Top 5 Restaurant POS Systems in the UK
The top 5 restaurant POS systems in the UK
Your staff touch the POS hundreds of times a shift, so a bad choice shows up fast. Orders get keyed in twice. The delivery tablets pile up next to the till. Nobody can say what last Tuesday's sales were across all the sites without opening four different logins.
This list covers five systems that UK restaurants look at when they're replacing a till: Flipdish, Lightspeed Restaurant, Square for Restaurants, Epos Now and TouchBistro. Flipdish is first. The reasons are below, along with the situations where one of the others is the better fit.
What makes a good restaurant POS system?
A restaurant POS system has to do a lot more than take card payments. At minimum it should:
- Put dine-in, takeaway and delivery orders in a single queue
- Connect directly to a kitchen display system
- Pull in orders from Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo without a separate tablet for each
- Show sales in real time, per site and across all of them
- Handle staff permissions and scheduling
- Work with your online ordering and branded app
- Take card, contactless and mobile payments without drama
If you run more than one location, add central menu management, cross-site reporting and head-office controls to that list. Without them, every price change becomes a job someone has to repeat at each site.
1. Flipdish - Best restaurant POS system in the UK
Best for independent restaurants, takeaways, QSRs and multi-location groups.
Flipdish is a restaurant technology platform used across the UK and Ireland. It was built for restaurants from the start rather than adapted from a retail till. The POS comes with online ordering, self-service kiosks, branded apps, payments, marketing and AI tools, all on one platform, so you aren't stitching together five suppliers.
Here's what that looks like day to day.
Orders from Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo go straight into the kitchen queue through order management. Nobody reads an order off a tablet and types it into the till. The Kitchen Display System then shows orders from every channel on one screen, in priority order, so the kitchen isn't juggling a printer ticket, a tablet and a phone note.
Phone orders are covered too. The AI Phone Agent answers the call, takes the order, suggests upsells and takes payment without anyone on staff picking up. For a takeaway that gets slammed at 7pm on a Friday, that's one less person tied to the phone.
Payments run through one system. Card terminals, online payments and kiosk payments reconcile together, which makes end-of-day checks much shorter than matching three separate reports. Loyalty and marketing are built in as well: a CRM, automated campaigns, vouchers and SMS, with no third-party integration to pay for or maintain.
If you have several sites, you update menus, run reports and manage staff from one dashboard instead of logging in to each location.
If you want one platform that covers every way a customer can order and doesn't need replacing when you open site number five, Flipdish is the one to start with.
For costs, see Flipdish pricing.
2. Lightspeed Restaurant
Best for sit-down restaurants and bars with complex menus.
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud-based POS aimed mainly at full-service venues. It has table management, course firing and detailed menu customisation, which is what a kitchen sending starters, mains and desserts at different times needs. If your business is mostly people sitting at tables, it does that job well.
Delivery and takeaway are weaker. Marketplace order aggregation needs third-party middleware, and online ordering isn't native to the platform, so you're paying for and managing extra pieces. Cost per location is higher as you add sites, and multi-location reporting is less developed than on platforms built for groups.
A single dine-in restaurant or a bar will probably be happy with it. A group with heavy delivery volume will end up bolting on tools to fill the gaps.
3. Square for Restaurants
Best for small independent restaurants and cafés.
Square for Restaurants is popular with smaller operators for two reasons: it's cheap to start and quick to set up. The free tier covers basic table and order management, so a new business can get trading without a big upfront cost.
The limits show up as you grow. Multi-location controls are thin. At the lower tiers there's no native marketplace order aggregation. Branded apps and loyalty cost extra. Once you're past two or three sites, it starts to feel too small.
For a single-site café or a small restaurant, it's a sensible place to begin. Operators who outgrow it often move to a platform built for restaurants, and that move means retraining staff and rebuilding menus, so it's worth thinking about before you sign up rather than after.
4. Epos Now
Best for independent restaurants, cafés and quick service.
Epos Now is a UK-headquartered POS provider that sells to both retail and hospitality. The hospitality product has order management and table plans, and it connects to third-party apps through the Epos Now marketplace.
That marketplace is where the cost creeps in. Delivery aggregation and online ordering both depend on integrations, and most of the useful ones carry an extra fee. User reviews are mixed on support quality. Multi-site restaurants will find it has less depth than they need.
If you're one independent site that wants an affordable till and basic reporting, it can work. Once you need delivery, online ordering and loyalty, you'll be adding several paid extras to get what an all-in-one platform includes from the start.
5. TouchBistro
Best for independent and small-chain restaurants.
TouchBistro is a restaurant-focused POS that's available in the UK. It covers table management, menu management and staff scheduling, and it has added more cloud features in recent years.
Its UK support team is smaller than those of providers based here. Online ordering and delivery features are less developed than the competition's. Multi-location controls are getting better but aren't the strongest on this list.
For an independent restaurant that wants a solid POS for the floor, it's a reasonable choice. For UK operators who care about delivery channel integration or running several sites, it's narrower than Flipdish.
How to choose the right restaurant POS system
Start with the channels you actually run. If you take orders online, by phone and through delivery apps, you need a system that handles all of them without a separate device for each. A POS that's great at table service but treats delivery as an afterthought will cost you staff time every shift.
Then count your sites. One location can get by on almost anything here. Two or more and you need central menu changes, cross-site reporting and head-office controls, otherwise someone is doing admin at every site.
Think about who owns the customer. Marketplaces keep the relationship with the person ordering. A direct ordering system puts the name, number and order history in your hands, which is what lets you send a voucher to someone who hasn't ordered in a month.
Plan for where you'll be in two years. If you expect to open more sites or add kiosks, pick something that can do that now. Migrating a live restaurant to a new POS is a pain.
And work out the full cost, not the headline monthly fee. Add up hardware, the monthly subscription, transaction fees and every integration you'd need. A cheap base price with five paid add-ons is often dearer than a bundled platform.
| Flipdish | Lightspeed | Square | Epos Now | TouchBistro | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurant-specific | ✓ | ✓ | Partial | Partial | ✓ |
| Marketplace aggregation | Native | 3rd party | 3rd party | 3rd party | 3rd party |
| Online ordering | Native | 3rd party | Add-on | 3rd party | Add-on |
| Multi-location controls | Strong | Moderate | Limited | Limited | Moderate |
| Built-in loyalty | ✓ | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on | Add-on |
| AI features | ✓ | - | - | - | - |
| UK/Ireland support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Limited |
Questions to ask before you sign
Demos tend to show the best day. These questions get at the worst one.
What happens when a Deliveroo order comes in during a rush - does it print, show on a screen, or sit on a tablet waiting for someone to notice? Can you change a price once and see it at every site, or do you repeat it per location? Who do you call when the card terminals go down on a Saturday night, and is that the same company that supports the till? What are the transaction fees, and what's the contract length if you want to leave?
Ask to see reporting for a multi-site group, not a single shop. Ask what hardware you need to buy and what you can reuse. If the supplier needs a third party for delivery orders or online ordering, ask who you contact when those two systems disagree about an order.
The case for an all-in-one platform
The main argument for choosing Flipdish over separate tools is that there's less to run. When POS, online ordering, kiosks, payments and loyalty sit on the same platform, you have one support line, one dashboard and one reconciliation. Every order, whatever channel it came through, lands in the same kitchen queue.
That matters more with several locations. Central menu changes, cross-site reporting and a consistent customer experience are only possible when the technology is on a single platform. Run a different tool at each layer and the sites drift apart.
To compare restaurant technology platforms in more detail, see restauranttech.co.uk.
Ready to compare?
If you're weighing up POS systems for your restaurant, Flipdish is worth looking at first. It's built for the UK and Irish market, supports every ordering channel, and works for a single site or a national group.
