SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp sells card readers and a basic till to small businesses. The readers are easy to set up, the fees are clear, and if you're selling things over a counter it does the job.
A restaurant is a different problem. Orders have modifiers. A table of six wants the bill split four ways. The kitchen needs the ticket the second it's sent, and that same kitchen is also getting orders from a website, a kiosk and two or three delivery apps. SumUp's till wasn't built for any of that.
Picture a Friday night. The counter is busy, the website is sending orders every few minutes, and Deliveroo has just pinged for the third time. On a basic till, someone has to read each of those orders off a different screen and shout it across to the kitchen. That's where mistakes and missed orders come from, and it's where most owners decide the till has to go.
These are the complaints that usually push restaurant owners to look elsewhere:
- Orders can't be sent to a kitchen display or kitchen printer
- Table management and cover tracking are missing or very basic
- Online ordering is a separate system with its own menu
- Delivery marketplace orders don't come into the till
- There's no real multi-site management or central reporting
- There are no loyalty, CRM or marketing tools
Flipdish
Flipdish is the best SumUp alternative for restaurants. SumUp is a general payments and POS tool that small food businesses adapt to their needs. Flipdish was built for restaurants from the start, and it puts the POS, payments, online ordering, kiosks, kitchen screens, loyalty and multi-location management on one platform.
The Flipdish restaurant POS handles what a live service throws at it: tables, split bills, covers, modifiers, combos and kitchen routing. Staff permissions, manager approvals and voids are built in, so a server can't quietly void a bill without someone senior knowing.
The Flipdish Kitchen Display System replaces paper tickets with a screen. Every order shows up in one queue, whether it came from the counter, the website, a kiosk or a marketplace, and both the kitchen and the front of house can see how long each one has been waiting.
Payments run through Flipdish Pay, which takes cards, contactless and digital wallets and sits inside the POS. There's no separate terminal to reconcile at close, and the payment data goes straight into your reports without an export.
For direct orders, Flipdish online ordering gives you a branded ordering website, a mobile app and QR code ordering, all tied to the same POS. An order placed at midnight reaches the kitchen the same way a counter order does at lunch.
Marketplace orders are handled by Flipdish order management. Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat orders land in the POS, so the kitchen works from one queue. You can put the tablets back in the cupboard, and nobody misses an order because a tablet was buried under a pile of menus.
Flipdish loyalty and marketing covers points programmes, automated win-back campaigns, SMS and email, and promotions aimed at specific customers. It runs off the customer data already sitting in your POS and ordering platform, so you don't have to feed it from somewhere else.
If you run more than one site, you manage menus, reporting and updates from a central dashboard and push changes to every location at once. That's what the Flipdish multi-location tools are for.
There's also the Flipdish AI phone agent. It answers inbound calls, takes the order, answers menu questions and takes payment, with no one on your team picking up the phone. SumUp has nothing like it.
Because all of this runs on one platform, you keep one menu. Change a price or mark an item off, and it changes in the POS, on the website, in the app and on the kiosk. Nobody retypes anything, and nobody finds out a dish is unavailable after the customer has paid for it.
Flipdish suits restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and multi-site groups that need the whole operation in one place, not a card reader with a till bolted on.
Other systems you'll come across
Search for SumUp alternatives and a few other names turn up. Here's how they compare against what a restaurant needs.
Square for Restaurants adds table management, course management and kitchen printing to Square's POS, and online ordering runs through the Square ecosystem. Multi-site operators run into limits with centralised management. POS, online ordering, loyalty and marketing come as separate Square products you piece together, not one system.
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS with floor plans, split billing, kitchen printing and links to delivery platforms. Multi-site reporting sits on the higher-priced plans. Online ordering, loyalty and marketplace aggregation need third-party integrations, so you end up with several vendors and several bills.
Epos Now is a UK EPoS provider with table management, kitchen printing and an app marketplace. Each extra app you connect adds setup work and a monthly subscription, so the final cost of a working setup is often higher than the headline price suggests.
Zettle by PayPal is SumUp's direct competitor: a card reader with a simple POS. It's aimed at market stalls and pop-ups. A restaurant has the same problems with it that it has with SumUp.
None of these gives a restaurant POS, payments, online ordering, marketplace orders, loyalty and multi-site management in a single platform. Flipdish does.
What to check when you compare systems
Start with the kitchen. Can the POS send orders to a kitchen display or printer? Any restaurant doing real volume needs this, and SumUp's setup doesn't handle it well during a busy service. In a demo, ask to see what happens when an item is 86'd or a modifier is added after the ticket has been sent.
Then look at online ordering. If you take orders online, the POS and the website should share one menu and one order queue. Otherwise menus drift out of sync and orders turn up on a separate tablet. Ask a simple question: when I change a price on the POS, does it change on the website and app straight away? And when an online order comes in, where does it show up?
Marketplace orders matter if you're on Uber Eats, Deliveroo or Just Eat. Without an aggregator feeding them into the POS, the kitchen ends up watching three or four tablets, each with its own alert sound and ticket format. Ask every provider how those orders get to the kitchen.
Payment costs need a proper sum. SumUp takes a fee on every card transaction. Add up what you'd pay across a normal month of card sales, including transaction fees, monthly fees and hardware. An integrated option like Flipdish Pay tends to work out cheaper for restaurants with a lot of card volume.
Last, reporting. You want revenue by channel, by item and by period, food cost against revenue, average order value and year-on-year comparisons. If getting a useful answer means exporting to a spreadsheet, the reporting isn't doing its job. Ask to see a real report during the demo.
SumUp vs Flipdish
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant POS | Basic | Full |
| Kitchen Display System | No | Yes, native |
| Online ordering | No | Yes, branded |
| Marketplace aggregation | No | Yes, native |
| Loyalty programme | No | Yes, integrated |
| Marketing tools | No | Yes, AI-powered |
| Multi-site management | No | Yes, full |
| AI phone ordering | No | Yes |
| Payments integration | Card reader only | Fully integrated |
| Designed for | Small business generalist | Restaurants specifically |
Switching from SumUp
Moving to a full restaurant platform takes some setup time, but the day-to-day difference starts as soon as you go live. Before you pick anything, write down your menu, your table layout, your delivery marketplace accounts and the card volume you take in a typical week. You'll need all four, and having them ready makes the demo conversation far more useful. Then work through four questions.
How many sites do you run? One site gives you plenty of choices. With several, you want central management and reporting from day one, not bolted on later.
Which channels do you sell through? List them: counter, online, delivery marketplaces, phone. Pick a platform that handles all of them natively, so you aren't buying a separate integration for each.
Do you want more direct orders? If cutting your reliance on marketplaces is a priority, you need a platform with direct ordering and loyalty built in. Flipdish is designed to grow your direct channel while it manages the marketplace orders you already get.
How much do you take in card payments? The higher the volume, the more a flat subscription with integrated payments saves compared with paying per transaction.
Pick a quiet day to go live, not the Saturday before a bank holiday. Let staff run a few test orders through the counter, the kitchen screen and a marketplace order before the first real service, so the first time anyone sees a split bill on the new system isn't with a full dining room watching. It also shows you quickly whether your menu has been set up the way you want it.
Pricing is on the Flipdish pricing page.