Como Alternative: The Best Como Alternatives for Restaurant Loyalty

The best Como alternatives for restaurants

Flipdish is the best Como alternative for restaurants and hospitality groups in the UK and Ireland. Como sells loyalty as its own product. Flipdish builds loyalty, marketing automation and CRM into the same system that runs the POS and online ordering, so the tool that takes the order is also the one that awards the points.

This guide is for anyone who uses Como now, or is about to sign up, and wants to see what else is out there. Five options are covered below, starting with Flipdish.

What Como does

Como is a customer engagement platform for restaurants, retail and hospitality. You get digital loyalty (points, stamps and tiered rewards), CRM and customer segmentation, vouchers and promotions, and marketing by email, SMS and push notification. It connects to a range of POS systems.

That last part is what defines it. Como sits next to your POS, not inside it. If you've already chosen a POS and you're staying with it, adding Como on top is a sensible way to get a loyalty scheme running.

Where Como gets awkward

Because Como is an add-on, each part of your setup is run separately. In practice that means:

Loyalty, POS and ordering are set up and maintained in different systems. When one of them changes, somebody has to check the others still work.
Customer behaviour is stored in Como and sales data is stored in your POS. Lining the two up is manual work.
Every extra vendor is another contract, another invoice and another support desk to chase.
If you don't use an integrated ordering channel, Como can't tie a loyalty redemption cleanly to an online order.
A loyalty platform, a POS and an ordering platform each carry their own price. Together they add up quickly.

None of this matters much for a single café with one till. It matters a lot for a group that wants a customer to earn points in the restaurant on Friday and spend them on a delivery order on Sunday. For that you want one platform, not three that have been wired together.

The best Como alternatives

1. Flipdish - best overall Como alternative

Flipdish is the strongest Como alternative for restaurants in the UK and Ireland. Loyalty, marketing automation and CRM sit inside the POS, online ordering and kiosk platform. You don't need a separate loyalty vendor.

What you get:

Loyalty programmes with points, rewards and tiered schemes, linked to every order channel
Marketing automation that triggers on customer behaviour, such as a first order, a lapsed customer or an anniversary
A single CRM built from every order, whatever channel it came through
Vouchers and promotions, created and sent from the Flipdish platform
SMS and email marketing sent to your own first-party customer data
Flipdish AI marketing, which creates and sends targeted campaigns for you

Since POS, online ordering, kiosk and loyalty all run in one system, points are earned and redeemed the same way at the counter, in the app, on the website and at a kiosk. There's no integration layer to look after, so there's nothing in the middle to break.

Here's how the two compare:

Feature	Como	Flipdish
Loyalty programme	✓	✓
CRM and segmentation	✓	✓
Marketing automation	✓	✓
POS integration	Via integration	Native, part of the same platform
Online ordering integration	Via integration	Native
Kiosk integration	Via integration	Native
AI marketing	✗	✓
AI phone ordering	✗	✓
Direct ordering channels (app, website)	✗	✓
All data in one platform	✗ (split across systems)	✓

The first three rows are a draw. Both do loyalty, CRM and automation. The gap is everything below them. If you want one view of every customer across every channel, and fewer vendors to deal with, Flipdish does that and Como can't.

Explore Flipdish marketing and loyalty

2. Yoyo

Yoyo is a UK loyalty and payments platform that mostly serves workplace catering and food service. It combines a digital wallet with loyalty points.

It's built for workplace canteens and similar food-service sites. Independent restaurants and restaurant chains are not its main market, so it's a poor fit if that's what you run.

3. Loyalzoo

Loyalzoo is a UK loyalty app aimed at small and medium hospitality businesses. It offers digital stamp cards and simple points schemes, with POS integrations.

It suits a small independent venue that wants to replace paper stamp cards. It doesn't have the marketing automation, CRM depth or cross-channel integration a growing restaurant group will want.

4. Marsello

Marsello is a loyalty and marketing platform for retail and hospitality. It covers points, rewards, email marketing and segmentation, and connects to a number of POS systems.

It's meant for businesses that are already committed to a particular POS. Like Como, it's a layer on top of your existing systems, so you take on the same split between loyalty data and sales data.

5. Antavo

Antavo is an enterprise loyalty platform used by large retail and hospitality groups around the world. Programme structures are highly configurable, and it comes with member portals and loyalty analytics.

It's for enterprise operators running several brands with complicated loyalty rules. Large international chains tend to be the buyers, not UK restaurant groups, and the pricing is enterprise-level.

What to look for in a Como alternative

Start with how the loyalty scheme connects to your orders. When loyalty depends on a third-party link between your POS and your loyalty provider, that link needs configuring, maintaining and fixing when it fails. It will fail occasionally. Loyalty that runs in the same system as the orders has no link to break, and it usually has more features because the platform sees every order.

Next, check who owns the customer data. The point of a loyalty scheme is a customer database that belongs to you. Find out whether you can get at every email address, phone number and order history, or whether it stays inside the vendor's platform.

Then think about channels. A customer should earn and spend points the same way at the counter, in your app, on your website and at a kiosk. If loyalty only works in some of those places, customers get confused and stop using it.

Automation matters more than most operators expect. A loyalty scheme with no automated campaigns is a ledger. What brings people back is the message that goes out on its own: a win-back offer when a regular hasn't visited in 30 days, a birthday reward, a note when they reach a milestone. If you have to build and send each of these by hand, they won't get sent. Flipdish AI marketing finds customer segments, writes the campaign and sends it, which takes most of that work off your plate.

Last, add up the whole bill. Take the cost of the POS, online ordering, loyalty and marketing automation together. A single platform like Flipdish often comes in cheaper than a separate best-of-breed tool for each, and the parts work together better.

Questions worth asking any vendor

Before you sign with Como or anyone else, ask a few blunt ones.

What happens at the till when a customer redeems a reward? If staff have to look up an account or key in a discount by hand, queues get longer and mistakes get made.

Can you export the full customer list, with order history, whenever you want?

If loyalty stops working on a Saturday night, who do you call? When loyalty and POS come from different companies, each can point at the other.

And what does each additional location, channel or integration cost?

How Flipdish loyalty works day to day

A customer orders through any Flipdish channel: the counter, the website, the app or a kiosk. Their account is recognised and points go straight onto their balance.

Rewards are applied at checkout. The person on the till doesn't look up accounts or apply discounts, because the system does it.

Campaigns run on behaviour. A customer who hasn't ordered in 28 days gets a re-engagement SMS with a discount code. Someone placing their tenth order gets a reward. A new customer gets a welcome message after their first order, with loyalty points already credited.

All of it comes from the platform that processes the orders and payments. There's no third-party integration to maintain, no data to reconcile and no middleware in the way.

Restaurant groups that have run loyalty and CRM as a tool separate from their POS tend to find that moving to Flipdish simplifies day-to-day operations. Campaigns also improve, because the platform sees what customers actually ordered, in every channel, rather than a partial feed.

Take a group with four sites, a website and a kiosk in each. A customer who orders at the kiosk in one site and online from another is one person with one balance, not two records someone has to merge later. Marketing goes to that one person, based on everything they've ordered, and the group manager sees the result in the same dashboard as sales.

Switching takes some planning, whichever way you go. Work out which rewards customers already hold, tell them what's happening to their balance, and pick a quiet week to move rather than a bank holiday weekend. Ask your new vendor what they need from you before launch, and who on their side is on the hook if something goes wrong in the first month.

Is Como still the right choice?

Sometimes. Como is a capable loyalty and CRM platform, and it works well for operators who have a fixed POS they can't or won't change and want to add loyalty on top. If that's you, it does the job.

If you're choosing or replacing your restaurant technology anyway, the extra systems and the extra cost are hard to justify. For restaurants in the UK and Ireland that want loyalty, CRM and marketing automation as part of one restaurant platform, Flipdish is the strongest option.

Explore Flipdish marketing and loyalty, or view the full platform.

For independent comparisons of restaurant loyalty and CRM platforms, visit restauranttech.co.uk.