SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
What is SumUp?
SumUp makes card readers and a basic POS for small businesses. Market traders, pop-up stalls and small shops use it a lot, mostly because the readers are cheap, take minutes to set up and the basic plan has no monthly fee.
A restaurant is a different job. Once you need table management, split bills, online ordering, a kitchen display, reporting across sites or stock tracking, SumUp runs out of road. It was built to take a payment, not to run a kitchen.
This guide covers what to look for when you move off SumUp, where the other common options fall short, and why Flipdish is the platform we'd point restaurants to.
Why restaurants leave SumUp
Hardly anyone leaves because of one big problem. It's usually a pile of small ones that get worse as the place gets busier.
- Orders reach the kitchen on paper tickets or by someone shouting, because there's no kitchen display system
- Servers can't split a bill four ways, run courses or track covers at the till
- Online orders arrive on a separate system and get typed in by hand
- Nobody can see sales across more than one site without exporting spreadsheets
- Stock and food costs live somewhere else, if they're tracked at all
- Staff rotas sit in a different app from the till
- There's no loyalty scheme tied to what customers actually buy
SumUp is a payment tool. A restaurant needs the whole operation in one place.
Flipdish: the SumUp alternative built for restaurants
Flipdish is made for restaurants, takeaways and multi-location food businesses. SumUp handles the transaction. Flipdish handles the transaction and everything around it, from the order being placed to the ticket landing in the kitchen to the sales report the next morning.
Here's what you get that SumUp doesn't offer:
- A full restaurant POS with table management, modifiers and kitchen routing
- A kitchen display system that replaces printed tickets
- Online ordering with a branded website and customer app
- Self-service kiosks for ordering in the venue
- Order management that pulls Just Eat, Uber Eats, Deliveroo and your own channel into one screen
- Integrated payments built around restaurant volumes
- Inventory and food cost management
- Staff scheduling and management
- Customer loyalty and marketing
- AI-powered marketing and an AI Phone Agent that takes phone orders
- Multi-site reporting from a single dashboard
Independent restaurants, takeaways, QSRs and multi-location groups across the UK and Ireland use Flipdish. A single-site takeaway gets the same system a larger chain does, and doesn't have to switch platforms when it opens a second site.
The practical effect is that there's one menu, one set of orders and one set of customer records.
Where the other options fall short
You'll see four names come up when people search for a SumUp alternative. None of them gives a restaurant what Flipdish does in one platform.
Square for Restaurants has a restaurant POS with table management, online ordering through Square Online and basic inventory. It's a step up from a card reader, but its kitchen display and loyalty tools are basic and online ordering is limited. Groups with several sites will hit the ceiling fairly quickly.
Lightspeed Restaurant is a POS with good table management, detailed reporting and delivery platform integrations. It has no native online ordering or branded app, so you end up buying those separately and then stitching them back together.
Zettle by PayPal (formerly iZettle) sits in almost the same place as SumUp. It's a simple card reader with a basic POS, some menu management and sales reporting. There's no kitchen display, no online ordering integration and no multi-site management. Moving from SumUp to Zettle changes the logo on the reader and little else.
Epos Now is a UK POS used in hospitality and retail, with table management, basic stock control and an app marketplace. The marketplace is the catch. Kitchen display, online ordering and loyalty are add-ons, so the bill grows with every feature and each add-on is another system to keep in sync.
How they compare
| Platform | Restaurant POS | KDS | Online ordering | Multi-site | Loyalty | AI tools |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flipdish | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Square for Restaurants | ✓ | Basic | Limited | ✓ | Basic | ✗ |
| Lightspeed Restaurant | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ (native) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Zettle | Basic | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Epos Now | ✓ | Add-on | Add-on | ✓ | Add-on | ✗ |
| SumUp | Basic | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
What to look for in a SumUp alternative
A POS built for restaurants
SumUp treats every sale the same way. A restaurant sale isn't the same as a coffee at a market stall. There are courses, modifiers, allergens, split bills, table transfers and voids, and the kitchen needs to know about all of them.
A restaurant POS handles these natively. A generic payment tool makes staff work around them, and that's where mistakes and slow service come from.
Kitchen integration
A kitchen display system replaces paper tickets and keeps the kitchen and front of house looking at the same thing. An order taken at the table, online or on a kiosk should show up on the kitchen screen straight away.
Flipdish's kitchen display system routes orders automatically. The kitchen can manage prep times and bump tickets without paper, and nobody walks a docket from the till to the pass.
Online ordering that feeds the same system
If you take orders online and in person, both should land in the same place. Running a card reader for the till and a separate platform for the website means double entry, wrong orders and a tablet nobody has time to watch.
Flipdish puts online and in-person orders into one queue, so the kitchen sees a single list whatever channel the order came from.
Multi-site capability
Once you have a second site, you need to manage menus, reporting and settings centrally. SumUp has nothing meaningful here, so owners end up phoning managers for the day's takings.
Flipdish's multi-location management lets you run every site from one dashboard, with permissions set per site so a site manager sees their own venue and not the whole group.
Integrated payments
SumUp charges a flat per-transaction fee on cards, 1.69% and up on its standard rates. That's fine for a stall with a handful of sales. When card payments are most of your takings, the rate matters, and so does having payments connected to the POS so the till and the terminal never disagree.
Flipdish Pay is built into the platform for restaurant transaction volumes.
What it costs compared to SumUp
SumUp's basic plan is free and the per-transaction fee is the only cost. That looks cheap until you count what's missing. You pay for it in staff time re-keying online orders, in refunds when a ticket gets lost, and in the sales you never see because customers can't order from you directly.
Flipdish is a fuller platform with a monthly fee and integrated payments, and it covers the POS, ordering, kitchen display and marketing in one package. For most restaurants the extra cost is made back through fewer errors, faster service and orders that come straight from your own website and app instead of through a delivery marketplace.
The other platforms in the table above all have monthly or add-on costs too, and for the restaurant features they leave out you'd be paying a second or third supplier.
Flipdish and SumUp side by side
SumUp and Flipdish are designed for different businesses. SumUp is for anyone who needs to take a card payment quickly. Flipdish is for restaurants.
Here's how an ordinary service plays out on each:
| Scenario | SumUp | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Customer orders online | No native integration | Orders route directly to the POS and KDS |
| Split bill between four people | Manual workaround | Built-in split bill |
| Allergen query at the counter | Not supported | Allergen info on the POS |
| Order arrives from Just Eat | Separate tablet | Consolidated on one screen |
| Manager checks sales across 3 sites | Not possible | Real-time from one dashboard |
| Customer wants loyalty points | Not supported | Earned across every channel |
That isn't a small gap. A restaurant on Flipdish works differently from one on SumUp, from how the first order is taken to how the owner checks the numbers at the end of the week.
Moving from SumUp to Flipdish
Switching sounds like a bigger job than it is. Staff learn one system instead of a reader plus whatever else you've bolted on, and the kitchen display usually takes the least explaining, since a screen with tickets on it is self-evident.
The sensible order is to get the menu and POS set up first, switch on online ordering next and add the marketing and loyalty tools once service is running smoothly. If you run several sites, set up one, check it works the way you want, then copy the setup across the rest.
SumUp is good at simple payment collection. It isn't a restaurant system and doesn't claim to be. If you need a kitchen display, online ordering, loyalty, multi-site reporting or a branded app, you'll outgrow it fast, and Flipdish covers all of that in one platform.