Square Alternative: The Best Square Alternatives for Restaurants
The best Square alternatives for restaurants
Flipdish is the best Square alternative for restaurants in the UK and Ireland. It was built for food businesses from the start, and it covers POS, online ordering, kiosks, AI phone ordering, loyalty and marketing in one platform.
Square is a general payments and POS tool. For simple retail sales it does the job. Restaurants usually start to struggle when they open a second site, add a delivery channel, or decide they'd rather have customers order directly than through a marketplace.
Why restaurant operators look for Square alternatives
Square is popular because it's easy. The card reader arrives, you plug it in, and you're taking payments that afternoon. Pricing is easy to read. For a market stall, a pop-up or a small café with a short menu, that's a fair deal and there's no reason to buy more than you need.
Restaurants outgrow it for fairly specific reasons:
- Online ordering is there in Square for Restaurants, but it's one feature of a general POS. Platforms that only do restaurant ordering go further on branded websites and apps.
- Kitchen flow gets harder once orders arrive from several places at once. A kitchen display needs to handle all of them, and Square usually needs extra work to get there.
- Multi-location management isn't what Square was built around. Reporting, menu changes and staff permissions across several sites get awkward.
- Orders from Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo don't come into one screen cleanly.
- There's no AI phone ordering, AI marketing or smart upselling.
- Loyalty is generic. It doesn't match the stamp-card or points schemes restaurants use to bring people back.
Here's what that looks like in a real takeaway. A tablet for Just Eat, another for Deliveroo, a phone that rings during the dinner rush, a till for walk-ins, and someone typing each order into the kitchen by hand. Nothing is broken. It's just four places to watch, and the person on the till is the one who misses the Deliveroo order. Fixing that is the main reason operators move off Square.
The best Square alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish - best for UK and Irish restaurants
Flipdish is a restaurant technology platform used by thousands of restaurants, takeaways and multi-location groups across the UK and Ireland. It covers:
- Restaurant POS with kitchen display, order management and staff tools
- Online ordering with branded websites and mobile apps
- Self-service kiosks with upselling and loyalty
- AI Phone Agent for automated phone ordering
- Loyalty and marketing made for restaurants
- Restaurant payments
- Centralised reporting across every location
The case for Flipdish is that it's one connected system. Your online orders, kiosk orders, phone orders and till sales all land in the same place, and the same menu feeds all of them. If you currently run a card reader from one company, an ordering app from another and a loyalty app from a third, this is the version where you stop paying for and maintaining three logins.
Setup is handled by Flipdish's onboarding team, and support is based in the UK and Ireland, so you're not working across time zones when something goes wrong during service.
It suits operators who want direct ordering to become a real share of sales. It's less of a fit if all you need is a card reader for a market stall, and in that case Square is fine.
2. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed is a cloud POS from Montreal with restaurant features like table management, floor planning and multi-location reporting. It's aimed at sit-down restaurants and connects to a lot of third-party tools.
That last point is also the catch. Lightspeed doesn't include the ordering, marketing and AI products that Flipdish builds in, so many of the advanced features mean adding and paying for separate products.
3. Epos Now
Epos Now is a UK POS provider that sells to both retail and hospitality. It has a wide app marketplace and a fairly low upfront cost.
It's a general hospitality product. If you want built-in online ordering and marketing in the same system as your till, you'll be looking at add-ons rather than a unified stack.
4. TouchBistro
TouchBistro is made for table-service restaurants. Its floor plans and reservation tools are good. The company is based in Toronto and the product is mostly aimed at North American restaurants.
A sit-down restaurant that cares most about table management could do well with it. UK takeaways, quick-service restaurants and groups that want a complete platform will probably find it narrow.
5. Zettle by PayPal
Zettle started as iZettle in Sweden and was bought by PayPal in 2018. It's a card payment and basic POS tool, a lot like Square: quick to set up, and thin on anything restaurant-specific. It makes sense for low-volume, simple transactions. Full-service restaurant operations will outgrow it for the same reasons they outgrow Square.
Flipdish vs Square: direct comparison
| Feature | Square | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant POS | Basic | Full restaurant POS |
| Online ordering | Limited | Branded website + app |
| Self-service kiosks | No | Yes |
| AI phone ordering | No | Yes |
| Marketplace integration | Limited | Full (Just Eat, Uber Eats, Deliveroo) |
| Loyalty programme | Basic | Restaurant-specific loyalty |
| Multi-location management | Limited | Built for multi-site operators |
| Restaurant payments | Yes | Yes, integrated |
| Marketing automation | No | Yes |
| UK/Ireland support | Limited | Dedicated UK/Ireland team |
Not every row matters equally. Marketplace integration, online ordering and multi-location management are the rows that decide it for most restaurants. The kiosk and AI phone rows matter a lot if you're busy at the counter or on the phone, and not at all if you're not.
The marketplace commission question
A lot of Square switchers are really trying to get out from under marketplace commission. Rates differ by marketplace and by contract, so look at your own statements rather than anyone's average. Add up what you paid Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo last month, then go through the orders and ask which customers already knew your restaurant. Those are the people who'd have ordered direct if the link had been easy to find.
That's the job of a branded website and app, plus a loyalty scheme that gives regulars a reason to use it. Square can take online orders, but it wasn't designed around this goal. A restaurant platform is.
Who should move away from Square
You're probably past Square if any of these sound like you:
- You take more than 50 online orders a week across several channels
- You have two or more locations and want reporting and menu management in one place
- You run a quick-service or fast-casual restaurant and want kiosk upselling
- You're a takeaway that wants direct online ordering instead of depending on a marketplace
- Answering the phone eats up staff hours you'd rather put elsewhere, and AI ordering could take that over
If none of those apply, stay put. Switching systems costs time, and a single small site with a short menu gets little back from it.
What to ask any provider before you sign
Whichever platform you look at, get straight answers to a few things.
Who processes the card payments, and what's the rate? Some systems tie you to their own processor and others let you bring yours. Ask what the total monthly cost is for your actual volume, with hardware, software and processing all added up.
What happens to marketplace orders? Ask to see a Just Eat or Deliveroo order arrive on the kitchen screen. If the answer is a separate tablet, you haven't solved the problem you came to solve.
How long is the contract, and what does it cost to leave? Check the hardware too. Square's readers generally only work with Square's own software and processing, so expect to replace them when you move, and ask any new provider what they supply and what you'd pay.
Who picks up the phone when the system goes wrong on a Friday night? Look at support hours before you look at features. A restaurant's busiest hours are when most software gets stress-tested.
Can you see a demo with your own menu in it? A generic demo menu hides the awkward parts, like modifiers, half-and-half items and meal deals.
Making the switch from Square
Moving to a dedicated restaurant platform is easier than most operators expect. The main steps:
- Export your menu from Square and import it into the new system
- Set up your online ordering channels - website, app, kiosk
- Brief staff on the new POS flow (a basic handover usually takes 1 to 2 hours)
- Point existing customers to your direct ordering channels
Flipdish supports migration, and an onboarding team handles the technical setup.
Pick a quiet day for the switch, not a Saturday. Keep your old card reader charged and to hand for the first week in case you need a backup. Tell regulars about the new ordering link in person, on receipts and on your social accounts. Direct orders only grow if people know where to find them.
Where to compare your options
For independent comparisons of restaurant technology in the UK, restauranttech.co.uk is worth a look before you commit to a platform.