Lightspeed vs Flipdish: Which Is Better for Restaurants?

Lightspeed vs Flipdish: The Short Answer

For most restaurants in the UK and Ireland, Flipdish is the better pick. It puts POS, online ordering, branded apps, self-service kiosks, payments and marketing into one system, and every part of it was built for food businesses. Lightspeed makes a good POS with proper restaurant features. It also started life as retail software, and you can tell once you get to direct ordering and customer marketing. There isn't much there.

So it comes down to what you're trying to fix. If you want fewer orders going through Deliveroo and Just Eat and more coming through your own channels, Flipdish is set up for exactly that. If you need retail-grade inventory tracking and you also happen to run a restaurant, Lightspeed makes more sense.

What Is Lightspeed Restaurant?

Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS that runs on iPad. Cafés, bars, hotels and multi-concept venues use it for table management, floor plans, split bills, menu management and kitchen printing. The restaurant product used to be iKentoo. Lightspeed bought it and folded it into a bigger commerce platform that also sells to retailers and golf courses.

It does tableside ordering, keeps working offline, handles menus in several languages and connects to third-party delivery platforms. It has a lot of customers across Europe.

What Is Flipdish?

Flipdish makes restaurant technology and nothing else. The platform includes:

Independent restaurants, takeaways, QSRs and multi-site groups use it across the UK, Ireland and Europe.

Feature Comparison

FeatureFlipdishLightspeed Restaurant
Cloud POS✓✓
Kitchen display system✓✓
Table management✓✓
Online ordering (own channel)✓Limited
Branded mobile app✓✗
Self-service kiosks✓✗
AI phone ordering✓✗
AI marketing✓✗
Loyalty programme✓Via integrations
Multi-location management✓✓
Integrated payments✓✓
Customer data ownership✓Limited

The first three rows are a draw. The gap opens up from online ordering down, and that's where most of the real differences are.

POS: How Do They Compare?

Both run in the cloud on tablet hardware. Both keep going when the internet drops, print to the kitchen and manage tables. On the basics there isn't much between them.

Lightspeed's POS is nice to use, and the floor plan editor is good - you can lay out the room the way it actually looks. It suits a café or casual dining room where most orders come from a server standing at a table.

The Flipdish POS is built around a different problem: orders coming in from everywhere at once. Counter, kiosk, phone and online orders all land in the same system. Kitchen staff watch one screen instead of three tablets and a printer churning out marketplace tickets. For a takeaway at 7pm on a Friday, that's the difference between a calm pass and a mess. It also means one menu. Mark the chicken wings as sold out on the POS and they come off the website, the app and the kiosk at the same time, instead of someone running around updating four places while orders for wings keep coming in.

For multi-location restaurant groups, both let you manage menus centrally across sites. The difference is what the POS is connected to. On Flipdish, the POS sits in the middle of your direct ordering setup, with the website, app, kiosks and phone all feeding into it. Lightspeed's POS is mostly a tool for the table and the counter.

Online Ordering: A Clear Difference

This is the biggest gap between the two.

Lightspeed doesn't offer a fully branded online ordering channel as a core product. Most restaurants on Lightspeed plug into Deliveroo or Just Eat instead. That means commission on every order, and the marketplace keeps the customer's details. You get the order. They get the customer.

Flipdish online ordering gives each restaurant a commission-free ordering website, plus a branded app if you want one. Customers order from you directly and you keep their data. Orders go straight into the POS, so nobody is retyping anything.

Here's what that looks like in money. Take a restaurant doing £15,000 a month in online orders, with marketplaces taking 25-30%. If that volume moved to direct ordering, the commission on it drops to zero - a saving of £3,750 to £4,500 a month. Flipdish charges a flat platform fee rather than a cut of each order, so the more you sell, the better the maths gets.

Not every customer will move. Some will keep using the marketplace app that's already on their phone. Every order that does move is one you're not paying 30% on.

The data part gets less attention than the commission, but it adds up over time. When someone orders through a marketplace, you usually see a first name and an order. You don't get an email address you can market to, and you can't tell whether that person has ordered from you twelve times or once. On your own ordering site, you can. You know who your regulars are, what they order and when they stopped. That's what the loyalty and marketing tools further down run on.

Branded Apps and Kiosks

There's no branded ordering app with Lightspeed. If a customer searches the App Store for your restaurant, they won't find you.

With Flipdish branded mobile apps, you get your own iOS and Android app with your name on it, separate from any marketplace. You can send push notifications, run a loyalty scheme and put promotions in front of regulars. That's what gets someone to order on a Tuesday when they weren't planning to.

Self-service kiosks come with Flipdish. Lightspeed doesn't have them. In fast-casual and QSR sites, kiosks usually push average order value up by 15-20%, because the screen offers the extra side or the bigger drink every single time - something staff on a busy counter forget to do. They also shorten the lunchtime queue.

AI Features

Flipdish has two AI products, and Lightspeed has nothing comparable to either.

The AI phone agent takes inbound phone orders and sends them to the POS. Nobody has to pick up. If you run a takeaway where the phone rings nonstop between 6 and 8pm while staff are trying to bag orders, start here.

AI marketing looks at what each customer has ordered before and builds campaigns from that. Someone who used to order every week and went quiet two months ago gets an automatic offer based on what they normally buy.

Payments

Both have payments built in.

Lightspeed Payments takes card payments in the venue, and Lightspeed works with a range of third-party card terminals as well.

Flipdish payments covers in-venue, online and kiosk transactions in one system. Because online ordering and the POS are the same platform, all the money shows up in one place. You don't finish the month with one export from the POS, another from the ordering site and a third from the payment provider, trying to make the numbers agree.

Multi-Location Management

Both handle multi-site groups. Central menus, cross-site reporting and role-based user access are in both.

Flipdish goes further at group level because it runs online ordering, apps and marketing across every site, not just the POS. A group with five locations can have one loyalty programme, one app and one set of marketing campaigns, all from a single Flipdish account. To do the same with Lightspeed you'd have to add separate tools and get them to talk to each other.

Pricing

Neither company publishes full pricing. What you pay depends on how many sites and terminals you have and which features you need.

Lightspeed charges a monthly licence fee per location. Payment processing is a per-transaction fee on top. Some third-party integrations cost extra.

Flipdish pricing covers platform access, online ordering and payment processing. There's no per-order commission on online orders, so a restaurant with decent online volume often pays less overall than it would for a POS plus marketplace commission.

Get quotes from both for the same set of features and put them side by side. In the Lightspeed column, include what you currently pay the marketplaces. That's the number people usually leave out.

Which Should You Choose?

Go with Flipdish if you want POS, online ordering, apps, kiosks and marketing in one place, or if you're trying to move orders off the marketplaces. It also fits if you run several sites and want ordering and customer data in one account, if the phone is a problem at peak times, or if you want automated campaigns to win back customers who've drifted off. The support team is based in the UK and Ireland, which helps when something breaks on a Saturday night.

Lightspeed can be the right call in a few situations:

  • You're mainly table service and don't do online ordering at all
  • You run retail alongside the restaurant and need serious inventory tracking
  • You're already on Lightspeed, it works, and switching would cost more than it saves

Switching From Lightspeed to Flipdish

Flipdish's onboarding team handles the move. They set up your menu, install the hardware and train staff. Most restaurants run both systems side by side for a short while before turning the old one off.

Flipdish POS hardware includes terminals, kitchen display screens and receipt printers. It arrives set up to work with the platform.

Before deciding, add up what you pay now across your POS licence, marketplace commission and any marketing tools. For most restaurants, Flipdish brings those into a lower total.

Lightspeed is a solid restaurant POS. Flipdish is the POS plus everything around it: ordering, apps, kiosks, phone and marketing. If you want to own your ordering channel and your customer list, Flipdish is the better bet.

Explore Flipdish's full product range or see what the Flipdish POS can do.