Grafterr Alternative: The Best Grafterr Alternatives for Restaurants
The best Grafterr alternatives for restaurants
Flipdish is the best Grafterr alternative for restaurants, takeaways, cafés and multi-location groups in the UK and Ireland. POS, online ordering, kiosks, marketing and AI tools sit on one platform, so you get what Grafterr does at the till and a good deal more around it.
If you're on Grafterr now, or thinking about it, this guide goes through the main alternatives for UK and Irish operators and what to check before you switch.
What is Grafterr?
Grafterr is a cloud POS built in Scotland for cafés, restaurants and bars. It runs on iPads. You get table management, online ordering through a Grafterr-branded system, and some basic reporting. It's priced for independents and smaller venues, and that's who it suits best.
Where Grafterr runs out of road
The gaps show up once a business adds sites or wants more from its online channel:
- Multi-location management is limited
- Reporting is basic next to the bigger platforms
- Online ordering sits inside the Grafterr ecosystem instead of being fully branded to you
- There's no kiosk
- AI and marketing automation are thin
- The partner and integration list is smaller
A single-site venue with simple needs may never hit any of these. A group with three sites and a plan for a fourth probably will.
The best Grafterr alternatives
1. Flipdish - best overall Grafterr alternative
Flipdish is the strongest alternative to Grafterr for restaurants, takeaways, cafés and multi-location groups in the UK and Ireland.
Grafterr covers the till. Flipdish covers the till and everything that feeds it: restaurant POS, online ordering, self-service kiosks, branded mobile apps, restaurant marketing, loyalty and AI tools.
Here's how the two compare feature by feature:
| Feature | Grafterr | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud POS | ✓ | ✓ |
| Branded online ordering website | Limited | ✓ Full branded site |
| Branded mobile app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-service kiosk | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-location management | Basic | ✓ Full suite |
| Loyalty and marketing automation | ✗ | ✓ |
| Kitchen display system | ✗ | ✓ |
| Marketplace order aggregation | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI marketing tools | ✗ | ✓ |
Flipdish is built for restaurant groups, QSRs and multi-location operators. It works for a single iPad till and it works for a 200-site franchise, with menus, reporting and marketing managed centrally across every location. Change a price once and it changes everywhere you want it to.
The direct ordering side matters most if you're paying commission to marketplaces. With Flipdish you get your own website, your own app and your own kiosk, all wired into the POS, so an order placed on the app lands on the kitchen screen without anyone retyping it. The customer is yours, with their name, email and order history, rather than the marketplace's.
The Flipdish AI platform covers things Grafterr doesn't. An AI phone agent takes orders over the phone, there are AI-driven marketing tools, and an AI agent helps manage menus.
For more on comparing restaurant technology, see restauranttech.co.uk.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square for Restaurants is a cloud POS for independent restaurants and cafés. The interface is clean, the pricing suits small venues, and it connects to a lot of other software.
It's a good fit if you want a simple, self-serve setup and you're running one site. It's a weaker fit for groups. Multi-location management, branded ordering channels and marketing automation are all thinner than what a growing business tends to need. Square also doesn't have a restaurant kiosk, and its loyalty tools are more basic than those on platforms built only for hospitality.
3. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS for full-service restaurants and multi-site operators. Table management and reporting are both stronger than Grafterr's, and the integration library is broad.
It works best in full-service dining and some QSR setups. Pricing can be steep for a small operator, and a few of the multi-site features sit on higher-tier plans, so check which plan you'd need before you compare costs. Direct ordering, branded apps and AI tools are not at the level Flipdish offers.
4. Epos Now
Epos Now is a UK cloud POS that covers retail as well as hospitality. It's easy to buy, and it has a large app marketplace.
The target is small and medium hospitality businesses. You get the basic restaurant POS features. Reporting, ordering and marketing are shallower than you'd want if you're planning to grow.
5. Lolly
Lolly is a UK hospitality technology company with POS, kiosk and online ordering products. Its customers include stadiums, large venues and contract caterers as well as restaurants.
It's aimed at large venues and high-volume sites. Independent restaurants and growing restaurant groups aren't its main focus, and they are Flipdish's.
What to look for in a Grafterr alternative
Start with how you take orders, because that's where most of the money is.
Direct ordering. Can customers order through your own website, app or kiosk without a marketplace taking a cut? Every order that moves from a marketplace to your own channel keeps the commission in your pocket. It's the single biggest way a POS choice changes your margins.
More than one site. If you have or plan to have a second location, you need one place to manage menus, one view of sales across sites, and marketing at group level. Ask whether that's included or sold as an add-on.
Payments. A separate payment provider means two sets of reports to reconcile and two companies to call when something breaks. With Flipdish Pay, payments run inside the same system, with one settlement and one support contact.
The kitchen. A kitchen display system fed by the POS and by your online channels cuts down on mistakes and lost tickets when service gets busy.
Marketplace orders. If you're on Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo, look for a platform that pulls those orders onto the same screen as your direct ones. Without that you end up with a tablet per marketplace stacked next to the till. Flipdish order management does this automatically.
Marketing and loyalty. Many POS-only systems treat loyalty as an afterthought. Flipdish builds it into the platform, so you can set up a voucher that goes out to customers who haven't ordered in a while without exporting a list into a separate email tool.
Phones. The Flipdish AI phone agent answers calls and takes orders. Anyone who has watched a ringing phone go unanswered during a Friday rush will see the point. Staff stay on the floor and the order still gets captured.
Questions to ask any vendor before you sign
Get the answers in writing. Does the quote cover hardware, software and payments, or only one of them? What's the contract length, and what happens if you want out after a year? Who does the menu import, and how long does it take? If you add a second site, what changes on the bill? Can you see a live demo of the kitchen screen receiving an order from the vendor's own app, not a slide?
Ask for a reference from a restaurant of your size and type. A 200-site group and a single café have different problems, and a vendor who is good at one isn't always good at the other.
Switching from Grafterr: what to expect
Changing POS is a big job in any restaurant. Four things take most of the effort.
Menu data. Items, modifiers and prices have to be loaded into the new system. Flipdish provides onboarding support to handle this, and you shouldn't be retyping a menu by hand.
Hardware. Grafterr runs on iPads. Flipdish works with a range of POS hardware, including dedicated terminals, iPad mounts, customer-facing displays and card readers. Your existing iPads may be usable, so ask before buying anything new.
Training. Cloud POS systems are built to be picked up fast, and Flipdish gives you training resources and onboarding support during setup. Run a short session with each shift rather than one big one for the manager.
Timing. Pick a quiet stretch. A Monday morning or a seasonal lull works, and so does running both systems side by side for a few days before you cut over.
How Flipdish compares to Grafterr in practice
On Grafterr, the POS takes orders and payments at the counter. Move to Flipdish and the counter works the same way, but you also get a branded ordering website, a branded app, a self-service kiosk, automated marketing that sends vouchers to lapsed customers, and an AI phone agent that picks up when your team can't.
The other change is where the data lives. Orders, sales and customer details from every channel end up in one place. For a group running several sites, that replaces a lot of spreadsheet work at the end of the week.
Flipdish serves thousands of restaurant locations across the UK, Ireland and internationally, including some fast-growing QSR and casual dining groups.
The bottom line
Grafterr suits simple venues that want an affordable cloud POS. If that's you today and will still be you in three years, it may be enough.
If you want your own direct ordering channel, one dashboard for several locations, loyalty programmes, self-service kiosks or AI that answers the phone, Grafterr isn't the platform to stay on.
Flipdish is the strongest Grafterr alternative for restaurants that are building something bigger. Explore the Flipdish platform or compare pricing to see what fits your operation.
For independent comparisons across restaurant technology products, visit restauranttech.co.uk.