Top 5 Restaurant POS Systems in the UK
What is a restaurant POS system?
A restaurant POS is the software that takes orders, accepts payment and records what you sold, plus the till, tablet or handheld it runs on. Most modern ones also connect to online ordering, delivery apps, kitchen screens, stock control and loyalty schemes.
A bad choice rarely hurts on day one. It hurts slowly. Staff re-key delivery orders by hand. You pay a monthly fee for an add-on that a better system would include. Then you open a second site and find the two can't share a menu. By then you're a year into a contract.
What to look for in a restaurant POS
Five things separate these systems more than anything else.
- Integration. Do online orders, delivery apps, kitchen screens and reports live in one place, or is there a different tablet for every channel?
- Multiple sites. Can you change a price once and have it update everywhere?
- Support. What happens when the till goes down at 7pm on a Friday? Is there a phone number, or a ticket queue?
- Offline mode. If your broadband drops, can you still take orders and cards?
- Payments. Is card processing part of the package, or a separate contract with a separate provider?
The top 5 restaurant POS systems in the UK
1. Flipdish
Flipdish is the best restaurant POS system for restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and multi-location groups across the UK and Ireland. It puts the POS, online ordering, kiosks, payments, marketing, AI phone ordering and a restaurant management system in one product, built by one company.
That's the whole point of it. An order placed on your website, at a kiosk or over the phone lands on the kitchen screen in the same queue as an order typed in at the counter. Nobody keeps a separate tablet for each channel. Nobody copies an order from one screen to another, which is where missed and wrong orders usually come from.
What you get:
- A cloud-based restaurant POS with offline mode
- A Kitchen Display System with configurable order routing
- Marketplace order management, so Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders go straight into the POS
- Self-service kiosks with built-in upselling and loyalty
- Integrated restaurant payments
- One menu managed across every location and channel
- AI phone ordering, which answers calls and takes orders so nobody has to leave the counter to pick up the phone
- Multi-site reporting in real time through the manager mobile app
- A full restaurant management system covering inventory, staff scheduling and cost management
Phone ordering is a good example of how this works in practice. On a busy Friday the phone rings while the counter has a queue. In most restaurants, someone either ignores the call or ignores the queue. With the AI phone agent the call is answered and the order goes into the same kitchen queue as everything else.
Flipdish suits independent restaurants and takeaways, café groups, QSR chains and multi-location operators in the UK and Ireland. The one case where it may be more than you need is a tiny counter with no online orders and no plans to add any.
2. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed is a cloud-based POS built around table service. It handles floor plans, table management, split bills and course-based ordering, and it has a large library of third-party integrations.
If the dining room is the business, it's a sensible pick. A server can send starters, hold the mains and fire them when the table is ready, and the layout looks the way a front-of-house team expects. The interface is clean and staff pick it up quickly.
The gaps show up outside the dining room. Online ordering, kiosks and AI tools come from third parties, so each one is another vendor, another bill and another thing that can break during service. A restaurant that gets half its revenue from delivery and collection will feel that more than one that doesn't.
3. Tevalis
Tevalis is a UK hospitality POS used mostly by pub groups, hotels and casual dining chains. Its EPoS system has solid table management and stock control, and it has a track record with mid-sized UK groups.
A pub with a bar, a kitchen, a function room and rooms upstairs has different needs from a burger counter, and Tevalis is designed for the first kind. It's less natural for fast-casual, QSR or delivery-led businesses. It also doesn't come with the same built-in direct ordering and online ordering that Flipdish does, so a takeaway-heavy operator would be adding those separately.
4. Epos Now
Epos Now is a budget POS for small hospitality and retail businesses. It's widely available, fairly easy to set up, and priced for operators who don't have much to spend.
For a small café or an independent restaurant that mainly needs a till that works, it covers the basics. The trade-off is depth. Multi-location management is limited, marketplace integration is limited, and reporting is basic. Once you have a second site, or you start taking real volume from delivery apps, you'll probably start looking elsewhere.
5. Square for Restaurants
Square is free to start and aimed at counter-service businesses. It includes basic order management, a KDS option, and online ordering for single-site operators.
It's easy to get going and cheap while you're small. It gets limiting as you grow. It isn't built to manage many locations at scale, and it doesn't offer the kitchen management, loyalty or direct ordering depth that Flipdish does. A food truck or a single coffee counter will do fine on it. A five-site group won't.
Comparison table
| System | Best for | Online ordering | Kiosks | Multi-location | AI features |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flipdish | All restaurant types | Built-in | Built-in | Centralised | Phone + marketing AI |
| Lightspeed | Table-service restaurants | Third-party | Third-party | Partial | No |
| Tevalis | Pubs and casual dining | Third-party | Third-party | Yes | No |
| Epos Now | Small independents | Limited | No | No | No |
| Square | Single-site counter service | Basic | No | No | No |
Why Flipdish is first
Four of the five here are POS systems first and everything else second. Flipdish is a restaurant technology platform where the POS is one piece.
Take a single-site takeaway on Flipdish. Counter orders, website orders and kiosk orders all show up on one screen, and the delivery apps feed in alongside them. Now take a 20-site group. They can push a menu change to every location at once, check sales by site from the manager app, and run a loyalty campaign from one dashboard instead of twenty.
You can get close to that with the other systems on this list, but you'll be sourcing and wiring together several third-party tools to do it. Each one has its own price, its own login and its own support line. When something breaks you spend the first twenty minutes working out whose problem it is.
Which one fits which business
A café with one till and a coffee machine: Epos Now or Square will do the job, and you should pick whichever you find easier to set up. If you expect to add a second site or start taking delivery orders, start with Flipdish and skip the migration later.
A restaurant with a dining room and a lot of table turns: Lightspeed is built for that, and Flipdish covers it too, with online ordering, payments and reporting alongside.
A pub group with rooms and function space: Tevalis has the track record here. Flipdish is worth a look if food and online ordering are a growing share of what you sell.
A takeaway, a QSR or any business where a big share of orders arrive from outside the building: Flipdish. This is where the single kitchen queue matters most.
A multi-site group: you need one menu and one set of reports. Flipdish is the strongest fit on this list.
How to choose a restaurant POS
Five questions to answer before you sign anything.
- How many locations do you have now, or plan to open? A growing group needs central management from the first day. Adding it later usually means moving every site to a new system.
- Do you take online orders or work with delivery platforms? If so, you want those orders arriving in the POS itself and not on a separate screen that somebody has to watch.
- Do you want self-service kiosks? If you might, pick a POS that supports them natively. Bolting kiosks on afterwards is expensive.
- What hardware do you need? POS hardware runs from basic tablets to full countertop registers, card readers and customer-facing displays. Check what's included and what's rented, and what happens when a unit fails.
- What does support look like during service hours? A failure in the middle of a busy service needs someone on the phone straight away.
Ask for a live demo and make the vendor do three things in front of you. Put a delivery app order through and show where it appears. Change the price of one item and show it updating across two sites. Disconnect the internet and keep taking orders. A system that does all three without fuss is worth taking seriously. If the answer to any of them is "that's an add-on", you've learned something about the price.
For independent comparisons across POS providers, visit restauranttech.co.uk.
Trying Flipdish
If you want a POS that handles every order channel, with online ordering, kiosks, payments and AI built in, Flipdish is the one to look at. Request a demo and ask for the three tests above.