The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants and Takeaways
What SumUp does well
SumUp started as a card reader and grew a basic POS around it. It's aimed at market traders, pop-ups and small shops that want to take cards without a contract or much setup. The readers are cheap, the app is easy to learn, and a coffee cart can be taking payments the same afternoon.
For a stall, that's enough. It stops being enough when a restaurant starts taking orders from more than one place. Add delivery, a second site, or a kitchen that needs to know what to cook, and you hit the edges of the product fast.
Why restaurants leave SumUp
SumUp wasn't built around a kitchen. In practice that means:
- Orders don't reach the kitchen automatically. There's no kitchen display system, so someone reads tickets out or walks them over.
- Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo orders each come in on their own tablet. A busy counter ends up with three or four screens, and staff watch all of them.
- There's no direct online ordering. No ordering website, no branded app, so customers who want to order from you directly have nowhere to go.
- No loyalty scheme, no CRM, no way to send a campaign to people who've ordered before.
- Every extra location needs its own SumUp account.
- Reporting stops at sales. It doesn't connect to inventory, labour or marketing.
The usual fix is to bolt things on. A kitchen screen from one supplier, online ordering from another, a loyalty app from a third. None of them share data with each other or with SumUp, so the owner ends up as the integration, copying numbers between dashboards on a Sunday night.
The best SumUp alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish
Flipdish is the best SumUp alternative for any restaurant, takeaway, café or food business that has outgrown a single counter and a card reader.
SumUp takes payments. Flipdish runs the restaurant side as well: POS, online ordering, kiosks, payments, marketing, loyalty and AI tools, all on one platform with one set of data.
Here's how the two compare:
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Card payments | ✓ | ✓ |
| Restaurant POS | Basic | Full |
| Kitchen display system | ✗ | ✓ |
| Online ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-service kiosk | ✗ | ✓ |
| Marketplace order management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Loyalty programme | ✗ | ✓ |
| Marketing and CRM | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-site management | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Centralised reporting | ✗ | ✓ |
Flipdish was designed for restaurants from the start. It wasn't a retail till that got a "hospitality" mode later. The kitchen display system puts orders on the kitchen screen the moment they're placed. The order management tools pull Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo orders onto the same screen as your direct ones, so the tablets can go in a drawer.
The phone is another gap SumUp leaves open. Flipdish's AI phone ordering takes calls for orders, so nobody has to stop plating food to write down an address and a modifier list while the line behind the counter grows.
Groups with several sites get centralised reporting, one view across every location. Change a price or add a dish once and the menu updates at every site together.
For UK and Irish operators moving off SumUp, Flipdish is the one that covers the whole list of gaps above. That's why it's first here, and why it's the only one we'd tell you to switch to.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square's restaurant POS is a step up from SumUp. It has a kitchen display, floor management and some reporting, which makes it more useful to a small restaurant than SumUp is.
It runs out of road at multi-site scale and for anyone who wants proper online ordering or marketing built in. Square's online ordering comes through a third-party integration, so it isn't native. Flipdish has all of this in the platform itself.
3. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed handles floor and table management and reporting well, and it's used by independent fine dining and casual dining restaurants.
It doesn't include native online ordering, kiosks or AI tools. Running several sites is possible but gets complicated. A restaurant that wants a direct ordering channel alongside dine-in would need to add other products, which is the problem it was trying to get away from with SumUp. Flipdish already has the ordering side.
4. Epos Now Hospitality
Epos Now is a UK POS provider with a hospitality product. It's priced reasonably for single sites and covers basic POS, stock and reporting.
Anything beyond that comes from its app marketplace. Online ordering or loyalty means a separate integration and a separate bill. With Flipdish those are already part of the system.
5. Zettle by PayPal
Zettle, formerly iZettle, sits in the same spot as SumUp: card payments and a simple POS. It does a little more in some areas, but it has the same basic gap. It wasn't built for restaurant operations, so there's no kitchen workflow, no ordering and no way to manage channels together. Moving to Zettle swaps one limit for another that looks almost identical.
What a restaurant needs from its POS
The distance between SumUp and a full restaurant system is bigger than it looks from the outside. A restaurant needs these things working together:
Orders from every channel on one kitchen screen. Counter, website, app and kiosk orders should show up on a kitchen display system without anyone typing them in a second time.
More than one way to order. Online ordering, kiosks and table QR codes all need to feed the same system, or you end up reconciling them by hand at close.
A card terminal that talks to the till. With integrated payments, the amount goes to the terminal automatically. Nobody keys the total in twice, and nobody spends an hour finding the £4.20 that doesn't match at the end of the week.
Sales and stock in the same place. If you can't see what sold next to what you've got left, you're ordering from memory.
Customer data. Every order is someone you could contact again. Without a CRM and some marketing tools that list never gets built.
SumUp does none of this. Flipdish does all of it.
What a Friday night looks like on each
On SumUp, a Friday dinner rush might go like this. A customer orders at the counter and the cashier shouts it back to the kitchen. A Deliveroo tablet beeps, and someone retypes the order into the till so it counts in the sales figures. Another tablet beeps for Uber Eats. A regular who'd rather order direct finds you don't have a website for it, so they use a marketplace and you pay the commission.
On Flipdish, the counter order, the website order, the kiosk order and the marketplace orders all land on the kitchen screen in the order they came in. The kitchen cooks from one list. Nobody retypes anything. At the end of the night the sales report includes every channel without anyone adding it up.
The food doesn't change. The number of people shouting across the pass does, and so does the number of orders that get lost between a tablet and the kitchen. A missed ticket costs a remake or a refund, and on a Friday you only need a few of those to wipe out the margin on the evening.
Total cost of ownership
SumUp looks cheap because the readers cost little and the starting software is free or close to it. The bill changes once you add what a restaurant needs: a kitchen display, an ordering platform, a loyalty scheme, a marketing tool. Together those can cost more than one platform that includes them.
Before building around a payment tool, add up what you'd really pay:
- Monthly POS software fee
- Online ordering platform fee
- Marketing or loyalty platform fee
- Marketplace management tool fee
- Reporting and analytics tool fee
- The time someone spends keeping all of them in sync
That last line is the one people skip. Staff hours spent retyping orders and checking figures don't show on an invoice, but they're paid for. One integrated platform removes most of the lines above and most of the hours with them.
Questions to ask before you switch
Whichever system you look at, ask these first:
- Do orders from Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo show up on the same screen as direct orders?
- Does the card terminal work with the POS, or are they separate?
- Is online ordering part of the product, or a third-party add-on with its own fee?
- If you open a second site, can you manage it from the same account?
- Can you change the menu once and have every site update?
If the honest answer to most of these is no, you'll be back here in a year looking for another replacement. Flipdish answers yes to all five.
When you do move, set up the menu first, since that's most of the work, and run the new system alongside the old one for a quiet day or two before you rely on it.
Flipdish is built for restaurants, takeaways and food businesses, and it covers POS, payments, online ordering, kiosks, loyalty and AI in one place. For UK and Irish restaurants leaving SumUp, it's the one to pick.