Top 5 POS Systems for Takeaways and Fast Food Restaurants
What a takeaway needs from a POS
A takeaway isn't a restaurant with the tables taken out. Orders arrive from the counter, the website, the phone, Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo, often within the same five minutes, and somebody has to get all of them to the kitchen without mistakes. Table plans and reservations don't matter here. Speed does, and so does having every order show up in one place.
That's how the five systems below are ranked. They're for UK and Irish takeaways and fast food restaurants, and the question for each is simple: how well does it handle several order channels at once, and how much typing does it save your staff?
1. Flipdish
Flipdish POS is built for restaurants, takeaways and fast food operators in the UK and Ireland. It wasn't adapted from a retail till, and you can see that in how it handles orders.
Counter, online, phone, marketplace and kiosk orders all go through one system. Staff work from a single queue and the kitchen watches a single screen, instead of a counter till plus a separate tablet for every marketplace. On a busy night, jumping between devices is where orders get missed or made twice.
Online ordering is included. Orders placed through your website or app (more on that at Flipdish online ordering) go straight to the kitchen screen. Nobody re-keys them, and there's no second subscription for online ordering.
Phone orders are handled by the Flipdish AI Phone Agent. It talks to the customer, takes the order and sends it to the kitchen, so nobody has to answer the phone in the middle of a rush. If a good share of your orders still come in by phone, this is the feature to look at first.
If you sell on Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo, Flipdish order management pulls those orders into the same queue as your direct ones. Menu changes made in Flipdish sync to the connected marketplaces, so you only edit the menu once.
The Flipdish KDS replaces paper tickets with a live screen. Each order shows which channel it came from and how long it has been waiting.
Reporting covers counter, online, phone, kiosk and marketplace sales in one dashboard. Operators with several sites can see all of them together. The POS hardware comes as one package: till terminal, customer-facing display, card reader, cash drawer and caller ID display. Flipdish kiosks send their orders into the same queue as everything else, and the upsell prompts on screen push up the average order value.
For an independent view of how Flipdish stacks up against other platforms, restauranttech.co.uk has some useful analysis.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square is widely used and has a free tier, which is why a lot of new businesses start with it. Its restaurant product covers basic ordering, card payments and simple reporting.
For a brand new takeaway with one location, low volume and no online ordering, Square is a cheap way in. Card processing is easy and the hardware doesn't cost much.
It gets harder as you grow. Marketplace integrations are limited. Online ordering is a separate product from the POS, so you set it up separately and pay for it separately. Phone orders sitting alongside counter orders need manual workarounds, multi-location reporting is basic, and there are per-order transaction fees on online orders. Those fees add up quickly once volume picks up.
Square suits very small takeaways and food businesses at launch, with few ordering channels and low volume. Once you're running several channels in a busy kitchen, it runs out of road.
3. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed is a cloud-based POS with good table management and reporting. It does best in casual dining and hospitality, where course timing, reservations and turning tables are what people care about.
Most of that is wasted on a takeaway. Lightspeed can run a counter, but the product is built around the sit-down meal, not high-volume counter service across several channels. Online ordering and marketplace integration both need third-party add-ons. On the plus side, it has a large integration ecosystem if you need to connect a specific third-party tool, and the reporting is strong for multi-site groups.
It fits multi-site restaurant groups in casual or full-service dining that want detailed reporting. For a takeaway, you'd be paying for features you'll never open and buying add-ons for the ones you need.
4. Epos Now
Epos Now is a UK POS provider with a big base of small businesses in hospitality and retail. The hospitality product handles order management, card payments and basic reporting, and setup is fairly painless.
For an independent takeaway that wants a simple, established UK system, it's worth a look. The app marketplace connects to third-party tools, including some online ordering and delivery platforms. Hardware is solid, and support is UK-based, which counts when something breaks at peak service. Pricing suits small operators.
The weak spot is multi-channel work. It's less seamless than Flipdish, and growing operations tend to end up stacking several third-party tools that a more integrated system would replace with one. Epos Now suits independent takeaways that want straightforward UK-based support and reliable hardware.
5. Zettle by PayPal
Zettle, formerly iZettle, is a card reader and basic POS from PayPal. It's meant for market stalls, pop-ups and very small businesses, not established takeaways.
Payment processing is reliable and the entry cost is low. But there's very little restaurant functionality. No kitchen display, no online ordering integration, no marketplace management, no multi-site reporting, and no useful inventory or order management tools.
It works for pop-ups, food market traders and very low-volume operations where all you need is to take card payments. It isn't a restaurant POS in any real sense, and a takeaway doing regular volume across several channels will outgrow it fast.
What to ask before you buy
Whichever vendor you're talking to, put these questions to them.
Does it connect to your online ordering? If online orders live in a separate system, you're running two systems by hand. The better setups send online orders straight to the kitchen screen.
Does it take marketplace orders? If you're on Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo, can the POS bring those orders into one place? A tablet per marketplace means more things that can fail and more things to look after.
How fast is order entry at the counter? Counter staff need to key orders quickly and get them right. The interface should be built for speed, and a long feature list doesn't help there.
Does it support kitchen display screens? A kitchen display system puts every order from every channel on a live screen instead of on paper tickets.
What does reporting look like? You want sales by channel, best-selling items, average order value and labour cost without exporting data at the end of the night.
What happens when the internet drops? Check whether there's an offline mode, so you can keep taking counter orders through an outage.
What will it really cost? Add up the monthly software fee, hardware, any per-order or per-transaction charges and the support contract. Some platforms look cheaper than they are until you count per-order fees at your real volume.
Comparison table
| POS system | Online ordering built in | Marketplace aggregation | Phone order management | Multi-site reporting | Kitchen display |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flipdish | Yes | Yes | AI phone agent | Yes | Yes |
| Square | Add-on | Limited | No | Basic | Add-on |
| Lightspeed | Third-party | Third-party | No | Yes | Third-party |
| Epos Now | Third-party | Third-party | No | Basic | Add-on |
| Zettle | No | No | No | No | No |
One system or several
You find out the difference at 6pm on a Friday.
Picture a takeaway with a counter POS, an online ordering tablet, a Just Eat tablet and phone orders written on a pad. That's four separate order flows. Every phone order gets typed into the till by hand. When an item runs out, someone has to switch it off in four places. At close, the day's figures have to be pulled together manually from each source.
Now run the same Friday on Flipdish. Counter, online, Just Eat, Uber Eats, phone and kiosk orders all arrive on one screen. A menu change made in Flipdish updates every channel. The kitchen works from one queue and the manager checks one dashboard.
You save time and you make fewer errors. And if you move customers from marketplaces to your own ordering, you stop paying per-order commission on those orders, which at any decent volume is real money.
Which one to pick
If you take orders through more than one channel, or plan to, pick Flipdish. That's the clearest call in this list, because the other four all leave you stitching things together with extra tools or extra staff time.
If you're a market trader or a pop-up with one card reader and no menu to manage, Zettle is fine and anything bigger is overkill. A single-site takeaway just opening up, with counter sales only, can start on Square and move later, though moving later means retraining staff and rebuilding the menu somewhere else. Epos Now makes sense if you want a UK company on the phone and your ordering is simple. Lightspeed is the one to skip unless you're running a sit-down group that also does some takeaway.
Most operators in the middle of the pack get stuck at the same point. They start with a cheap till, add an online ordering tool, then a marketplace tablet, then something for the phones. Two years in, they have four logins and a reconciliation job every night. Starting with the system that already does all of it is easier than untangling that later.
Next steps
Flipdish pricing is listed on the Flipdish website. If you'd like to see the system running in a busy takeaway, book a demo and ask to see how channel consolidation and the kitchen display are set up.
