The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
The short answer
SumUp takes card payments. It doesn't run a restaurant. If you've outgrown it, the alternative to look at is Flipdish, which covers the till, online ordering, kiosks, loyalty and marketing in one system.
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp was built for market traders, mobile barbers and small shops. It does one thing well: you tap a card, the money arrives, and the reader costs very little.
Restaurants have other problems. How does an order get to the kitchen without someone reprinting it? What happens when a Just Eat order lands at the same moment a walk-in orders at the counter? How do you change a price at three sites without logging in three times? Who opened the till at 11pm? And how do you get regulars to order from you directly instead of going through Deliveroo and paying the commission?
SumUp has no answer to any of that. It's a card terminal with a sales log attached. That's fine in the first few months, but a restaurant with a kitchen, a delivery menu and more than a couple of staff usually hits the limit quickly.
Picture a Friday at 7pm. The phone is ringing, two marketplace tablets are beeping, there's a queue at the counter and the kitchen is working from a pile of dockets in no particular order. SumUp is fine in that room, because it takes the payment. Everything else in that room is still being done by hand, and that's where orders go missing.
You've probably outgrown it if:
- there are separate tablets for Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat sitting next to the till
- you can't say with confidence what sold yesterday or which dishes make money
- staff write or print dockets by hand and orders get missed on busy nights
- every menu change has to be made in several places
- you have no way to contact a customer after they've ordered
- you want your own ordering app or website and have nothing to build it on
The best SumUp alternative for restaurants
Flipdish
Flipdish is a restaurant platform, not a card reader with extras. It's the one we'd point any food business to if SumUp has stopped being enough, whether that's a single takeaway or a group of sites. Here's what it covers.
Point of sale. The Flipdish POS is made for food service. It has kitchen display support, order modifiers and item snoozing, so when the cod runs out at 8pm you snooze it at the till instead of taking orders you can't fill. Hardware comes with the system: till screens, card readers, receipt printers and customer-facing displays.
Online ordering. Flipdish builds and hosts your restaurant website with ordering built in, branded as you. Customers order from you, and you keep the customer details.
Mobile apps. You get iOS and Android apps with your own logo and colours. Flipdish looks after them, so you don't need a developer.
Self-service kiosks. Kiosks take orders in store at counter-service and fast-casual places. The queue gets shorter, and the kiosk suggests extras at checkout so you sell more per order.
Marketplace orders. Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat orders feed into the Flipdish order management system and go straight to the kitchen. One screen, no tablet drawer.
Loyalty and marketing. Customers earn points on every order, whichever channel it came through. SMS and email campaigns go out automatically based on what customers do.
AI tools. The AI phone agent answers calls, takes orders and takes payment, which helps if the phone never stops ringing during the Friday rush. The AI marketing platform spots customers who've stopped ordering and sends them a nudge.
Payments. Flipdish Pay processes payments across every channel and reconciles them in one place.
Flipdish is used by single-site takeaways, café groups, QSR chains and multi-location restaurant brands in the UK and Ireland. Direct orders are covered by a flat platform fee, not a commission on each one.
Other systems people look at
Most restaurants searching for a SumUp replacement also run into a few other names. None of them match what Flipdish does for a restaurant that takes orders, and here's where each one stops.
Square for Restaurants has a floor plan, table management, course firing, a kitchen display and menu management. It suits small independent restaurants and cafés. Online ordering and delivery management come through add-ons rather than as part of the core system, which matters once delivery is a big share of your sales.
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS with table management, stock tracking and reporting. It's aimed at sit-down restaurants. If you run a takeaway, a QSR or a counter-service shop where online orders matter most, it's not set up around that way of working.
Epos Now Hospitality has table management, kitchen printing and a lot of integrations, and it's common in pubs and bars. Deep online ordering and multi-site control aren't what it's built around.
Zettle by PayPal sits in the same bracket as SumUp. It takes card payments, produces a sales report and pays out through PayPal. Inventory and staff management are a bit better than SumUp's, but it's still a payment terminal. Swapping SumUp for Zettle leaves every problem listed above where it was.
Feature comparison
| Feature | SumUp | Zettle | Square | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurant-specific POS | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Kitchen display system | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Online ordering on your own website | No | No | Limited | Yes |
| Branded mobile app | No | No | No | Yes |
| Self-service kiosk | No | No | No | Yes |
| Marketplace order aggregation | No | No | Third-party | Yes, native |
| Loyalty programme | No | No | Basic | Yes |
| Automated marketing | No | No | No | Yes |
| AI phone ordering | No | No | No | Yes |
| Multi-location reporting | No | No | Limited | Yes |
The table is blunt on purpose. SumUp and Zettle are payment terminals, so most rows are a no. Square gets further because it has a restaurant mode, and the gaps show up once you want your own app, kiosks or automated marketing. Flipdish is the only column that is a yes all the way down.
What to check before you switch
Start with how orders reach you today. If Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat each have their own tablet, you want something that puts all of them on one screen. Flipdish does that natively.
Then decide whether you want your own ordering channel. A website or app of your own is the only way to stop paying marketplace commission on customers who already know you. Flipdish builds and runs both.
Ask what happens to your data too. If customers order through a marketplace, the marketplace keeps their details. If they order through your own site or app, you do. That difference decides whether you can ever send a regular a text on a quiet Tuesday.
Think about how many sites you have, and how many you'll have in two years. One shop can get by with almost anything. Three shops need one menu, one set of reports and one login, and it's much easier to set that up before you open the second site than after you open the fifth.
Support hours matter more than most people expect. Restaurants are busiest when offices are closed. A 48-hour email reply is no use at 7pm on a Friday, so ask any provider exactly who answers the phone on a weekend evening.
What SumUp costs you
SumUp charges around 1.69% on card-present payments. On a restaurant turning over £600,000 a year, that's about £10,140 in fees. The number looks small, and it is small for what a card reader does.
The cost is what sits around it. There's no kitchen display, so someone is relaying orders by shout or by docket. There's no customer database, so you can't tell a regular from a stranger. There's no online ordering channel, so every delivery goes through a marketplace and the marketplace takes its cut. There's no loyalty scheme, so a customer has no reason to pick you over the place next door.
A platform like Flipdish has a monthly cost, and that's real money. In return you get direct ordering, loyalty, kitchen management and automated marketing in one place. Work out what you pay each month in marketplace commission and what a lost order costs on a busy Saturday, and put those next to the platform fee. The comparison is usually clearer once it's written down.
How to switch from SumUp
- List every way an order reaches you and every place someone takes payment. Include the phone and the marketplace tablets.
- Write down what costs you time or money right now. Missed dockets, double entry, menu edits, whatever it is.
- Ask for a demo and insist on seeing the kitchen display and online ordering working, not slides.
- Pick a quiet week to go live. Not the week before Christmas.
- Train the team before go-live. Doing it on the day, mid-service, is a bad idea.
- Ask who will load your menu. Retyping every dish and modifier by hand is a slow job, so find out early whether the provider will do it.
Where Flipdish fits
Flipdish is for the operator who has outgrown a card reader and needs the whole order journey in one system. A customer orders online or in person, the kitchen sees it, payment is taken, and it all lands in the same reporting.
For fish and chip shops, takeaways, cafés and restaurant groups in the UK and Ireland, it's the system we'd choose. See the full product range or check POS and ordering pricing.
