Top 5 Alternatives to Deliveroo for Restaurants

What is a Deliveroo alternative?

Anything that lets you take delivery or collection orders without Deliveroo being your main channel. That might be another marketplace, your own ordering site, a courier you book for deliveries, or some mix of the three.

Most UK and Irish restaurants start looking because of commission. Deliveroo takes 25% to 35% of each delivery order, depending on the contract. On a £20 order that's £5 to £7 gone before you've paid for food, staff or rent.

Put it in monthly terms. A kitchen doing 400 delivery orders a month at £25 each takes £10,000. At 30% commission, £3,000 of that goes to the platform. That's £36,000 a year for orders you still cook, pack and hand over yourself.

1. Flipdish - Your Own Ordering Channel

The best alternative to Deliveroo is not another platform that sits between you and your customers. It's your own ordering channel: a branded website and app where people order from you directly, and you keep the margin.

Flipdish online ordering is made for restaurants, takeaways, cafés and fast food operators in the UK and Ireland. Customers order under your name, and Flipdish charges a flat monthly fee instead of a cut of each order. Take 100 orders or 1,000, the fee is the same.

What you get with it:

No per-order commission, so the full order value stays in your business.
A branded website and app. Customers see your logo and your menu, not a row of competitors' listings.
Customer data. Everyone who orders is your customer, and you have their email, order history and preferences. Deliveroo doesn't hand any of that over.
Loyalty and marketing tools, including loyalty programmes, SMS campaigns and automated win-back messages, so you're not paying someone else to reach people who already buy from you.
AI phone ordering. The AI phone agent answers the phone, takes the order and sends it to the kitchen. Nobody has to stop what they're doing to pick up.
POS integration. Online orders arrive in the kitchen through the Flipdish POS system, with no retyping and no extra tablet on the counter.
Self-service kiosks for the restaurant itself. They prompt for upsells, which tends to push up the average order.

With Deliveroo you rent access to customers. With Flipdish the customers are yours. That's the whole difference, and it's why Flipdish is first on this list.

If you want independent comparison data on ordering platforms before you decide, restauranttech.co.uk is worth a read.

2. Uber Eats

Uber Eats is Deliveroo's closest competitor in the UK and Ireland, and it charges in much the same way: typically 25% to 30% on delivery orders and around 15% on collection. Moving from one to the other doesn't fix the margin problem. You're just paying a different company.

It does have strong coverage in cities and a big customer base. If your goal is more reach rather than lower fees, listing on both Deliveroo and Uber Eats can bring in more orders overall.

The catch is the admin. Each platform sends orders to its own tablet, has its own menu to update and sends its own commission invoice. Several tablets on the pass is a good way to get orders missed. The Flipdish order management system pulls marketplace orders, Uber Eats and Deliveroo included, onto one kitchen screen next to your direct orders.

Uber Eats suits restaurants in dense urban areas that want to be on as many platforms as possible. The drawback is the same as Deliveroo's: similar commission, and you don't own the customer relationship.

3. Just Eat

Just Eat differs from Deliveroo in one way that matters. It has historically let restaurants use their own drivers and pay a flat fee per order instead of a percentage. If you already run your own delivery fleet, that can come out cheaper than Deliveroo's commission.

What you actually pay depends on your contract, your location and whether you use Just Eat's couriers or your own. Check your own rate before assuming you'll save anything, because the fee structures have changed over the years.

Just Eat is strong across the UK, especially in suburbs and regional areas where Deliveroo's coverage thins out. For a takeaway in a town or smaller city it's often the more relevant marketplace of the two.

It's still a marketplace, though. Your listing sits next to your competitors' and the customer data stays with Just Eat. It suits takeaways and QSRs in suburban and regional markets, particularly ones that already have drivers.

4. Foodhub

Foodhub is a UK online ordering marketplace that charges a flat monthly subscription instead of commission. For a high-volume takeaway that can mean real savings against Deliveroo's percentage.

The trade-off is reach. Foodhub has far fewer customers than Deliveroo or Just Eat, so if most of your orders come from people discovering you on a marketplace, expect less traffic from it. Discovery is the weak point.

Foodhub makes more sense as one piece of a wider mix. Keep Deliveroo or Just Eat for visibility, add Uber Eats if you're in a city, and run a Flipdish-powered direct channel for the orders where you keep the most. It suits high-volume takeaways in areas where Foodhub already has a user base and the owner wants to cut commission without disappearing from marketplaces.

5. Stuart or Addison Lee Delivery (Courier-as-a-Service)

Stuart and Addison Lee aren't marketplaces. They're on-demand courier services, and that changes how you'd use them. They don't find you customers. They deliver orders you've already got.

So this only works if you have your own ordering channel. Take the order through Flipdish or another direct platform, and book a courier like Stuart to deliver it. You set the delivery price and you own the customer. The courier charges a fee per delivery, not a percentage of the whole order.

Here's what that looks like. A £25 order with 30% Deliveroo commission costs you £7.50 in platform fees. The same order placed on your Flipdish site and delivered by Stuart might cost £3.50 to £5 for the courier, and the ordering side is covered by your monthly Flipdish fee.

It suits restaurants that already have direct ordering and need drivers. If you don't have a direct channel yet, start there first, because couriers won't bring you new customers the way Deliveroo does.

Hidden costs of Deliveroo beyond commission

Commission is the number you can see on the invoice. Some other costs don't show up there.

Customer data is the big one. Anyone who orders through Deliveroo belongs to Deliveroo. You can't email them or text them, and if you want to reach them again you pay Deliveroo again. Growth then depends on spending on the marketplace year after year.

Menus are another. Marketplaces set their own rules for photos, description length and menu layout, so your listing may not show your food at its best.

Reviews matter more than they should. Your Deliveroo rating affects where you rank on the platform, and a run of bad reviews, even unfair ones, can cut your visibility and your orders.

Then there's pricing. Plenty of restaurants put their Deliveroo prices up to cover commission. A customer who sees one price on the app and a lower one in the restaurant or on your own site notices, and some of them don't like it.

How to rely on Deliveroo less

Almost nobody switches Deliveroo off overnight, and most shouldn't. It brings in real orders and real new customers. The sensible approach is to treat it as a way of finding customers while you build a direct base alongside it.

Roughly, in order:

Launch a direct channel. Flipdish online ordering can be live within a few weeks.
Point people to it. Put QR codes on packaging, messages on receipts and signs in the restaurant that link to your own site.
Give them a reason to use it. A loyalty scheme, a first-order discount or a quicker collection time on direct orders will all move some customers over.
Use the data. Once you have direct customers' emails and phone numbers, send campaigns that bring them back. Flipdish AI marketing automates a lot of that.
Check the split every month. Track direct orders against marketplace orders. As the direct share grows, you can look again at your marketplace prices and how much of your menu you list there.

The sums are easy to run yourself. Every order that moves from Deliveroo to your own site saves you the commission, so at 30% on a £25 order that's £7.50 each time, less whatever your delivery costs.

Commission comparison table

Platform	Delivery commission	Collection commission	Customer data ownership	Discovery traffic
Deliveroo	25-35%	10-15%	Platform	High
Uber Eats	25-30%	~15%	Platform	High
Just Eat	Variable	Variable / flat	Platform	High
Foodhub	Flat monthly fee	Flat monthly fee	Platform	Lower
Flipdish	None (monthly fee)	None (monthly fee)	You own it	Direct / owned

Which one to pick

Deliveroo does bring in customers, but it's an expensive way to keep getting them. The restaurants with the best margins right now run both: marketplaces for visibility, direct ordering for the orders that actually make money.

Flipdish is built for that setup. If you want to see what direct ordering would do to your margins, talk to them.