SumUp Alternative: The Best SumUp Alternatives for Restaurants
Why restaurants outgrow SumUp
SumUp takes card payments, and it does that well. For a market stall, a pop-up or a one-chair barber, that's often all you need.
A restaurant is a different job. Orders arrive from the counter, the tables, the phone, your website and two or three delivery apps, and someone has to get every one of them to the kitchen with the right modifiers. SumUp was built around a simpler transaction: scan an item, take the payment, serve the next customer. Kitchen printing, table management, modifier trees, marketplace orders and reporting across sites weren't part of the brief.
So when someone searches for a SumUp alternative for a restaurant, they rarely want another card reader. They want one system that runs the whole operation. The options below are ranked with that in mind.
What SumUp is missing for restaurants
It's easier to compare alternatives once you know exactly what's missing.
| Capability | SumUp | What restaurants need |
|---|---|---|
| Kitchen Display System | No | Orders have to reach the kitchen without a runner |
| Table management | No | Floor plans, split bills and open tabs for sit-down service |
| Modifier logic | Basic | Complex modifier trees - sizes, sides, extras, allergens |
| Online ordering integration | No | Website and app orders landing next to POS orders |
| Marketplace aggregation | No | Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo on one screen |
| Multi-location reporting | No | One view across every site |
| Loyalty and CRM | No | Customer data and repeat ordering |
| AI phone ordering | No | Phone orders taken without pulling staff off the floor |
If you're on SumUp and hitting any of these walls, the problem isn't your setup. It's the tool.
What a busy Friday looks like
Take a takeaway doing a few hundred orders on a Friday night. Some come in at the counter. Some are phone calls, and the phone doesn't stop ringing from six o'clock. A good chunk arrive through Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo, each on its own tablet. The rest come through the restaurant's own website.
On SumUp, the card payments are fine. Everything else is manual. Someone retypes marketplace orders into the till, someone else writes phone orders on a pad and walks them to the kitchen, and the menu has to be changed in four places when you run out of an ingredient. Mistakes happen when it's busy, and they're the kind that cost you a refund or a bad review.
On a platform built for restaurants, the marketplace orders, website orders, phone orders and counter orders all arrive in one queue and print or display in the kitchen. When the chicken runs out, you switch it off once.
That's the gap. It has nothing to do with taking payments, and everything to do with what happens to the order before and after the payment.
The best SumUp alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish - best for restaurants and takeaways
Flipdish is a restaurant management platform made for food service. It covers what SumUp can't: POS, online ordering, self-service kiosks, kitchen display systems, marketing and loyalty, and an AI phone agent for places that still take orders by phone.
The difference between Flipdish and SumUp is the difference between restaurant software and generic payment software.
What you get with Flipdish that SumUp doesn't offer:
- A full restaurant POS system with kitchen printing and display
- Branded ordering websites and mobile apps
- Order management that pulls Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo orders into a single screen
- Menu management in one place, covering every channel and location
- Reporting for all your sites from one dashboard
- Card payments built in through Flipdish Pay
- Loyalty, SMS marketing and a customer CRM
- An AI phone ordering agent that takes orders over the phone without staff
Independent restaurants, multi-location groups, franchise operators and QSR chains all use it. If you want to run the whole business from one platform, Flipdish is the SumUp alternative to pick.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square built a hospitality product on top of its payment platform. It handles table management, floor plans and kitchen printing, which SumUp doesn't. It suits small and mid-sized restaurants that want a familiar interface and no long-term contract.
It falls short once you grow. Square's multi-location reporting and advanced features are thinner than Flipdish's, so a group with more than two or three sites will feel it. If you also need marketplace integration and AI phone ordering, Square doesn't get you there.
3. Zettle by PayPal
Zettle sits in the same place as SumUp: a simple card reader with a basic back office. It has a few more retail management features, but it isn't designed for restaurants. There's no kitchen printing, no table management and no integrated online ordering, so it doesn't solve the problems that make people leave SumUp in the first place.
4. Epos Now Hospitality
Epos Now has a hospitality product for restaurants and cafés, with table management, kitchen printing and some reporting.
Much of what you'd want beyond that comes through third-party integrations, and each one adds cost and another thing to set up and maintain. Its multi-location tools and online ordering are weaker than Flipdish's.
5. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed is a cloud POS for hospitality, with solid table management and detailed reporting, and it connects to a lot of third-party tools.
It's aimed at larger restaurant groups and can take a while to implement. Pricing climbs as you add features. And the online ordering, loyalty and AI tools that come built into Flipdish aren't native to Lightspeed.
How to choose
Five questions will narrow it down quickly.
Do you take orders online? If so, your POS needs to talk to your website, your app and your marketplace accounts. Flipdish does this natively. Most other options need third-party integrations stitched on.
Do you run more than one site? You'll want one menu, one set of reports and user permissions by site. Most SumUp alternatives handle this badly. Flipdish was built for it.
How many orders come in by phone? Phone ordering eats staff time, especially on a Friday. An AI phone ordering agent like Flipdish's answers the calls so nobody has to stop what they're doing.
Do you want repeat customers? SumUp collects no customer data. If you want to run promotions and rely less on delivery marketplaces, you need loyalty and CRM tools in the same system as your orders.
What are you paying in card fees? SumUp charges a percentage per transaction, and your payments sit apart from your POS. With Flipdish Pay, payments run inside the POS, which makes reconciliation simpler because the sales and the money are in the same place.
A single café with a counter and a handful of tables needs less than a five-site takeaway group, but the order of priorities is the same. Kitchen communication comes first, then online orders, then reporting. Payments matter, they just aren't the hard part. If you start with a counter POS and a kitchen display and add online ordering later, it's much easier when that's already part of the same platform than when it means bolting on a second vendor.
Self-service is worth a look if queues are your problem. Flipdish kiosks let customers order and pay themselves at the counter, and the order goes to the kitchen like any other.
What to ask in a demo
A demo is where most of the useful information comes out, so go in with your real menu and your real order types. A few things to test:
- Ask them to build one of your trickier menu items, the one with the most modifiers, and send it to a kitchen printer.
- Have them show a marketplace order arriving and appearing on the kitchen screen without anyone retyping it.
- Ask what happens when you 86 an item. Does it update the website, the app and the marketplaces, or only the till?
- Ask to see reports across two sites side by side.
- Ask what the payment fees are on a typical day's takings, in pounds or euros, not as a percentage.
- Find out who sets up your menu, and who you ring when the printer stops working on a Saturday.
If a vendor can't show you these live, assume it doesn't do them.
What to expect when switching
Switching POS systems is disruptive if you don't plan it. A sequence that works:
- Audit your current setup. List every integration, menu item and workflow that touches the old system.
- Get a demo, and watch the new system handle your actual order types.
- Pick a quiet day to go live. Most operators choose a Monday or Tuesday.
- Train staff before go-live. POS mistakes in the middle of a rush are expensive.
- Keep SumUp running for a week if that makes you feel safer. Some operators use it as a fallback while the new system beds in.
Flipdish provides onboarding support, which takes a lot of the risk out of steps three and four.
Why Flipdish comes out ahead
SumUp is a payment tool. Flipdish is a restaurant platform. For a market stall, SumUp is fine. For a restaurant taking orders at the counter, at tables, by phone, through an app and from marketplaces, it isn't.
Flipdish replaces more than your card reader. It covers your online ordering, phone ordering, marketing, kitchen display and reporting too, so you stop paying for and juggling five separate tools.
If you're ready to move on from SumUp, request a Flipdish demo and see how it handles your own orders.