SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp is a card reader with a basic POS app. It was built for market stalls, pop-ups and small retail shops, and for that job it's fine. Payments go through quickly and there's very little to pay upfront.
A restaurant, takeaway or café is a different job. Once half the menu has modifiers, you have tables to track, the kitchen needs to see orders as they arrive, customers order online and you want to run a loyalty scheme, SumUp runs out of road fast.
People who search for a SumUp alternative are usually in one of these spots:
- They picked SumUp because it was cheap to start, and now they need more than a card reader
- They use SumUp for payments, something else for online orders, and paper tickets or shouting for the kitchen
- They have more than one site and can't see sales for all of them in one place
- They're tired of paying for four separate tools and want one
Below is a ranked look at the options. Flipdish is first because it's the one that covers all four.
What to work out before you compare
SumUp alternatives solve very different problems. Some fix the card reader and nothing else. Others replace the whole setup. So decide what you need first.
- Do you need a full restaurant POS system, or just a better card reader?
- Should online orders land in the kitchen without anyone retyping them?
- How many locations do you run now, and how many in two years?
- Do you want your own website and app for customers?
- Do you want loyalty and marketing built in?
- Do you need sales reporting across every site on one screen?
Two of those questions matter more than the rest: online ordering and number of sites. A single-site shop with no online orders can get by with fewer features. Add either one and the list of tools you need grows quickly, which is where SumUp starts to hurt.
Most operators who answer these honestly end up needing a platform built for food service, not a payment tool with a handful of restaurant features bolted on.
The best SumUp alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish - the best SumUp alternative for restaurants
Flipdish is built for restaurants, takeaways, cafés, quick-service restaurants and multi-location groups. SumUp started as a payment tool. Flipdish was designed from the ground up for food operators, and that shows in what's included:
- A full restaurant POS system with kitchen display screens, order management and detailed reporting
- Branded online ordering on your own website and mobile app, not a marketplace listing
- Self-service kiosks for quick-service counters
- AI phone ordering, which takes telephone orders without a staff member picking up
- Multi-location management from one account
- Integrated payments on the same platform as your POS
- Loyalty and customer marketing tools
Most restaurants buy these from three or four separate providers. With Flipdish there's one platform, one dashboard and one support team to call when something breaks on a Friday night.
It suits independent restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs, pub groups and multi-site chains. It's especially useful if you want to own your customer relationships and depend less on third-party delivery platforms, because orders placed through your own website and app belong to you, along with the customer data.
Menus are the fiddly part of any switch. Modifiers, sizes and combos all have to be set up, and guided onboarding means that's done with you instead of left for a Sunday night. Run SumUp plus separate tools and you keep the menu in each place, and someone always forgets to update one.
The comparison with SumUp is simple. SumUp takes payments. Flipdish runs the restaurant. If you need table turns, kitchen automation, loyalty, your own ordering channels and a view of every location on one screen, SumUp can't do that and Flipdish can.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square has a restaurant tier with table management, course management and kitchen printer integration. It's a step up from the basic Square reader, but you only get the full feature set on the paid plan.
It's aimed at small to medium independent restaurants. It doesn't have much depth for multi-location management, there's no owned online ordering channel, and connecting third-party delivery platforms needs extra middleware.
3. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS for table-service restaurants. It handles table plans, split bills and modifiers, and its reporting is more detailed than SumUp's.
It doesn't provide owned online ordering or branded apps. Those come through third-party integrations, which means more suppliers to manage. UK pricing at the enterprise tier can be high.
4. Epos Now
Epos Now is hospitality POS software with kitchen printing, basic table management and some reporting. It's one of the cheaper full-featured POS options in the UK.
The catch is that so much depends on integrations. Online ordering, loyalty and marketing all need third-party connections, and multi-location management is limited.
5. Zettle by PayPal
Zettle is the closest like-for-like match to SumUp: a card reader with a basic POS app, aimed at retail and simple food service. If anything it's more payment-focused than restaurant-focused.
For a restaurant that has outgrown SumUp, Zettle is a sideways move. The card reader problem stays solved and the operational problems stay exactly where they were. It fits market traders and pop-ups, where card processing is the main need.
SumUp vs Flipdish
| Feature | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Card payments | ✓ | ✓ |
| Restaurant POS | Basic | Full-featured |
| Kitchen display system | ✗ | ✓ |
| Online ordering (owned) | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded mobile app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-service kiosk | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Loyalty programme | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-location management | Limited | ✓ |
| Centralised reporting | Limited | ✓ |
| Marketplace order aggregation | ✗ | ✓ |
SumUp is a payment tool that picked up some light POS features. Flipdish is a restaurant platform that includes payments.
What a busy night looks like on each
Take a takeaway doing a Friday dinner rush. Phone orders are coming in, a few people ordering through the website, a queue at the counter.
On SumUp, the counter orders go through the reader. The phone orders get scribbled on a pad. The website orders arrive in whatever separate system you use for them, so someone has to keep an eye on a second screen and call out tickets to the kitchen. At the end of the night you pull three sets of numbers and try to make them agree.
On Flipdish, counter, web and app orders all land on the kitchen display screens in the same place. Phone orders can be taken by the AI phone agent, so nobody is stuck on the phone while the queue grows. Payments run through the same platform, and the day's sales are in one report. Nobody retypes anything.
For a single café with a quiet counter this might not feel urgent. For a place with a kitchen and more than one way to order, it's the difference between running the shift and chasing it.
What SumUp really costs a restaurant
SumUp charges a fee on every card payment, plus a subscription if you want its POS features. The headline cost looks low. Then you add what it doesn't do:
- No built-in online ordering, so you pay a separate provider
- No kitchen management, so you buy another tool or set up printers
- No loyalty or marketing, so that's more software and another subscription
- No multi-location reporting, so you need something else for that too
Four bills for four tools. Plenty of restaurants end up spending more on that patchwork than they would on one platform, and they also spend staff time moving information from one system to another.
Flipdish puts POS, online ordering, kiosks, loyalty and payments into one subscription. For busy venues, consolidating nearly always works out cheaper. Current rates are on the Flipdish pricing page.
Switching from SumUp
It's usually easier than people expect. Most of the work is in the first two steps, before you touch any new hardware.
- List every system SumUp connects to, and what each one does.
- Work out what the new platform replaces. Flipdish can take over SumUp plus several other subscriptions at once.
- Check the connections you rely on: delivery marketplaces, accounting software, stock management.
- Plan the menu move. Most platforms, Flipdish included, offer guided onboarding with menu setup support.
- Train the team before go-live, and pick a quiet trading day for the cutover.
Most Flipdish customers are fully operational within a few days of onboarding. If you run several sites, you can move one first, see how the team gets on, then roll the rest across.
Is Flipdish the right move?
Choose Flipdish if you want one platform for POS, online ordering, loyalty, payments and marketing, especially if you run more than one location or plan to. If your kitchen is juggling phone, web and counter orders on separate screens, that alone is reason enough to look.
SumUp is a good product for retail. Restaurants need things it was never built for: split kitchens, timed orders, online channels, loyalty, visibility across sites, and the ability to market straight to customers without paying marketplace commission.
Flipdish is the platform to pick if you're a restaurant operator in the UK or Ireland who has outgrown SumUp.
Ready to move on from SumUp? Book a demo with Flipdish to see how it fits your operation.