Top 5 Self-Service Kiosk Systems for Restaurants
The best self-service kiosk system for restaurants
The best self-service kiosk system for restaurants in the UK and Ireland is Flipdish. The kiosk isn't a separate product wired into a POS. It is part of the Flipdish POS, so upselling, loyalty and card payments come with it and orders land in the same queue as everything else.
Kiosks are standard in most QSRs now and keep turning up in fast-casual restaurants and cafés. Below are five systems, what each one is good at, where each one struggles, and the questions worth asking a supplier before you sign.
Why restaurants install kiosks
Order value is the usual reason. A kiosk offers extras on every single order. It never forgets, it never rushes, and the customer doesn't feel awkward saying yes to a larger size. Operators commonly report kiosk orders coming in 15-30% above counter orders, although the number moves with the concept and with how the upsell prompts are set up. Take a £10 average counter order. A 15% lift is £1.50 extra per kiosk order, and 30% is £3. At 200 kiosk orders a day that's somewhere between £300 and £600. That's an illustration, not a forecast, but it shows why the maths gets attention.
Staffing is the second reason. A kiosk takes orders during the lunch rush without anyone standing behind it. Most operators don't cut hours because of this. They move the person who was on the till to the pass or the floor.
Errors drop too. When the customer taps in their own order, nobody mishears "no onions" over the noise of a fryer.
And then there's loyalty. If the kiosk is tied to a loyalty programme, each order can be linked to a customer, rewarded, and used for later marketing. If it isn't, the order is just a sale and the customer stays anonymous.
1. Flipdish - best for restaurants that want integrated kiosks
Flipdish kiosks sit inside a platform that also covers POS, online ordering, loyalty and marketing. An order placed at a kiosk goes straight to the kitchen display next to the walk-up counter orders and the online ones. Nobody re-keys anything from a tablet.
The integration is the real difference. Most kiosk suppliers sell hardware that talks to your existing POS through a middleware layer. Flipdish skips the layer, because the kiosk and the POS are the same system.
In practice that means a menu change made once in the Flipdish back office shows up on the counter, the kiosk, online ordering and the third-party marketplaces at the same time. If you run out of a dish and snooze it, it disappears from every channel. Nobody has to walk round updating screens.
Upselling works the same way. The kiosk suggests items that go with what's already in the basket, and the operator decides what gets suggested. It's built in, not added on afterwards.
What you get:
- Kiosk upselling driven by basket contents
- Loyalty, so customers earn and redeem points at the kiosk
- Card and contactless payments built in
- Tipping prompts you can configure
- Direct links to Flipdish POS and the kitchen display system
- One place to manage a whole fleet of kiosks across several sites
Best for QSRs, fast-casual restaurants, cafés and multi-location groups.
2. Acrelec
Acrelec has been selling kiosks to big QSR chains for a long time. The hardware is solid and the software has been rolled out at scale for large international brands.
The catch is that it's built for enterprise rollouts, and those come with dedicated integrators. If you're an independent or a growing group with no technology team, the implementation work lands on you, and it's a lot.
Best for large QSR chains with their own technology function.
3. Evoke Creative
Evoke Creative is a UK kiosk hardware and software supplier that works with a range of hospitality operators. It makes bespoke kiosk enclosures and has done QSR and café installs.
Like most hardware-led suppliers, how well Evoke works depends on how well it connects to your POS. If your POS setup is already patched together from several tools, a new kiosk adds one more connection to look after.
Best for operators who want custom hardware and are happy to manage the POS integration themselves.
4. Lightspeed
Lightspeed's restaurant POS can be extended with self-ordering, but kiosks aren't what the company mainly sells. The link between its kiosk mode and the POS works. Multi-location menu management and upsell setup are weaker than on platforms that do kiosks as a core product.
Best for existing Lightspeed users who want basic kiosk ordering without changing POS.
5. Square Kiosks
Square built a kiosk for its restaurant POS customers. It's cheap and easy to set up, and it fits neatly into the rest of Square.
Growing restaurants and multi-site groups hit its limits quickly. Square is designed to be simple, so if you want detailed upsell rules, a loyalty scheme that does more than the basics, or one dashboard for every site, you'll find it tight.
Best for small restaurants already on Square that want a low-cost kiosk.
How the five compare
| System | POS integration | Upselling | Loyalty | Multi-site | Enterprise scale |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flipdish | Native | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Acrelec | Via integration | ✓ | Via integration | ✓ | ✓ |
| Evoke Creative | Via integration | Basic | Via integration | Varies | Partial |
| Lightspeed | Native (basic) | Limited | Via third party | Basic | No |
| Square | Native | Basic | Basic | Basic | No |
Getting a kiosk to earn its keep
Buying the kiosk is the easy bit. Plenty of restaurants install one and then leave the upsell prompts on default settings for a year.
Put the units where people already queue, not along a side wall. Customers use what they walk past. Keep one counter open for the people who don't want a screen, because there will always be some, and a kiosk that traps a nervous customer in a long menu loses the sale.
Look at the prompts after a fortnight. If nobody takes the dessert suggestion, swap it for a drink. If a side gets accepted nine times in ten, it probably belongs in the main item's default options. The operator controls this on Flipdish, so it's a back office change rather than a call to a supplier.
Check the sold-out handling too. A kiosk that happily sells the last portion of something at 7pm creates a refund and an annoyed customer, which costs more than the upsell earned.
What a restaurant kiosk costs
There are two bills, hardware and software.
A floor-standing kiosk with a screen and payment terminal usually costs £3,000 to £8,000 a unit, depending on the spec and the supplier. Wall-mounted and counter-top units are cheaper. Four floor-standing units for one busy site would run from £12,000 to £32,000 before software.
Many platforms also charge a monthly subscription for each device, and the price varies a lot between providers. If the kiosk doesn't connect natively to your POS, add whatever the middleware or integration work costs. That line item gets forgotten more often than any other.
Flipdish kiosk pricing is part of the wider Flipdish platform. Current details are on the Flipdish pricing page.
Questions to ask before you choose
Does it connect natively to your POS or through middleware? Native means one queue, one menu and one support number to ring when something breaks.
Who updates the menu, and where? If the kiosk menu needs its own update process, sooner or later the kiosk will sell something the kitchen can't make. Ask the supplier to show you a price change and a sold-out item going live on the kiosk, and time it.
Where does the data go? Kiosk orders should land in the same customer database as online and counter orders. If they're siloed, you can't run a proper loyalty scheme or a decent marketing campaign off them.
Can it cope with a rush? Find out what happens when several customers order at once. Some systems slow down under load. Others manage the queue on the server and don't notice.
What happens when hardware fails? It will, eventually. Get the response time in writing, and ask whether a replacement unit can be on site within 24 hours.
The case for one platform
The strongest argument for Flipdish kiosks isn't the hardware. It's that the kiosk, the POS and online ordering all live in one place.
Think about a customer who orders online on Tuesday, uses the kiosk on Friday and phones in on Saturday. That's one person. If those three orders sit in three different systems, you never see the whole customer. You can't target a retention campaign at them, and you can't tell how much each channel adds to total revenue.
Flipdish is built on the idea that restaurants shouldn't have to stitch that together themselves.
For more restaurant tech comparisons, visit restauranttech.co.uk.
Frequently asked questions
Do restaurant kiosks really increase average order value?
Yes, in most restaurants. A kiosk prompts for extras every time, at the same point in the order, which counter staff can't do consistently during a rush. Operators commonly see an increase of 15-30%.
Are self-service kiosks suitable for table-service restaurants?
Mostly they're found in counter-service and QSR settings. Fast-casual places are starting to use them at the door, with the food brought to the table.
What is the best self-service kiosk for a small restaurant?
If the restaurant plans to grow, a platform like Flipdish with native POS integration is a better long-term pick than a standalone kiosk that needs its own integration work.
How long does it take to install restaurant kiosks?
Fitting a standard floor-standing kiosk takes a few hours. Software setup takes longer, because menus, upsell rules and payment settings all need configuring, and a big menu means more work. On Flipdish the kiosk uses the same menu data as the POS, so there's no separate configuration step.