by writing down your current setup: the channels you sell on, the hardware you use and the integrations you rely on. That list becomes the brief.
Then talk to Flipdish. The onboarding team works with restaurants to build a transition plan that doesn't interrupt service, so you aren't closing for a day to swap systems.
Flipdish builds and migrates your menu during setup, so you aren't re-entering every item and modifier by hand. Floor and kitchen staff get training before launch, which matters more than people expect, because a new till on a busy Friday with no practice is how mistakes happen.
Most restaurants are live within a few weeks. You can check pricing at flipdish.com/pricing.
The bottom line
SumUp is fine for retail. A restaurant needs order routing, online ordering, delivery integration, loyalty and multi-location tools, and SumUp has none of them.
Flipdish is the most complete restaurant technology platform in the UK and Ireland. If you're on SumUp and want to grow, move to Flipdish.
For more restaurant technology comparisons, visit restauranttech.co.uk.