Epos Now vs Flipdish: Which POS Is Better for Restaurants?
Epos Now vs Flipdish: the quick answer
Flipdish is the stronger choice for restaurants. It is built specifically for hospitality, combining POS, online ordering, mobile apps, kiosks, AI phone ordering and marketing in one integrated platform. Epos Now is a general-purpose point-of-sale system designed to serve retail and hospitality alike, which limits how deeply it serves restaurant-specific workflows.
If you run a restaurant, takeaway, café or multi-site food business in the UK or Ireland, the detail below explains what that distinction means in day-to-day operation.
What is Epos Now?
Epos Now is a cloud-based point-of-sale company founded in Norwich, UK. It serves a broad range of business types: retail shops, salons, cafés, pubs and restaurants all use its platform. Its core product is a cloud POS with a hardware bundle and an app marketplace for third-party integrations.
Epos Now built its reputation on accessible pricing and quick setup. It is popular with small independent businesses — a café owner who needs a working till and card reader without configuration complexity — and its general-purpose design means it can be deployed across multiple business types.
What is Flipdish?
Flipdish is a restaurant technology company founded in Dublin in 2015. Its platform is designed exclusively for food businesses, covering every stage of the order journey from the customer's first interaction to the kitchen screen.
The full Flipdish platform includes:
- Restaurant POS and Kitchen Display System
- Online ordering through a branded restaurant website
- Branded mobile apps for iOS and Android
- Self-service kiosks for counter service and QSR
- AI phone ordering to handle telephone orders automatically
- AI-powered marketing tools
- Restaurant delivery management
Flipdish serves independent restaurants, takeaways, café chains, quick-service operators and multi-location restaurant groups across the UK and Ireland.
Feature comparison at a glance
| Feature | Epos Now | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud POS | Yes | Yes |
| Built for restaurants specifically | No | Yes |
| Table management | Basic | Yes |
| Course management | Limited | Yes |
| Kitchen Display System | Via integration | Built-in |
| Online ordering | Via third-party app | Built-in |
| Branded mobile app | No | Yes |
| Self-service kiosk | No | Yes |
| AI phone ordering | No | Yes |
| Loyalty programme | Via third-party | Built-in |
| AI marketing tools | No | Yes |
| Multi-location management | Basic | Centralised |
| UK/Ireland support | Yes | Yes |
| Restaurant-specific focus | No | Yes |
POS functionality: where purpose-built matters
Epos Now provides a functional POS system. For a straightforward counter operation — a sandwich counter, a coffee shop with a simple menu, a pub serving food from a fixed menu — it handles the basics well. Staff can take orders, process payments and run end-of-day reports.
For restaurants with more complex service patterns, the limitations become apparent. Table management on Epos Now covers the essentials but lacks the depth that a busy restaurant service requires: course management, split-bill workflows, seat-level ordering, dietary flag handling and kitchen routing all need to work smoothly under pressure.
These are not edge cases. They are the operational reality of a restaurant during a full Friday service. When a system requires workarounds for common scenarios, the cost is staff time, order errors and table turn speed — all of which directly affect revenue.
Flipdish's restaurant POS handles table management, order routing to a Kitchen Display System, modifier and upsell management, and multi-course workflows as native features. Staff who have used restaurant-specific POS systems consistently report shorter training times and fewer errors when the system reflects how restaurant operations actually work.
Online ordering: a fundamental difference
Online ordering is where the gap between the two platforms becomes most significant.
Epos Now's core product is a POS. Online ordering is available through integrations in the Epos Now app marketplace — third-party providers that connect to the POS via an integration layer. This means additional monthly fees for the integration, dependence on a third party for availability and support, and a separate management interface for the online menu. Menu updates made on the POS do not always propagate instantly to the online storefront. Orders from the online channel require reconciliation against the POS at end of day.
Flipdish online ordering is built into the platform. Online orders and walk-in orders appear on the same kitchen screen and are managed from the same interface. A menu change made on the POS automatically updates the online menu. There is no separate system to reconcile.
For any restaurant where online orders represent meaningful revenue — and that includes virtually every takeaway and a growing proportion of casual dining — this integration difference affects daily operations, not just setup complexity.
Branded mobile apps
Epos Now does not offer branded mobile apps. Flipdish branded apps for iOS and Android are built and maintained as part of the platform. Customers order through an app that carries the restaurant's name, branding and identity — not a generic marketplace or a third-party ordering tool.
Branded apps matter commercially because they change the customer's relationship with the restaurant. A customer who orders through a marketplace is a marketplace customer. A customer who downloads your app is your customer: you have their contact details, their order history and the ability to market to them directly. Repeat order rates through branded apps are consistently higher than through aggregator channels because the customer has made an active choice to engage with your brand.
Self-service kiosks
Epos Now does not offer a self-service kiosk product. Flipdish kiosks are integrated into the same platform as the POS and online ordering, so a kiosk order appears on the kitchen screen alongside all other orders — no separate screen, no separate reconciliation.
Kiosks are no longer a novelty. Fast-casual and QSR operators across the UK have demonstrated measurable average order value increases from kiosk deployments, primarily because the ordering interface surfaces upsells and add-ons more consistently than a counter interaction, and because customers browse and customise without feeling rushed.
Multi-location management
Restaurant groups operating across two or more sites need centralised control over menus, pricing and promotions. Updating each site individually creates administrative overhead and introduces inconsistency — a price change made on three of five sites that misses the other two is a real operational problem.
Epos Now's multi-location tools are limited for larger restaurant groups. Changes often need to be applied per-site, and centralised reporting across locations requires additional configuration.
Flipdish provides centralised order and menu management for multi-location operators as a core platform feature. Menu updates, price changes and promotional offers can be pushed to all sites simultaneously. For franchise operators managing dozens of locations, this is not a convenience — it is essential.
Pricing: what you actually pay
Epos Now's accessible pricing is a genuine strength for operators who need a basic POS at low cost. Entry-level packages are affordable and hardware bundles are available without large upfront commitments.
The comparison becomes less clear-cut when you account for what a restaurant actually needs versus what Epos Now includes. A restaurant wanting POS plus online ordering plus loyalty plus marketing needs to add third-party integrations for each missing capability, with associated monthly fees and maintenance overhead.
Flipdish packages POS, online ordering, apps, kiosks and marketing tools as an integrated platform. For operators comparing total spend rather than base plan price, the difference narrows significantly when all components are costed together. A single platform with one support contact and one data layer is also operationally simpler than four integrated products from four vendors.
Support
Both Epos Now and Flipdish offer UK-based support. The experience of restaurant operators using Epos Now has been mixed — a common observation in reviews is that support response times during busy periods are slower than expected, and that first-line agents do not always have restaurant operations knowledge.
Flipdish support is focused exclusively on restaurant and hospitality businesses. When an issue arises during a service, the support team understands what table management, kitchen routing and order flow problems look like in practice — not just in a help documentation context.
Who each system is best suited for
Epos Now works for:
- Small independent cafés and coffee shops needing basic counter POS
- Businesses with simple menus and low operational complexity
- Operators who need a low-cost entry-level system quickly
Flipdish is designed for:
- Restaurants and takeaways wanting online ordering integrated with their POS
- Operations moving away from marketplace dependence toward direct customer relationships
- Multi-location restaurant groups wanting centralised management
- QSR and fast-casual operators using or planning kiosks
- Franchise and chain operators
Verdict
For a café or counter operation that needs only a basic POS, Epos Now covers the fundamentals at an attractive entry price. For any food business that needs online ordering, a branded app, a kiosk, multi-site control or AI-powered tools, Flipdish is the more capable, better-integrated and more commercially focused platform.
The cost of assembling Epos Now with the third-party integrations needed to match Flipdish's feature set typically closes the gap on headline price — while adding complexity that a single platform avoids.
Request a Flipdish demo to see the full platform demonstrated for your operation type.