Top 5 Online Ordering Systems for Restaurants
The top 5 online ordering systems for restaurants
Here are the five, in the order we'd put them:
- Flipdish - online ordering, POS, payments and marketing in one system, for restaurants of any size
- Vita Mojo - built for fast casual chains with large, customisable menus
- Hungrrr - white-label apps for independent restaurants and small groups
- OrderYOYO - white-label ordering for takeaways
- Slerp - click-and-collect for premium food brands
Flipdish is our product, so you'd expect it at number one. The sections below say why, and where one of the others is the better fit. For some restaurants it is.
Why order direct at all
Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo got a lot of restaurants online quickly, and they still bring in orders. The price is 15-35% commission on each one, and the customer's details stay with the marketplace.
A direct online ordering system puts the order on your own website or in your own branded app. You see who ordered, what they ordered and when. You can text them. You set the prices and keep the margin.
Here's what that looks like in money. Say a restaurant takes £12,000 a month in delivery orders through marketplaces at 28% commission. That's £3,360 a month in fees. Move 40% of those orders to a direct channel and £4,800 of sales stops paying 28%. The commission on that slice was £1,344. At a payment and platform cost of about 2%, the same orders cost £96. The difference is around £1,250 a month, before the fixed monthly fee for the platform. If direct customers also spend a bit more per order, that's on top.
Notice what the sum depends on. It isn't the software. It's how many of your customers you can get to order direct, and the rest of this page keeps coming back to that.
What to check before you pick one
Most of these platforms look the same on a feature list. The differences show up in how they connect to the rest of your kitchen and what you can do with the customer data afterwards.
| What to check | Why |
|---|---|
| POS integration | Orders should reach the kitchen without anyone retyping them |
| Branded experience | Customers see your name, not a third party's |
| Customer data | You need order history and contact details to market to people |
| Marketplace aggregation | Every channel shows up in one kitchen view |
| Multi-location support | Menus and orders for every site run from one place |
| Loyalty and promotions | Vouchers, discounts and rewards |
| Reporting | You can see which channel, item and site is earning |
| Payments | One payment setup instead of several providers |
1. Flipdish
Flipdish covers web ordering, branded mobile apps, self-service kiosks and QR code table ordering, and runs them on its own POS and its own payments. That's the main difference from the other four. You aren't stitching together an ordering tool, a till and a payment provider and hoping they talk to each other.
What you get:
- A branded website and a mobile app for iOS and Android, under your name
- Marketplace order aggregation, so Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders land on the same kitchen display as your direct ones
- A customer CRM with order history, segments and automated re-engagement campaigns
- AI phone ordering, where an AI agent answers the phone, takes the order, suggests extras and takes payment at any hour
- Integrated payments, so there's no separate payment provider to set up
- Loyalty and promotions, including vouchers, discounts and stamp cards
- Multi-location management from a single dashboard for menus, orders and performance
- AI marketing that finds customers who've stopped ordering and sends them an offer
In practice the benefit is fewer systems. Your POS, online ordering, kiosks, payments, loyalty and AI tools sit in one system, with one support team and one set of reports. When a delivery order and a kiosk order end up in the same sales figures, you don't have to reconcile anything by hand.
It suits restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and multi-location groups in the UK and Ireland that want one platform instead of several.
2. Vita Mojo
Vita Mojo is a UK-built ordering and operations platform aimed at fast casual chains. Its strong point is menu management: modifier logic, nutritional labelling and allergen tracking. If your menu has dozens of options per dish and you have to show calories and allergens for every combination, that matters a lot.
It connects to several major POS systems and offers web ordering, kiosk and app channels. Its AI tools, marketing automation and payment integration are less developed than Flipdish's, and payments come through a third party.
It's the one to look at if complex menus and nutritional compliance are your biggest daily headache.
3. Hungrrr
Hungrrr is a UK platform that provides branded apps and web ordering for independent restaurants and small groups. For a standalone ordering tool the feature set is fair, and it includes basic loyalty and promotions.
POS integrations are more limited than Flipdish's. There's no marketplace aggregation, no AI tools, and the multi-location reporting is thin, which starts to hurt once a group adds sites.
It fits an independent that wants its own white-label app and doesn't need a full platform behind it.
4. OrderYOYO
OrderYOYO was founded in Denmark and has a UK presence. It's built around white-label online ordering for takeaways and restaurants, with a website, a branded app and a basic CRM.
Marketplace integration and AI are more limited than Flipdish's. The company has mostly focused on independent takeaways.
If you run an independent takeaway and want a direct channel running alongside your marketplace listings, it's a reasonable starting point.
5. Slerp
Slerp is for premium food brands and click-and-collect. Pre-orders and gifting are presented well. It isn't designed for high-volume delivery or for running several sites, and it lacks the kitchen integration, marketplace aggregation and multi-location management a restaurant group needs.
Bakeries, artisan producers and other premium brands selling gifts and collection orders are the people it suits. A restaurant doing a busy Friday delivery service isn't.
Side by side
| Platform | Native POS | Branded app | AI tools | Multi-location | Marketplace aggregation | Payments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flipdish | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vita Mojo | Via third party | ✓ | Limited | ✓ | Limited | Via third party |
| Hungrrr | Via third party | ✓ | No | Limited | No | Via third party |
| OrderYOYO | Via third party | ✓ | No | Limited | Limited | Via third party |
| Slerp | Via third party | Limited | No | Limited | No | Via third party |
Getting customers off the marketplaces
A lot of operators paying 25-30% to marketplaces assume that moving customers direct will be expensive or hard. The software isn't the expensive part. A direct ordering platform usually costs a fixed monthly fee plus a small cut of each transaction, and for any restaurant with a decent monthly order volume that comes in well under marketplace commission.
The hard part is changing what customers do. Someone who's used to opening Uber Eats on a Friday night won't switch because you built an app. You have to give them a reason and make it easy. Restaurant marketing tools like SMS campaigns, loyalty schemes and AI marketing are what pay for themselves here.
Things that work:
- Signs and QR codes in the restaurant that point to your app
- A discount that only applies to direct orders, such as 10% off the first one
- Staff who mention direct ordering to every collection customer, every time
- Loyalty points that only build up on direct orders
- Automatic win-back messages to anyone who hasn't ordered in 30-60 days
That last one is tedious to do by hand, and it's what Flipdish's AI marketing handles. It looks at each customer's actual order history, spots who is drifting away, and sends them an offer.
Questions to ask in a demo
Does it connect to your POS? If someone has to retype online orders at the till, you'll get mistakes, delays and annoyed staff. Ask whether the integration is native or goes through middleware. Native is better.
Can you get your customer data out? Some platforms limit access or make exporting awkward. If you can't use your own customer list, you've swapped one marketplace for another.
Will it cope with a second or third site? If you plan to open more, pick something that handles multiple locations from the start. Bolting that on later is a workaround you'll regret.
What does it really cost? Add up the setup fee, the monthly subscription, the transaction fees and the payment processing. A low monthly fee with a high charge on every order can cost more than a higher flat fee.
Which one to choose
For a restaurant in the UK or Ireland, whether it's a single independent, a growing group or already multi-site, we'd pick Flipdish. It has the widest feature set, runs POS, ordering and payments as one system, and has the most developed AI tools of the five.
Vita Mojo is worth a look if you run a fast casual chain with complicated menus. Hungrrr or OrderYOYO may do the job for a small independent takeaway that just wants a basic direct channel up quickly.
If you want to compare restaurant tech more widely, restauranttech.co.uk is an independent source.