Lightspeed vs Flipdish: Which Is Better for Restaurants?

Lightspeed vs Flipdish: The Short Answer

If all you need is a till for a sit-down restaurant, Lightspeed Restaurant does the job. Its table management is good and the reporting is decent. Flipdish covers the till as well, but it also runs your online ordering, your app, kiosks, phone orders and marketing, and it was built for restaurants in the UK and Ireland.

So the real question is how much of your trade happens outside the dining room. If the answer is "not much", Lightspeed is fine. If you're doing a fair number of collection and delivery orders, or you're tired of handing a marketplace a cut of every one of them, Flipdish is the better fit.

What Is Lightspeed Restaurant?

Lightspeed is a Montreal-based company that sells cloud POS software to retailers and hospitality businesses. Its restaurant product runs on iPads and is used in restaurants across Europe and North America. Much of the restaurant side came through acquisitions - Lightspeed bought iKentoo, Kounta and Upserve between 2019 and 2020.

What you get with Lightspeed Restaurant:

  • Table management and a floor plan
  • Cloud POS on iPad
  • Menu management
  • Staff management and time tracking
  • Reporting and analytics
  • An integration marketplace for delivery, accounting and so on
  • Online ordering, mostly through those integrations

It's a dine-in product first. Table layouts, coursing, splitting bills, tipping - that's where Lightspeed has put its effort. When you want to take orders online or run delivery, you usually end up connecting a third-party tool to it.

What Is Flipdish?

Flipdish started in Dublin in 2015 and sells restaurant technology to independents and groups in the UK, Ireland and further afield.

The platform includes:

Flipdish built the online and direct ordering parts itself. They aren't bolted on. An order placed on your website and an order rung up at the counter go through the same system and land in the same kitchen queue.

POS Comparison

FeatureLightspeed RestaurantFlipdish
Cloud-based POS✓✓
Table management✓✓
Kitchen display systemVia integrationNative
Online ordering (native)Limited✓
Branded apps (native)✗✓
Self-service kiosks✗✓
AI phone ordering✗✓
AI marketing tools✗✓
Multi-location control✓✓
UK and Ireland supportVia resellerDirect

On the till itself, there isn't a huge gap. Both are cloud-based, both handle tables, both work across multiple sites. The differences start once you look past the counter.

Online Ordering

This is where the two products split.

With Lightspeed, online ordering comes through third-party integrations. To take orders online you connect Lightspeed to a separate ordering or delivery platform. That means two contracts, two support desks, and two systems that have to stay in sync.

Picture a pizzeria on a Friday at 7pm. You run out of dough balls. On a connected setup, someone has to mark them unavailable in the POS and then check the ordering platform picked up the change - or go and change it there too. If the sync lags, people keep ordering dough balls you can't make, and somebody has to ring them. When an order goes missing between the two systems, each supplier tends to point at the other.

Flipdish built online ordering into the platform. Website orders, app orders and in-house orders all arrive in the same place. There's no middleware in between and nothing extra to keep in sync. Mark an item as sold out once and it's gone from every channel.

If online orders are a small slice of your takings, you might live with the integration. If they're a third or more of your revenue, the plumbing matters a lot more. It decides how often orders go missing, how fast they reach the kitchen and how much your staff are fiddling with tablets instead of making food.

Branded Apps

Lightspeed doesn't offer branded restaurant apps. If you want an app with your restaurant's name on it in the App Store, you'll need another supplier.

Flipdish builds and maintains branded mobile apps for iOS and Android as part of the platform. The app hooks straight into your Flipdish ordering, loyalty programme and marketing tools, so a customer who orders through the app earns points and gets your offers without anyone setting up another connection.

Regulars are the people most likely to download your app. Those are also the people you least want ordering through a marketplace, where you pay commission and the marketplace keeps the customer data.

Kiosks

Lightspeed doesn't offer its own self-service kiosk hardware or software.

Flipdish has self-service kiosks that run on the same platform as everything else, so the menu, prices and stock are the same as on your website and till. For counter-service places - QSRs, pizza shops, fried chicken, burger chains, café chains - kiosks usually push up the average order value. People add the extra side, the upgrade to a large, the drink, when they're browsing a screen and there's no queue staring at the back of their head.

They also take some of the pressure off the counter at lunch. One person can look after the kiosks and hand out orders while the rest of the team stays on the kitchen.

AI Tools

Lightspeed doesn't offer AI tools for ordering or marketing.

Flipdish has an AI platform with two main parts. The AI phone agent answers the phone, takes orders and handles common questions like opening hours or whether you deliver to a certain area, so a member of staff isn't stuck on the phone. AI marketing writes and sends campaigns automatically, based on what customers have ordered and how long it's been since they last ordered.

The Flipdish AI phone agent is the one most takeaways will notice. On a busy Friday, every call is someone off the line or away from the pass for a few minutes, reading out the menu and writing down an address. Or the phone just rings out and the order goes elsewhere. Neither is great.

UK and Ireland Support

Lightspeed operates worldwide and supports UK customers mainly through a network of resellers. How good that support is depends on which reseller you end up with. Getting hardware sourced or replaced can also take longer in the UK than in markets where Lightspeed has more of its own people on the ground.

Flipdish is headquartered in Dublin and has a large UK operation. You deal with Flipdish directly, not a reseller. That counts for a lot when the card machine stops working halfway through Saturday service and you need someone who can actually fix it, rather than someone who'll log a ticket with someone else.

Pricing

Lightspeed Restaurant charges a monthly subscription based on the features you want and the number of terminals. Prices are on its website and start at around £69 a month for the basic plan, going up as you add features and sites.

Flipdish doesn't publish a standard rate. Pricing covers the whole platform and depends on hardware, setup, ongoing support and which products you use.

Comparing headline monthly fees will mislead you. What you want is the total cost of running POS, online ordering, an app, marketing and support. On Lightspeed, the ordering platform, app developer and marketing tool are each a separate bill - and each one usually needs its own integration. Add those up and Flipdish is competitive, often more so than the £69 headline suggests.

It's worth asking each supplier for a full quote for your actual setup: how many terminals, how many sites, whether you want an app and kiosks. Then put the numbers side by side.

Multi-Location Restaurants

Both platforms handle multi-site groups.

Lightspeed's multi-location tools are about the POS. You can manage menus, staff and reporting across sites. They don't reach online ordering, kiosks or marketing, because those sit in other systems.

Flipdish gives you control over every channel from one place. Change a price or add a new item and it goes out to the website, app, kiosks and POS at every site at once. Reporting pulls all channels and all sites into one dashboard. Flipdish AI marketing can run campaigns for the whole group or for one site.

Once you're past five sites, the difference shows up in the admin. A menu change that means logging into three systems at each of eight sites is a morning gone. On Flipdish it's one change.

When to Choose Lightspeed

Lightspeed makes sense if:

  • You're mainly dine-in and do little delivery or online ordering
  • You already have an online ordering tool you like and plan to keep
  • Detailed table management and reservation integrations are your priority
  • You're in an area where Lightspeed has a strong local reseller

When to Choose Flipdish

Flipdish is the better choice if:

  • You want POS and online ordering on one platform without the integrations to manage
  • You're growing collection or delivery and want those orders going straight to your kitchen
  • You want branded apps, kiosks or AI phone ordering
  • You're in the UK or Ireland and want to deal with your supplier directly
  • You run several sites and want to manage every channel from one place

Moving From Lightspeed to Flipdish

Most restaurants on Lightspeed that also sell online are running a stack: the POS, an ordering platform, maybe an app from a separate developer, and a marketing tool on top. Flipdish replaces that stack with one platform covering front of house, online, kiosk, phone and marketing.

If you're on Lightspeed and the online side keeps letting you down, moving to Flipdish cuts the number of suppliers you deal with and gives you your own direct ordering channels, where the customers and the revenue stay with you.

Talk to Flipdish about replacing Lightspeed with one platform for your whole restaurant.