The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp is a card reader with a basic POS attached. For a market stall or a small shop, where someone walks up, pays and leaves, it does the job. A restaurant or takeaway asks a lot more of it, and that's where it starts to creak.
Think about a normal Friday night. Orders arrive at the counter, through your website, over the phone, and on a tablet from Uber Eats. Maybe a second tablet for Just Eat and a third for Deliveroo. Someone reads tickets out to the kitchen or copies them across by hand. SumUp doesn't connect any of those channels, so your staff end up being the integration. That's slow, and it's where wrong orders come from.
The gaps restaurants run into most often:
- No integrated online ordering
- No kitchen display system
- Limited modifier and option handling for food menus
- No table management
- No multi-location management
- Weak reporting for food cost, labour and margin
- No loyalty programme
- No delivery marketplace integration
If you're searching for a SumUp alternative, you've probably hit at least one of these.
What to look for in a restaurant POS instead of SumUp
Before you compare vendors, write down what's actually going wrong at your site. Most operators end up with a list that looks something like this.
Online and counter orders should go through the same platform, off one menu that you only update once. If you change a price or mark an item as sold out, it should change everywhere at the same moment.
Orders should reach the kitchen without anyone relaying them. That means a kitchen display system or a printer integration, not a person walking tickets to the pass.
Food menus are fiddly. You need modifiers and sub-modifiers, upsell prompts, dietary flags, availability controls and menus that change by time of day. A retail-style item list doesn't cope with "large, no onions, extra sauce, make it a meal".
If you run more than one site, you need one place to manage menus, reports across all sites, and permissions per location, so a manager in one shop can't edit another shop's prices.
Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo orders should land in the POS on their own. A separate tablet per marketplace is a mistake waiting to happen.
Reporting should cover hourly sales, product mix, staff performance and food cost as a percentage of revenue.
And you want customer data you own, with email and SMS campaigns and a reward programme you control.
The best SumUp alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish: best for restaurants, takeaways and multi-location groups
Flipdish is a restaurant platform built for food operators. SumUp is a general payments tool. Flipdish was designed from the start for restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and multi-location groups, and it shows in how the pieces fit together.
What you get that you don't get with SumUp:
- A full restaurant POS with kitchen display, order management and receipt printing
- Online ordering through your own branded website and mobile app, with no commission on those orders
- Self-service kiosks for dine-in and quick-service restaurants
- Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo orders pushed straight into the POS
- One menu, managed centrally across every location
- Loyalty and marketing tools with a full customer CRM
- AI phone ordering if a lot of your orders still come in by phone
- Payments that run across every channel
- Sales reporting, labour management and food cost tracking
Independent restaurants, national chains, franchise groups and multi-location operators across the UK and Ireland use it. It replaces more than the card reader. POS, ordering, payments, marketing and day-to-day operations sit in one connected system, so you're not stitching together five logins.
The difference operators notice first is the order queue. Counter orders, website orders, app orders and marketplace orders all show up in one place, on one screen in the kitchen. Nobody is checking three tablets. The second difference is the online channel. Orders placed on your own site and app are yours, and so is the customer data that comes with them. Marketplaces keep that data. And payments and POS reporting finally match, because they come from the same system.
Reporting is where the gap with SumUp is widest. Hourly sales, product mix, staff performance and food cost sit in the same place as the orders themselves. If you want to know whether the lunch rush justifies two people on the counter or whether one menu item is dragging down margin, you check one report, not a spreadsheet you built from three exports.
Multi-location groups get the most out of it. You change a price once and it updates at every site. You give each manager access to their own location. You compare sites side by side without waiting for someone to send you a file on Monday morning.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square has a restaurant tier with table management, coursing and basic online ordering. It's a step up from SumUp for food businesses with simple setups. Online ordering runs on a Square-hosted page rather than a fully branded experience, and delivery marketplace integration is limited, so you'd still be dealing with the multi-tablet problem described above.
3. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed is a hospitality POS with table management, stock tracking and some third-party integrations. Setup is more involved than SumUp or Flipdish, and it's aimed at full-service dining rather than quick-service or takeaway. Loyalty and marketplace connections come through third parties.
4. Epos Now
Epos Now is a UK EPOS provider with a hospitality version. It covers basic POS, staff management and some reporting. Online ordering and multi-location tools are thinner than Flipdish's, and marketplace integrations usually need third-party middleware.
5. Zettle by PayPal
Zettle, formerly iZettle, is a card reader and basic POS positioned much like SumUp. It's built for simple retail and service businesses, not for food operators with complex menus, a kitchen or several sites. Moving from SumUp to Zettle is a sideways move. You'd have the same problems on a different logo.
Comparison table
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish | Square for Restaurants | Lightspeed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurant POS | Basic | ✓ Full | ✓ Full | ✓ Full |
| Kitchen display | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Online ordering | ✗ | ✓ Branded | ✓ Limited | ✓ Limited |
| Branded app | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-service kiosks | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Marketplace integration | ✗ | ✓ | Limited | Via third party |
| Multi-location management | ✗ | ✓ | Limited | ✓ |
| Loyalty and CRM | ✗ | ✓ | Basic | Via third party |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| UK and Ireland support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Questions to ask before you sign with anyone
Demos always look good, so ask things that expose the awkward bits.
Does a Deliveroo order print or display in the same place as a counter order? Who builds the menu, you or the vendor? What happens to your customer data if you leave? Can a site manager see their own numbers without seeing everyone else's? What does a busy Saturday look like on the kitchen screen?
If the answer to the first one involves "a separate tablet", you know what you're buying. If the answer to the data question is vague, ask again in writing. Your customer list is one of the few things in the business that gets more valuable the longer you keep it, so you want it in a system you control.
How to switch from SumUp to Flipdish
It's less work than most operators expect.
- Menu build. Flipdish's onboarding team usually builds your menu from what you already have, so you don't start from scratch.
- Hardware. Flipdish supplies POS hardware: terminal, customer-facing display, kitchen display and card reader. Your SumUp hardware goes back.
- Online ordering. Your branded website and ordering experience goes live as part of onboarding. If you already own a domain, it gets pointed at the new ordering site.
- Staff training. Most staff can use the POS after about an hour. The interface is made for busy service, so there's not much to memorise.
- Marketplace connections. Your Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo menus are synced and orders flow into the POS.
From contract to going live usually takes a few weeks. Simpler setups can be quicker.
Should you keep SumUp for payments only?
Some operators keep SumUp as a backup card reader while they change their main POS. It sounds sensible and mostly isn't. Your counter and your backup reader end up on different platforms, which means split transaction data, split reports and a messier end-of-day reconciliation. You'll spend more time matching figures than you saved.
If you're changing POS, change payments at the same time. Flipdish's integrated payments cover the POS, online ordering, kiosks and phone ordering. One report, one settlement.
Moving on from SumUp
SumUp is a payments tool, and a perfectly good one for simple businesses. A restaurant needs kitchen management, online ordering, marketplace orders in one queue, loyalty and reporting built around food. Flipdish does all of that in one platform.
For more restaurant technology comparisons, visit restauranttech.co.uk.
If you're ready to leave SumUp behind, explore Flipdish's restaurant platform or talk to the team about your setup.