Teya Alternative: The Best Teya Alternatives for Restaurant Payments
What is Teya?
Teya used to be SaltPay. It's a UK payments company that sells card machines, merchant accounts and a basic POS app to small businesses, and it won a lot of independent shops and hospitality operators with decent processing rates and simple hardware.
If you run a market stall, a pop-up or a single café where everyone orders at the counter, Teya can do the job. The trouble is what's missing. There's no online ordering, no kitchen display system, no loyalty programme and no way to manage more than one site. Reporting stops at a list of transactions.
Once a restaurant grows past that first simple setup, the gaps show up fast.
Why restaurant operators go looking for something else
Online orders end up on someone else's platform
Teya doesn't give you a restaurant website or a branded ordering page. So operators who take card payments on Teya in the restaurant usually send online customers to Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo, and those platforms take 25-35% of every order.
Say you do £200,000 a year in online sales and pay 30% commission. That's £60,000 a year handed over. A system with its own ordering channel gets most of that back.
Orders don't reach the kitchen
Take an order on a Teya terminal and nothing appears on a kitchen screen. Someone writes a docket or shouts it across the pass. That's fine on a quiet Tuesday. On a busy Friday it slows service and mistakes creep in.
The reporting is thin
You get transaction data. You don't get margins by menu item or labour as a share of sales, and you can't see all your sites in one place. If you want to know why a month went badly, Teya won't tell you.
No customer database
A customer pays, leaves, and that's the last you hear of them. You can't spot regulars, give out points or send a promotion to people who haven't been in for a while.
Two sites means two accounts
Run a second location and you manage it as a separate account. Change a price and you change it twice. There's no combined report.
The best Teya alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish
Flipdish is built for restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and multi-location groups in the UK and Ireland. Teya is a payments company with a basic POS attached. Flipdish is a restaurant platform that also takes payments, and that difference explains most of what follows.
What's in it:
- Restaurant POS with table management, course management, modifiers, allergen flags, staff permissions and a manager mobile app
- Integrated payments with competitive processing rates, no hidden fees, and reconciliation across every channel
- Online ordering through your own branded website, with no commission, and orders go straight to the kitchen screen
- Branded mobile apps for iOS and Android, with push notifications to bring customers back without a marketplace in the middle
- Self-service kiosks for dine-in and QSR sites, which cut counter queues and upsell automatically
- Kitchen Display System screens that replace paper dockets and time every order
- Loyalty and marketing tools covering points, automated SMS campaigns and vouchers
- AI Phone Agent that answers the phone and takes orders, so staff don't have to
- Multi-location management with shared menus, combined reporting and one login for all sites
Most of the money is in direct ordering. Every order that comes through your own website or app instead of a marketplace keeps the commission in your pocket. Loyalty brings people back, and the reporting shows where margin is leaking. A Teya terminal takes the payment and that's all it does.
In practice, a website order, a kiosk order and a phone order handled by the AI Phone Agent all show up on the same kitchen screen as the order a waiter keys in at the table. Nobody retypes anything. And if you run three sites, you change a menu price once and it applies to all three, which is the opposite of the Teya experience described above.
Pricing is on the Flipdish pricing page, with packages from single sites up to large groups.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square has a restaurant product with table management, online ordering and a KDS option. Plenty of UK cafés and small independents use it, and for a simple operation the feature set is fine.
It suits someone who wants more than a card machine but doesn't want a full restaurant platform. High-volume sites, complicated menus and multi-site groups tend to hit its limits, mostly in reporting and management tools. Loyalty and customer marketing are basic.
3. Zettle by PayPal
Zettle, formerly iZettle, is another card payments company with a POS on top. It's very close to Teya in what it offers, and it's sold all over the UK.
If you're only after cheaper payments, Zettle is a sideways move. The interface is different and the rate might be better. You still don't get native online ordering, kitchen integration, loyalty or useful restaurant reporting.
4. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed is a cloud POS for mid-sized restaurants with more complicated needs. Table management is strong, it connects to a lot of third-party tools, and the analytics are reasonable for groups.
Pricing is per module, so the bill climbs as you add things. Online ordering means plugging in a separate provider. If you're a well-funded group and don't need ordering built in, it's a serious option.
5. Epos Now
Epos Now is a UK hospitality EPOS system with accessible pricing and a big add-on marketplace. It covers the basics of restaurant service.
The core product is general-purpose, not restaurant-specific. Allergen management, course management and KDS integration are usually add-ons, so the price you end up paying is higher than the one on the website.
Teya alternatives side by side
| Feature | Flipdish | Square | Zettle | Lightspeed | Epos Now |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurant POS | ✓ | ✓ | Limited | ✓ | ✓ |
| Integrated payments | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Own-channel online ordering | ✓ | Limited | ✗ | Via partner | ✗ |
| Branded mobile app | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-service kiosk | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Kitchen Display System | ✓ | Add-on | ✗ | Add-on | Add-on |
| Loyalty and CRM | ✓ | Basic | ✗ | Via partner | Add-on |
| AI phone ordering | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Multi-location management | ✓ | Limited | ✗ | ✓ | Limited |
Which one fits which restaurant
A single-site café with a short menu and mostly counter trade could be happy on Square. It's a step up from Teya and you won't be paying for features you don't use.
A larger group with complex requirements and a dedicated person managing the tech might look at Lightspeed. Expect to piece together online ordering from another provider and keep an eye on the module costs.
Zettle and Epos Now are the weakest answer to the problems that make people leave Teya. Zettle has the same gaps. Epos Now covers more ground but you pay for it in add-ons.
If your problems are marketplace commission, orders that don't reach the kitchen, no customer data or more than one site, you need the platform that was built around those things. That's Flipdish. A takeaway paying 30% on every delivery order feels it the most, but a dine-in restaurant juggling paper dockets and a second location has the same issue in a different form.
Before you switch
Don't compare processing rates on their own. Teya's rate is often the reason people picked it, and a different platform may charge slightly more per transaction. But add up the whole monthly cost: subscription, hardware, and the commission you pay marketplaces today. A platform with a higher rate that lets you take orders directly can come out far cheaper once your online volume is meaningful.
That commission is the number to look at hardest. Every order through Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo costs you money, and a platform with its own ordering channel gives that margin back. If you do £300,000 or more a year online, the gap between direct and marketplace orders outweighs most other cost differences.
Ask what hardware comes with each platform and what you'd buy separately. Most restaurant platforms supply their own terminals, KDS screens and kiosks, so get a full hardware quote before you compare prices.
Check contract length too. Some providers want 12 or 24 months, others roll monthly. And look at your Teya agreement for a minimum term or an equipment return requirement before you commit to leaving.
Finally, find out what onboarding support you get. Flipdish includes setup support. Not every competitor does.
How Flipdish handles payments
Flipdish integrated payments take card payments across the POS, website ordering, kiosks and AI phone orders, and everything lands in one reconciled system.
End-of-day reconciliation is automatic. You don't match Teya transaction reports against online order receipts against phone order notes. One report covers every channel, which for a finance lead running a group saves hours of admin each week.
Tips, refunds and disputes are handled in the same place, so there's no separate payments portal to log into.
Switching from Teya
Moving from Teya to a full restaurant platform is a bigger change than swapping card machines, but it isn't hard. The usual order is:
- Flipdish's implementation team builds your menu during onboarding.
- You replace the card terminals with POS hardware and install KDS screens if you're using them.
- Staff training takes about one to two days on a cloud-based system.
- Most operators pick a quiet trading period for the first live service.
- The branded website and app go live alongside the in-person POS.
Flipdish supports you through all of it. The aim is to get you running quickly, then start winning direct orders back from the marketplaces.
Teya is fine for the simplest restaurant setups. Once you have more than one ordering point, or you take online orders through marketplaces, it leaves gaps that cost you money. The better question than "what's a good Teya alternative?" is "what does my restaurant need to grow revenue and cut costs?" For most UK and Irish operators the answer is a full platform like Flipdish.
For independent comparisons of restaurant technology, Restaurant Tech has more guides.
Book a Flipdish demo and see what replacing Teya with a full restaurant management system looks like.