SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
The best SumUp alternative for restaurants
The best SumUp alternative for restaurants is Flipdish. It was built for food service from day one, and it puts POS, online ordering, kiosks, loyalty, marketing and payments in one platform.
SumUp is a card reader with a basic point-of-sale app, made for sole traders, market stalls and simple retail. It takes payments well. It doesn't deal with what a restaurant does all day: sending tickets to the kitchen, handling modifiers, running tables, taking online orders, tracking regulars, pulling in marketplace orders.
If you run a restaurant on SumUp and you're juggling orders across several devices, retyping sales into spreadsheets, or working around the app to keep the kitchen moving, you've outgrown it.
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp does one thing: it takes card payments quickly. For a pop-up or a market stall that's plenty. For a restaurant, café or takeaway, the limits show up almost straight away.
What SumUp can't do:
- Print kitchen tickets or run a kitchen display, so orders don't reach the kitchen on their own
- Handle modifiers or variants. There's no "no pickles, extra cheese, medium-rare"
- Manage tables, with no floor plan, seat assignment or split bills
- Run a branded online ordering website or app
- Run a loyalty programme or hold customer records
- Manage more than one location. Each device works on its own
- Connect to Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo, so those orders get handled separately
- Track inventory or costs
Picture a Friday evening. Phone orders are coming in, a Deliveroo tablet is beeping next to the till, and a table of six wants separate bills. On SumUp, every one of those is a manual job for someone on your team. Orders get missed. Customers can't order from you directly. And you've no idea who your regulars are or what they usually have.
At £3,000 a month in revenue and up, these gaps start costing real money.
SumUp is fine for a stall that sells coffee and cake over a counter, one person on the till and no delivery. That's what it was made for. Anything past that and you're paying for it in staff time.
The best SumUp alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish
Flipdish is the one to pick if you want to run a tighter operation and grow it. It's a full restaurant management system that covers restaurant POS, online ordering, self-service kiosks, loyalty and marketing and integrated payments. All of it is made for food service.
Here's how it compares with SumUp, feature by feature:
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant POS with modifiers | ✗ | ✓ |
| Kitchen Display System | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded online ordering website | ✗ | ✓ |
| White-labelled customer app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-service kiosks | ✗ | ✓ |
| Loyalty programme and CRM | ✗ | ✓ |
| Just Eat / Uber Eats / Deliveroo integration | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-location centralised management | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Inventory management | ✗ | ✓ |
Independent restaurants, fast-casual chains, QSRs and multi-location restaurant groups use Flipdish across the UK, Ireland and beyond.
The POS handles the things SumUp skips. Staff add modifiers and variants to an order, and the ticket goes to the kitchen display or printer without anyone walking it through. Card payments run through Flipdish's own payments, so you don't lose the one thing SumUp was already doing for you.
Online ordering is the bigger change for most owners. You get your own ordering website and a white-labelled app with your branding on it, not a marketplace's. Orders from Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo can be brought into the same system, which means no extra tablet on the counter. Kiosks add a self-service option for busy sites, and AI phone ordering takes calls for you when the line is full.
If you have more than one site, Flipdish gives you centralised menu management, cross-site reporting and a single back office. SumUp has nothing like that at any price.
Loyalty and marketing sit in the same system as the orders. That means a customer who orders on your website is already in your customer list, and you can email or text them later without exporting anything or stitching tools together.
Pricing is on the Flipdish pricing page.
Other options people compare
You'll see a few other names come up when you search for a SumUp replacement. None of them cover what Flipdish does end to end.
Square for Restaurants adds floor plans, kitchen ticket printing and basic reporting to the Square card reader. That's a step up from SumUp for a sit-down place. Online ordering needs extra integrations though, multi-location management is set up for small groups, and the loyalty and CRM tools aren't as tightly joined up as Flipdish's.
Zettle by PayPal sits in the same spot as SumUp: a card reader with a basic POS layer. It handles simple food and retail sales. It doesn't give you kitchen management, online ordering or restaurant loyalty tools, so moving to it from SumUp changes very little.
Epos Now is a cloud POS used in hospitality and retail. It does table management, kitchen printing and some online integrations through a marketplace. Branded ordering apps, deep marketing tools and AI features aren't part of it, and its online ordering and loyalty are less integrated than Flipdish's. Larger groups will find its multi-location features thin.
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS aimed at table-service dining, with floor plans, coursing and reservation integrations. It isn't designed around quick-service or delivery-heavy kitchens. Branded online ordering and loyalty both need third-party integrations, which means more suppliers and more bills.
Each of these fixes one or two of SumUp's gaps and leaves the others open. Flipdish closes all of them in one system.
How to choose
Five questions sort this out fast.
- Do you take phone or online orders? If you do, a POS terminal alone isn't enough. You need ordering built in.
- Do you use Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo? Then marketplace integration matters. Without it, orders land on a separate tablet and someone has to key them in by hand.
- Do you have more than one location? You'll want one place to control menus and see reports across every site.
- Do you want your own loyalty programme? Marketplaces own the customer relationship. Your own platform lets you keep it.
- Do you need kiosks? Self-service cuts queues and gives customers time to look at the whole menu.
Two or more yeses and you need a restaurant platform, not a card reader. Flipdish covers all five.
What switching from SumUp involves
Switching is simple. SumUp holds very little of your data, since its reporting and customer records are minimal, so there's not much to move.
To switch to Flipdish:
- Export your product list from SumUp if you want to reuse item names and prices.
- Build your Flipdish menu with modifiers, variants and pricing.
- Install the Flipdish POS hardware: terminal, kitchen display, printer and card reader.
- Connect your marketplace channels so every order arrives in one place.
- Launch your branded ordering website and customer app.
- Set up your loyalty programme and first marketing campaigns.
Flipdish provides onboarding and training for new customers, which helps when you're changing systems on a working site. The menu build is the step that takes thinking. If you've been faking modifiers with extra line items on SumUp, this is the time to replace them with proper ones.
What staying on SumUp costs
SumUp charges a fee on every payment, typically around 1.69% on tap or chip transactions. On £30,000 a month of card sales, that's about £507.
The fees aren't the main cost. The main cost is what you're not set up to do.
- Marketplace commission. Say you take £20,000 a month and 40% of it comes through Just Eat or Uber Eats at 30% commission. That's £8,000 of marketplace sales and about £2,400 a month in commission.
- No way to contact past customers. With no loyalty programme and no email or SMS marketing, a customer who orders once through a marketplace stays the marketplace's customer. You never get their details.
- No upselling. SumUp has no upsell prompts. A restaurant kiosk or an online ordering page can suggest a drink or a side at the moment someone's choosing, and your staff don't have to remember to ask.
Moving even a slice of that marketplace volume to your own website and app means keeping the commission and keeping the customer details.
Common questions
Can SumUp run a restaurant? For a very small operation with a short menu and no delivery, it can take payments. It can't send orders to a kitchen, manage tables or take online orders.
Do I need new hardware to leave SumUp? Yes. Flipdish supplies the POS hardware, including the terminal, kitchen display, printer and card reader.
Will I lose my sales history? SumUp stores very little beyond transactions. Export what you need before you leave.
Does Flipdish work for takeaways and cafés as well as restaurants? Yes. Independents, fast-casual brands, QSRs and multi-site groups all use it.
Can I keep taking Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats orders? Yes. Flipdish brings those channels into the same system as your own orders.
Ready to move on from SumUp? Request a Flipdish demo and see a restaurant platform working on a real menu.