Lightspeed vs Flipdish: Which Is Better for Restaurants?

Which is better for restaurants: Lightspeed or Flipdish?

For most restaurants in the UK and Ireland, Flipdish. It puts a cloud POS, direct online ordering, branded apps, self-service kiosks, AI marketing and loyalty into one system. Lightspeed Restaurant is a good hospitality POS, and its table and floor management is nice to use, but it more or less stops at the till. Direct ordering, apps and marketing aren't really what it sells.

So the choice comes down to what you want the software to do. If you want to take more orders outside Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats, and run every order channel from one place, Flipdish does that. Lightspeed doesn't.

What does Lightspeed Restaurant do?

Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS built mainly for table service. It handles:

  • Table mapping and floor plans
  • Menus, modifiers and coursing
  • Split bills, covers and tabs
  • Connections to delivery aggregators
  • Reporting and labour management
  • Running several locations from the POS

If you run a dining room, it does the job and it has a decent reputation. The table management screen is one of the cleaner ones around.

What it doesn't have built in is a direct online ordering channel, a branded app, kiosks or an AI marketing and loyalty tool. If you want those, you add third-party products on top. Each one is another subscription, another login and another integration that can fall over on a Friday night.

What does Flipdish do?

Flipdish is software for restaurants, takeaways, QSRs and groups with multiple sites. The platform includes:

The idea behind it is simple. The restaurant should own its ordering channels instead of renting them from a marketplace. Everything in that list is there to help with that, and it's the main thing that separates Flipdish from a POS-only product.

Lightspeed vs Flipdish: feature comparison

FeatureFlipdishLightspeed Restaurant
Cloud POS✓✓
Kitchen Display System✓Via integration
Table management✓✓
Online ordering (direct)✓Via integration
Branded mobile app✓✗
Self-service kiosk✓✗
AI phone ordering✓✗
AI marketing automation✓✗
Customer loyalty✓Via integration
Multi-location management✓✓
Delivery aggregator integration✓✓
Integrated payments✓✓

Flipdish has the whole ordering and marketing side built in. Lightspeed is strong inside the venue and leans on other companies' tools for direct ordering, loyalty and marketing.

Direct ordering is where the money is

Of everything in that table, the direct ordering rows are the ones with the most money attached.

Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats take 25-35% commission on each order. A restaurant putting £15,000 a month through them hands over between £3,750 and £5,250 in commission. Every month. At 30%, each £1,000 of orders that comes through your own site instead of a marketplace keeps roughly £300 in the business before payment fees. You don't need to move everyone. Moving some of your regulars is enough to change the numbers.

Flipdish gives you the parts you need to do it: a branded website, a branded app and marketing tools to move customers off the marketplace and onto your own channel. The AI marketing platform picks out customers who've stopped ordering and sends them campaigns without anyone on your team having to build them.

There's also the customer list. When someone orders through a marketplace, the marketplace keeps the relationship. You get the order, and they get the customer's details, their order history and the chance to show them a competitor's menu next time they open the app. When someone orders through your own website or app, that customer is yours, and you can contact them again without paying anyone a percentage for it.

Lightspeed doesn't do any of this. It looks after the customer once they're at the table or the order has already landed. Flipdish also deals with how the order gets to you in the first place, and whose name is on it when it does.

Inside the venue

Lightspeed's strongest ground is the dining room, and Flipdish covers that too. Both have a cloud POS, table management and integrated payments, so for seating guests, firing courses and splitting a bill for a table of eight, you won't be short of anything with either.

The differences show up around the edges. Flipdish has its own kitchen display system, so orders from the till, the website, the app, the kiosk and the delivery marketplaces all land on the same screens in the kitchen. With Lightspeed, the kitchen display comes through an integration.

Then there are kiosks. In a counter-service or QSR setup, a kiosk lets customers order and pay without queuing at the till, and the order goes straight to the kitchen. Flipdish sells kiosks as part of the platform. Lightspeed doesn't offer them, so a busy counter means more staff on tills or longer queues.

Running multiple locations

Once you have more than one site, the problems change. A price change has to go out to every menu at the same time, or one branch ends up charging a pound less for the same dish for a fortnight. You want to compare sites side by side. Marketing and loyalty should work across the whole group, so a customer who orders from one branch is recognised at another.

Flipdish was built for multi-site groups from the start. Menus, reporting, campaigns and customer data are all managed centrally. Head office can push a menu update to every location in minutes.

Lightspeed does have multi-location management in its POS. It can't extend that control to online ordering, kiosks or marketing, though, because those aren't part of Lightspeed. If you've added a separate online ordering tool, you update the menu in the POS and then again in that tool. Two places to update. Two places to get it wrong.

AI and automation

Flipdish has an AI platform with three tools restaurants use day to day.

The AI Phone Agent answers incoming calls, takes orders and deals with common questions. If you take a lot of phone orders, that's one less job for whoever is on the pass at 7pm, and fewer orders lost to a phone that rang out during the rush.

AI Marketing finds customers who haven't ordered in a while and sends them personalised campaigns to win them back. Each campaign reports the revenue it brought in, not just opens or clicks. An open rate doesn't pay the rent.

Predictive upsell suggests add-ons based on what a customer has ordered before, which pushes up average order value.

Lightspeed has reporting and analytics but nothing comparable for automation. Its reports tell you what happened. Flipdish's AI tools go and act on it, which is a different job.

Pricing

Neither company publishes standard prices. Both quote based on how many locations you have, which features you want and how long a contract you sign.

Lightspeed charges a subscription per terminal plus payment processing fees. Online ordering, loyalty and marketing come from other providers and cost extra. Flipdish includes all three.

That makes a straight comparison between Lightspeed's POS subscription and a Flipdish quote misleading. To match what Flipdish does on top of Lightspeed, you'd be paying for the POS, an online ordering tool, someone to build you an app, a loyalty platform and a marketing automation tool. Add all of that up and the total often comes out in Flipdish's favour.

When you ask for quotes, give both companies the same full list of what you need. Then compare the cost of the whole setup, not the POS on its own.

Which should you choose?

Choose Flipdish if:

  • You want POS, online ordering, branded apps, kiosks and AI marketing in one system
  • You run more than one site, or plan to
  • Marketplace commission is eating your margin and you want to cut it
  • You want marketing and phone ordering to run without someone doing it by hand
  • You're in the UK or Ireland

Lightspeed might suit you if:

  • You run one independent table-service restaurant
  • You already have online ordering and marketing tools that work
  • What you mostly need is floor and covers management, not growth across channels

For groups that want to grow, Flipdish is the stronger pick. With POS, direct ordering, apps, kiosks and AI in one system, you get one menu, one customer database and one set of reports. The alternative is five separate products, each holding its own piece of the picture.

Switching from Lightspeed to Flipdish

Changing POS takes planning. Menus have to be moved across, hardware set up, staff trained and a go-live date agreed. Flipdish provides implementation support to keep the risk down.

A lot of operators don't switch everything at once. They start with Flipdish online ordering running alongside their current POS, then move to the full Flipdish POS once the team knows the platform. Direct orders can start coming in straight away, and the till doesn't change until staff are ready for it.

If you're thinking about leaving Lightspeed, talk to Flipdish early. They can map out what the move would involve for your setup and number of sites.