SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
The short answer
If you run a restaurant, takeaway or café and want to move off SumUp, Flipdish is the one to look at. SumUp reads cards. Flipdish covers the till, online ordering, kiosks, loyalty, marketing and AI tools in one system built for food businesses, so you're not stitching five products together.
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp was built so small businesses could take card payments quickly. For a market stall, a pop-up or a sole trader, it does that fine. For a restaurant or takeaway handling dozens or hundreds of orders a day, it runs out of road.
The problems show up in the same places every time.
Kitchen. SumUp has no kitchen display system and can't send orders to different stations. If you run several courses or have more than one prep area, no amount of working faster fixes that.
Tables. There's no floor plan, no table status, no covers count, no course-by-course ordering and no split billing. A sit-down restaurant can't get far on that.
Online ordering. If you want a branded website or app where customers order from you directly and you don't hand a commission to a marketplace on every order, you need a platform made for it.
Delivery apps. Orders from Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo should land on the same screen as your own orders, with nobody retyping them. SumUp doesn't pull in third-party delivery orders.
Reporting. You get basic sales figures. Item-level reports, a breakdown by channel, staff performance and a view across several sites all need something else.
Loyalty and marketing. There's nothing for a loyalty scheme, SMS campaigns to past customers or automated win-back messages.
Multiple sites. If you run more than one location, you can't manage menus centrally, compare how sites are doing or control who has access across the group.
None of this makes SumUp a bad product. It does what it was built to do. The trouble starts when a restaurant asks it to do things it was never meant to.
What to look for in a replacement
Work out what your operation needs before you start comparing products. Most restaurants leaving SumUp are trying to fix one or two of these:
| Your situation | What you need |
|---|---|
| Counter-service café or takeaway | Fast POS, online ordering, loyalty, delivery integration |
| Sit-down restaurant | Table management, course ordering, split bills, floor plan |
| Multi-location group | Centralised menus, consolidated reporting, role-based access |
| QSR or fast casual | Self-service kiosks, upselling, speed of service |
| Delivery-first operation | Kitchen display, marketplace integration, branded ordering channel |
Payments are one piece. What matters is whether they connect to everything else you do.
Take a Friday night in a takeaway. Phone orders are coming in, the website is busy, and Deliveroo and Uber Eats tablets are both beeping. On SumUp, someone types each of those into the till or the kitchen works from three separate screens and a pile of printed tickets. With a restaurant platform, every order lands in one queue and the kitchen works from that. The same goes for a sit-down restaurant on a Saturday: the server needs to see which tables are on starters, which are waiting on mains and who wants to split the bill four ways.
If that sounds like your service, a card reader on its own won't keep up.
Flipdish: the restaurant platform to switch to
Flipdish is made for restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and multi-location groups. It does the things SumUp can't, and it does them in one place.
POS
The Flipdish POS works for counter service, table service, delivery and drive-through. Staff can run multiple courses, split bills, add modifiers and send orders to the kitchen without leaving the screen.
Kitchen display
The Flipdish kitchen display system takes the place of paper tickets. Orders from the POS, online, kiosks and delivery apps all show up in one queue, ordered by prep time.
Online ordering
Flipdish builds you a branded ordering website and a customer mobile app. Customers order through your brand, and there's no per-order marketplace commission.
Kiosks
Flipdish kiosks let customers order in store without queueing at the counter. Orders go straight to the kitchen, and the kiosk suggests extras on its own, which pushes up the average order without a member of staff doing anything.
Delivery app orders
Flipdish order management puts Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders into the same kitchen queue as everything else. Your team watches one screen instead of three tablets.
Loyalty and marketing
Flipdish marketing tools cover loyalty programmes, vouchers, discounts and SMS. The AI marketing spots customers who've stopped ordering and sends them a targeted campaign automatically, so nobody has to build and schedule it by hand.
AI phone ordering
The Flipdish AI Phone Agent answers calls, takes the order and takes payment. Staff don't have to drop what they're doing in the middle of a rush to pick up the phone.
Payments
Flipdish payments run on the same platform as the POS and online ordering. There's no reconciling a payment provider's statements against a separate till.
Managing several sites
The Flipdish RMS gives groups one view of every site: menus, performance, staff access and analytics. Nobody has to log into each location separately.
It suits a single takeaway and it suits a group with 50 locations. You don't have to change platform as you grow.
The practical difference from SumUp is that all of this shares one set of data. A kiosk order, a website order and a phone order all show up in the same reports, and a menu change made once applies everywhere. You're not exporting spreadsheets from one tool to paste into another.
Other platforms you'll come across
If you're searching for a SumUp alternative you'll see a few other names. Flipdish is the one we'd point a restaurant to, but here's what the others are.
Square for Restaurants adds table layouts, menu management and an optional kitchen display to Square's payments product. Its online ordering, third-party delivery aggregation and multi-location management are less developed than Flipdish's, so a restaurant that wants every channel in one place would still be missing pieces.
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS aimed at sit-down restaurants. Implementation and subscription costs are higher than SumUp's, and it's a weaker fit for takeaway or delivery-first businesses.
Epos Now is a UK POS provider with tableside ordering, kitchen display integration and an app marketplace. Online ordering, loyalty and marketing, which Flipdish includes as standard, are separate subscriptions there. The total can end up well above the headline price.
TouchBistro is a POS for dine-in restaurants, with more of a following in North America than the UK. Its online ordering and delivery integrations are less developed than Flipdish's.
SumUp vs Flipdish
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Card payments | ✓ | ✓ |
| Restaurant POS | Basic | Full |
| Table management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Kitchen display system | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded online ordering | Limited | ✓ |
| Branded customer mobile app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-service kiosk | ✗ | ✓ |
| Just Eat integration | ✗ | ✓ |
| Uber Eats integration | ✗ | ✓ |
| Deliveroo integration | ✗ | ✓ |
| Loyalty programme | ✗ | ✓ |
| SMS marketing | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-site management | Limited | ✓ |
| Centralised menu management | ✗ | ✓ |
| Real-time cross-site reporting | ✗ | ✓ |
What it costs
SumUp charges a fee on every card payment plus a monthly software fee. At low volume that feels cheap. As you take more card payments, the per-transaction cost adds up.
Most restaurants also need online ordering, loyalty and marketing, and they end up paying for each one separately. Each has its own contract, its own support team and its own integration to keep working.
Flipdish pricing covers POS, online ordering, marketing and AI tools in a single subscription. For most restaurants that works out cheaper than SumUp plus the extra tools SumUp can't replace.
Hardware
SumUp runs on its own card readers and an app on a tablet or phone. It's cheap to start, which is a big part of why new businesses pick it.
A restaurant platform usually means buying proper POS hardware: a POS terminal, a customer-facing display, a kitchen printer or kitchen display screen, and a payment terminal. You spend more up front. You also get a lot more than a card reader and a phone.
Flipdish supplies the lot through its restaurant POS hardware range: POS terminals, kitchen display screens, card readers, customer-facing displays and kiosk hardware.
How to switch from SumUp
Write down what SumUp can't do for you. Kitchen coordination, online orders, reporting gaps, whatever's actually causing trouble. You'll use this list in the demo.
Book a demo and bring your own service format, whether that's counter, table, delivery or a mix. Ask to see it working the way you work.
Plan the menu move. Getting your whole menu into a new system takes the most time. Ask how onboarding works and whether Flipdish helps with the first build.
Check the hardware. Know what you need to buy and what it costs before you sign, and which SumUp kit you can't reuse.
Train staff before launch. Front of house and kitchen both need a run through before the first live service. A quiet day is best.
Set up online ordering first. If you're launching a branded website or app, get it live and test it with real orders before you switch SumUp off.
The bottom line
SumUp takes card payments. A restaurant needs its technology to do a lot more than that.
Flipdish runs POS, online ordering, kitchen display, kiosks, delivery app orders, loyalty, marketing and AI tools in one platform made for food businesses. If you're in the UK or Ireland and want one system to run the whole operation instead of just the card machine, that's the one to pick.