Top 5 Restaurant POS Systems in the UK
The best restaurant POS system in the UK
The best restaurant POS system in the UK is Flipdish. It puts the till, online ordering, self-service kiosks, loyalty, marketing and payments on one platform, and it was built for restaurants, takeaways and multi-location groups rather than adapted from a shop system.
Your POS touches every order, every card payment and most of your reporting, so a bad choice is a pain to undo. Staff get retrained, menus get rebuilt, and you end up running two systems side by side for a few weeks while everyone grumbles.
Below are five options that make sense for UK restaurants, what each one does well and where each one gets awkward. The comparison table is further down if you want to skip ahead.
What to look for in a restaurant POS
Start with orders. Walk-in, online, kiosk and marketplace orders should all land in one queue. If you've got one tablet for Deliveroo, another for Uber Eats and a till for everything else, somebody is retyping orders, and sooner or later somebody gets one wrong.
Then think about sites. If you have more than one location, or you plan to, you want menus, prices and staff permissions managed from one place. Updating a price by walking round each site doesn't get any easier as you grow.
Payments matter more than they look like they do. When payment processing is part of the POS, there's one company to ring when a card payment fails, and you aren't matching up two sets of reports at the end of the week.
Kitchens need a screen eventually. Printed dockets work until the printer jams or the paper runs out in the middle of a Friday rush. A kitchen display system shows the kitchen each order as it arrives, with less paper and fewer missed items.
Reporting is the last big one. You want sales by hour, by item, by staff member and by channel. Labour cost as a share of revenue. Food cost variance. If the reports are buried or you can't export them, nobody will look at them.
One more thing that doesn't show up on feature lists: the contract. Ask how long it runs, which hardware you have to buy, whether that hardware only works with their software, and what happens to your sales data if you leave. Those answers tell you more about a supplier than the brochure does.
1. Flipdish - best for restaurants that want everything in one platform
Flipdish is the strongest full-stack restaurant platform available to UK operators. It covers POS, online ordering, branded apps, self-service kiosks, kitchen display, loyalty, marketing, AI phone ordering and payments, all connected to each other.
The reason it comes out on top is how the pieces fit together. Most restaurant tech stacks are patched together. One provider for the POS, another for online ordering, a third for marketing. Data sits in separate systems, the reports never quite agree, and when something breaks you spend an hour working out whose problem it is.
Flipdish builds all of it as one platform. An order from the website, the branded app, a self-service kiosk or a marketplace arrives in the same queue. The menu is managed in one place. Customer data goes into the same CRM, and the reporting covers every channel, so you aren't adding up three spreadsheets to find out how Saturday went.
For multi-location operators and franchise groups this is the main difference. You can change a price, snooze a menu item or run a promotion across every site at once.
What's in it:
- Cloud restaurant POS with kitchen display integration
- Online ordering through a branded website and mobile app
- Self-service kiosks with built-in upselling
- Marketplace order management for Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat
- AI phone ordering
- Integrated payments
- Loyalty and marketing automation
- Centralised multi-site management
It suits independent restaurants, takeaways, QSR chains, multi-location groups and franchise operators.
2. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS with a decent feature set for table-service restaurants. Floor plans, table management and split billing all work well enough, and that's what most sit-down restaurants use daily.
It falls behind Flipdish on breadth. Online ordering, marketing and loyalty need separate tools or third-party integrations, so a restaurant that wants one platform to do everything ends up with more patchwork.
Best for smaller table-service restaurants that don't need a full multi-channel setup.
3. Epos Now
Epos Now is a low-cost cloud POS aimed at small businesses. It handles straightforward setups fine, and its app store has a lot of third-party integrations.
That app store is also the catch. Every integration is another company you might have to call. When something breaks between Epos Now and a loyalty or ordering tool, each side tends to point at the other, and you're the one standing in a busy restaurant waiting for an answer.
Best for very small, simple food businesses.
4. Square for Restaurants
Square is easy to set up and widely used. The free tier makes it an easy first choice for a new business, and the hardware looks good on a counter.
Growing restaurants hit its limits quickly. Multi-location reporting is basic, the kitchen display needs add-ons, and online ordering doesn't share data with the POS in any way that helps you much. It's built to be simple, and it does that well. It isn't built for scale.
Best for pop-ups, market stalls and new businesses that don't yet need a dedicated restaurant platform.
5. Tevalis
Tevalis is a UK-built hospitality POS with a solid record in pubs, hotels and multi-site operations. It's aimed at larger businesses than the others here and is sold through specialist resellers.
That means a managed implementation. Lead times are longer and the total cost is probably higher than with a platform like Flipdish, and you shouldn't expect to set it up yourself on a quiet Tuesday.
Best for large UK hospitality groups that want an established enterprise supplier and are happy to go through a managed rollout.
Comparison table
| System | Multi-location | Online ordering | Kiosks | Payments | AI features |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flipdish | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Lightspeed Restaurant | Partial | Via third party | Via third party | Via third party | Limited |
| Epos Now | Basic | Via third party | Via third party | Via third party | None |
| Square for Restaurants | Basic | Basic | Via third party | ✓ | None |
| Tevalis | ✓ | Via partner | Via partner | Via partner | Limited |
How to choose the right POS for your restaurant
If you run one site and want things simple, pick a system designed for restaurants rather than one adapted from retail. Flipdish is easy to set up and you won't outgrow it when you open a second site.
With several locations, the case for one platform gets stronger with every site you add. Reconciling data across separate systems costs time, and it causes errors, and both get worse as the estate grows.
If orders come in through several channels (marketplaces, your own website, kiosks, the phone), the test is simple. Does everything end up in one queue? A system that can't do that will cost you kitchen capacity and make the line harder to read on a busy night.
If you want to cut what you pay in marketplace commission, you need a way to move customers from the marketplace to ordering direct, plus loyalty and marketing that keep them there. That means a platform with those tools built in, which points to Flipdish.
Whatever you shortlist, ask for a demo using your own menu. A demo with a sample burger menu tells you nothing about how the system copes with your modifiers, your combos or your half-and-half pizzas.
Switching from your current POS
Most restaurants don't pick a POS from scratch. They're replacing something that has stopped being good enough, and the switch is where things go wrong.
Export what you can before you start: the menu, your sales history, your customer list. Set the new system up at one site first, ideally the quietest one. Train the staff before go-live rather than on the day. Don't switch on a Friday. And keep the old system available for the first week so you can compare end-of-day totals between the two and catch anything that doesn't match.
If you're moving from separate tools for ordering, marketing and payments, do the POS and the online ordering together if you can. Moving them in two stages means you pay the disruption cost twice.
What does a restaurant POS cost in the UK?
It varies a lot with the supplier and the size of the operation.
- Hardware: a typical counter setup (terminal, printer, cash drawer, card reader) costs between £500 and £2,000 depending on the spec.
- Software: monthly subscriptions run from nothing (Square's free tier) to several hundred pounds a month for enterprise platforms.
- Payment processing: this is often where the real cost sits. Fees for integrated providers typically run 1% to 2% per transaction.
A free POS that charges you more per transaction can easily cost more than a paid one with lower processing fees, so work out the annual figure from your own takings, not the headline price.
Flipdish publishes its pricing online. Having POS, online ordering and marketing in one subscription tends to work out cheaper than buying them separately.
The Flipdish advantage for UK restaurants
Flipdish was built around how restaurants operate, not adapted from retail software. The UK is a core market, with local support, local payment integrations and a growing base of independent operators and multi-location groups.
If you want to depend less on third-party marketplaces, build direct relationships with your customers and run your whole estate from one system, Flipdish is the clearest answer.
Explore Flipdish POS or read more restaurant tech comparisons at restauranttech.co.uk.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best POS system for a restaurant in the UK?
Flipdish, if you want POS, online ordering, kiosks, marketing and payments in a single connected platform.
What does a restaurant POS system cost in the UK?
Hardware is typically £500 to £2,000 per terminal. Software subscriptions run from free for basic tools to several hundred pounds a month. Flipdish pricing has the specific figures.
What is the difference between a cloud POS and a traditional POS?
A cloud POS keeps your data on remote servers and you can get to it from anywhere. A traditional on-premises POS keeps it on a machine in your building. Cloud systems are usually easier to update, easier to manage across several sites, and easier to recover if a terminal dies.
Can a restaurant POS handle online orders?
The good ones can. Flipdish's POS receives online, kiosk and marketplace orders in the same queue as counter orders, so the kitchen sees one ticket whichever way the order arrived.