SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
SumUp is a card reader, and a good one. It's cheap, it sets up in minutes and it runs off a phone. If you sell from a market stall or a coffee cart, that's all you need. A restaurant is a different job, and SumUp wasn't built for it.
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp takes payments and keeps a record of them. That's about the extent of it. A coffee kiosk selling two items can live with that. A restaurant with table service, a takeaway counter, three delivery apps and a kitchen that needs to know what to cook next can't.
Here's what's missing once you try to run a restaurant on it:
- Online ordering
- A kitchen display system, or kitchen print routing
- Connections to Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo
- Table management and a floor plan
- Loyalty or a customer database
- Staff scheduling, clock-in and payroll
- Reporting beyond basic transaction summaries
- Management of more than one location
Picture a Friday evening. A server rings up a table, a phone order comes in, and the Deliveroo tablet starts beeping. With SumUp, none of that reaches the kitchen on its own. Somebody types it in, somebody shouts it across the pass, somebody writes it on a docket. Orders get missed or made twice. That's the real cost, and it gets bigger every busy night.
Delivery platforms are the other pressure point. Many restaurants end up with a tablet per app sitting by the till, each one needing to be accepted and retyped. It's slow, and it's the first thing to fall apart when the kitchen gets busy. Joining those orders to the same queue as everything else removes a job nobody wanted.
Opening a second site makes it worse. Each location ends up with its own card reader, its own sales numbers and nobody with a single view of how the two compare. At that point SumUp is a payment device sitting next to the actual system, and you're doing the system's job by hand.
What a SumUp replacement needs to do
Start with orders. Whatever the channel - counter, website, app, kiosk, delivery platform - the order should land in one kitchen queue. If you keep a separate tablet for each channel, someone is retyping orders, and retyping is where mistakes come from.
Then the kitchen. A kitchen display system replaces the printed dupe tickets, shows the cooks what's next and updates as orders change. At high volume that cuts down on the "where's table nine's starter" conversations.
Reporting matters more than people expect. Total sales for the day doesn't tell you what to prep, when to schedule extra staff or which site is dragging. You want sales by item, the hours that are busy, and a way to compare locations.
Then your customers. Someone who orders through a delivery app is that app's customer. The name and number you collect yourself belong to you, and a loyalty programme is how you get them and bring people back.
Last, growth. If you plan to open more sites, the platform should handle them without a separate login and a separate set of reports for each one.
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 locations in the UK and Ireland.
SumUp handles card payments and stops there. Flipdish is a full restaurant management system that puts POS, online ordering, kiosks, payments, loyalty, marketing and AI tools on one platform, so the data isn't split across five different logins.
What you get:
- A restaurant POS built for hospitality, with a kitchen display system, order management across all channels, and POS hardware
- Online ordering through your own restaurant website and mobile app, with zero commission on direct orders
- Self-service kiosks that raise average order value and take pressure off the counter
- AI phone ordering, which answers the phone and takes orders automatically
- Integrated payments across every channel
- Restaurant marketing with loyalty, SMS, vouchers and automated retention
- AI Marketing, which finds customers who've stopped ordering and gets them back without anyone doing it manually
It works for a single-site independent and for groups with dozens of locations. The multi-location management tools give operators one view across every site.
For a restaurant outgrowing SumUp, every gap in the list above is covered by Flipdish, in one place.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square has a restaurant tier with floor plan management, item modifiers and online ordering. The free plan is limited, and most of what a restaurant needs sits behind a paid subscription. Loyalty and marketing are add-ons, and they're less tied into the rest of the system than Flipdish's. It's aimed at smaller single-site restaurants, so a growing group would hit limits.
3. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS for full-service restaurants. It has floor plan tools, detailed reporting and delivery platform integrations. The interface is more complex than most, and onboarding takes a while. It's built around full-service dining, so takeaways and quick-service restaurants are a poorer fit. Flipdish covers both, plus online ordering and kiosks on the same platform.
4. Epos Now
Epos Now is a UK POS with table management, kitchen printing, stock control and staff management. The hardware is proprietary, which ties you to what they sell. Online ordering, kiosks and marketing aren't in that list, and Flipdish has all three built in.
5. Zettle by PayPal
Zettle is a card reader with a basic POS, and it's closer to SumUp than to a restaurant platform. You get a product catalogue, basic inventory and sales reports. There's no kitchen management, no table service and no delivery integration. If SumUp is the problem, Zettle has the same problem.
What changes on a normal shift
The easiest way to see the difference is to follow one order. On SumUp, a customer rings, a staff member writes the order down, walks it to the kitchen, then comes back and takes the card payment on the reader. Nothing is connected, so nothing is tracked. If the kitchen is slammed, nobody knows how long that order is going to take.
On Flipdish the same order comes in through the website, the app, a kiosk or the till and appears on the kitchen display straight away. The payment is already attached to it. Staff aren't passing paper around, and the person on the pass sees everything in one queue, whatever channel it came from.
The same goes for end of day. Instead of adding up a card reader's totals and then working out separately what came in by phone, you open one report. Sales by item, by hour and by site are all there, which makes it much easier to decide what to prep tomorrow.
SumUp vs Flipdish: feature comparison
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Card payments | ✓ | ✓ |
| Restaurant POS | ✗ | ✓ |
| Kitchen display system | ✗ | ✓ |
| Online ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded mobile app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-service kiosk | ✗ | ✓ |
| Delivery platform integration | ✗ | ✓ |
| Loyalty programme | ✗ | ✓ |
| SMS marketing | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-location management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Centralised reporting | ✗ | ✓ |
How to switch from SumUp
It's less work than most owners expect.
- Write down everything you need that SumUp doesn't do. Online orders, kitchen tickets, loyalty, whatever you're currently patching by hand. That's your checklist.
- Ask for a demo of the Flipdish platform and bring your own setup to it: how many sites, which channels, how your kitchen runs.
- Sort out hardware early. Flipdish uses purpose-built POS hardware, so confirm what you need before go-live and not on the morning of.
- Build your menu. Menu setup is part of onboarding, and it's worth slowing down here because it feeds every channel. A wrong price in the menu is wrong on the till, the website and the app.
- Train the team. Flipdish gives you onboarding and support, but your staff still need an hour or two on the new screens before a real service.
- Go live on a quiet day. Monday or Tuesday, not Friday night.
The cost of staying on SumUp
SumUp has no monthly fee, so it looks cheap. What it costs you is revenue you never see.
Say a takeaway sends 40 orders a week through a delivery app. Every one of them pays the app's commission. Now say half those customers would have ordered from your own website or app if it had been easy and they knew it existed. That commission stays with you, and the customer's details stay with you too, so you can message them, offer a voucher and bring them back next week. On SumUp you can do none of that, because there's no website, no app and no customer list.
Phone orders work the same way. Someone has to answer, write it down and walk it to the kitchen, usually in the middle of a rush. Moving those to direct ordering, or letting AI phone ordering take the call, frees up a pair of hands at the busiest time of the evening.
Add kiosk upselling and automated marketing, and a restaurant on Flipdish is earning on orders that SumUp never captured. That's what pays for the switch.
Move from SumUp to Flipdish
If SumUp doesn't do enough for your restaurant any more, Flipdish replaces it and adds the tools a growing restaurant needs.
Get a Flipdish demo and see the whole platform running.