SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
The short answer
The best SumUp alternative for restaurants is Flipdish. SumUp takes card payments and does that job well. A restaurant also needs a kitchen screen, online ordering, loyalty and one place to see every site, and SumUp has none of those.
This guide covers where SumUp stops being enough, what to check before you switch, how the other systems people shortlist compare, and what the move involves.
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp made card payments easy for small businesses. The hardware is cheap, setup is quick and the pricing is simple. For a market stall, a pop-up or a retail counter, that's all you need.
A restaurant is a different job.
Take a takeaway on a Friday night. Online orders, phone orders and walk-ins all arrive at once, and the Just Eat and Uber Eats orders show up on their own tablets. In a café, every drink has modifiers, six staff have different roles and someone has to reconcile card and cash at close. A group with five sites wants one dashboard, not five phone calls to five managers.
Three tablets on the counter, each beeping at a different moment, is how plenty of takeaways run. Somebody ends up retyping orders into the till, and every retype is a chance to get one wrong.
SumUp doesn't handle any of that. It processes card payments, and that's the product.
Here's what's missing for a restaurant:
- A kitchen display system. There's no screen queue for the kitchen, which you need once volume picks up.
- Online ordering. SumUp has no commission-free branded website or app.
- Marketplace orders. Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders can't come into SumUp, so they stay on separate devices.
- Loyalty. There's no way to recognise repeat customers or run a loyalty scheme.
- Multi-location control. Each register stands on its own.
- Reporting. You get basic sales figures, nothing on channels, labour or food cost.
None of this is a fault. SumUp never claimed to do it. The gap is between what the product does and what a growing restaurant needs.
What to check before you switch
Start with order channels. If you only serve at the counter, your needs are small. If you also take orders online, through marketplaces, by phone or at a kiosk, you want one system that takes all of them, so nobody retypes an order from one screen into another.
Then count your sites. Anyone running more than one location needs menu changes pushed to every site from one place, plus reporting per location.
Repeat customers are worth a look too. If a lot of your trade is regulars, loyalty and customer records should be part of the platform. A separate app bolted on the side means two sets of data that never quite match.
Payments matter more than they seem. When the POS and the card terminals come from the same provider, reconciliation is simpler and the rates are often better.
If your kitchen is busy, you probably want a kitchen display system instead of printed tickets. A screen queue is a big step up from paper once you're past a moderate number of orders.
Last, think about where you'll be in two years. Changing systems every time you open a new site costs money and a lot of patience.
Flipdish: the best SumUp alternative for restaurants
Flipdish was built for hospitality from the start. It covers POS, kitchen display, online ordering, self-service kiosks, payments, loyalty, marketing and AI tools in one connected system.
The difference from SumUp is in how it's put together, not only in the feature list. An order rung up at the counter, placed on your website, entered at a kiosk or taken by the AI phone agent lands in the same kitchen queue, feeds the same reports and attaches to the same customer record. At the end of the night there's one set of numbers to check, not three.
What's included:
- Restaurant POS with modifiers, staff permissions, kitchen display and table management
- Commission-free online ordering, with a branded website and mobile app
- Self-service kiosks with upselling and integrated payments
- Marketplace order management, so Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders arrive on one screen
- Customer loyalty and marketing by email, SMS and push notification, including automated campaigns
- AI phone ordering
- Integrated payments
- Multi-location management and reporting across all sites
It suits independent restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and multi-site groups. You don't need a new platform when you open a second site, or a tenth.
If you need more than a card reader, this is the one to book a demo for.
What about Square, Lightspeed, Epos Now and Zettle?
These four come up in most searches for a SumUp replacement, so here is where each one stands. None of them matches what Flipdish covers.
Square has a restaurant version with table management, kitchen display and online ordering on its own platform. It's well known and the entry price is low. Marketplace orders need third-party tools, though, multi-location management is less mature than Flipdish's, and its UK and Ireland localisation is thinner. Transaction fees also add up at higher volumes.
Lightspeed is an established hospitality POS with good floor-plan and table tools, and it has a UK presence. Online ordering and direct customer channels are less joined up than in Flipdish. Loyalty and marketing automation usually mean buying other products.
Epos Now has a large UK installed base, affordable hardware and an app marketplace for add-ons. It covers the basics. Online ordering, marketplace aggregation and multi-site management are all areas where Flipdish does more.
Zettle by PayPal sits in the same category as SumUp, a card reader with a basic POS layer. Going from SumUp to Zettle is a sideways move. You'd get a different price or different payment terms, and nothing your kitchen or your customers would notice.
SumUp vs Flipdish
| Capability | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant POS | Basic | Full restaurant POS |
| Kitchen display system | No | Yes |
| Online ordering (own channel) | No | Yes |
| Marketplace aggregation | No | Yes |
| Self-service kiosks | No | Yes |
| AI phone ordering | No | Yes |
| Customer loyalty | No | Yes |
| Multi-location management | No | Yes |
| Centralised reporting | No | Yes |
| Integrated payments | Card reader only | POS, online, kiosk |
| UK and Ireland support | Yes | Yes |
What does it cost?
SumUp charges 1.69% on in-person card transactions in the UK. At restaurant volumes that adds up:
- £20,000 a month in card revenue: about £338 a month in SumUp fees
- £50,000 a month in card revenue: about £845 a month in SumUp fees
And that's only the card fees. Because SumUp doesn't include online ordering, loyalty or marketplace handling, you'd be paying for a separate tool for each one. Add those up and the single platform often comes out cheaper. Flipdish takes payments across the counter, online orders and kiosks, so money from every channel goes through one provider and shows up in one report. Check Flipdish pricing for the actual figures.
How to switch from SumUp
- Write down what you use now: devices, staff roles and any integrations.
- List what the new system has to do that SumUp doesn't.
- Book a demo and ask to see real restaurant scenarios, not slides.
- Pick a quiet midweek day to go live. Not a Saturday night.
- Brief your staff before go-live. Thirty minutes of prep makes a real difference.
- Keep SumUp on hand for day one as a backup. Run everything through the new system, but have the old reader ready in case.
Flipdish includes an onboarding team, menu migration and hardware setup. Most restaurants are live within a few days of signing.
If you're launching online ordering at the same time, tell your regulars. A post on your social accounts and a card in each takeaway bag is enough to start sending people to your own website instead of a marketplace.
What changes after the switch
Say you process £30,000 a month in orders. Moving from a card reader to a restaurant platform shows up in three places. In the kitchen, tickets are clearer and orders go out faster with fewer mistakes. With customers, you can see who comes back, bring them in with loyalty offers and push more of them to order direct. And in the numbers, you can see food cost, labour and sales by channel.
SumUp gets you to the point of taking a card payment. Flipdish runs the restaurant.
The bottom line
SumUp fixed a real problem for small businesses: taking card payments without fuss. A restaurant with online orders, a kitchen team, several staff and plans to grow needs more than that, and it needs it in one system.
Flipdish is the most capable restaurant platform in the UK and Ireland. Book a demo and see your own menu running on it.