Teya Alternative: The Best Teya Alternatives for Restaurant Payments
Why restaurants look for Teya alternatives
Teya, which used to be SaltPay, sells card machines and a basic POS to small businesses. Setup is quick and the pricing is fair. For a café with one counter and a handful of regulars, that's often enough.
It stops being enough when the restaurant changes. Maybe you add delivery. Maybe a second site opens, or you want a kiosk by the door because Friday night queues are costing you walk-outs. Teya's POS is basic, its link to online ordering is thin, and it wasn't built around how a kitchen and a front of house actually work together.
The usual reasons operators start searching for a Teya alternative:
- They want a real restaurant POS, not just a card terminal with an order screen
- They want online ordering that feeds straight into the till, without a second platform
- They run more than one site and are tired of logging into each one separately
- They're adding kiosks or delivery and Teya has nothing to offer there
- They need staff management, reporting and stock tools that go past the basics
If you only take card payments at a counter, you may not need to switch. If any of the above sounds like your week, keep reading.
The best Teya alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish
Flipdish is the one to look at first if you've outgrown a card-payments-first provider. It covers POS, integrated payments, online ordering, self-service kiosks and marketing and loyalty in one system.
The difference from Teya is where each company starts. Teya is a payments business that added some POS features. Flipdish is restaurant software that has payments built in. In practice that means an order placed on your website, a kiosk or the phone lands in the same place as an order rung through at the till, and the money from all of them ends up in the same report.
What you get with Flipdish that Teya doesn't offer:
- Payments and POS on one dashboard, so there's one reconciliation at close instead of two
- Online ordering through your own branded website and app, so customers order from you and not from a marketplace
- Self-service kiosks that prompt for extras and take pressure off the counter at peak times
- Delivery platform orders pulled into the POS through order management, so nobody retypes a Deliveroo ticket
- An AI phone agent that answers calls and takes orders when the team is busy
- Kitchen display screens in place of paper tickets
- Multi-location management for groups
Payments run across every channel: in person, online, kiosk and phone. The owner or finance person sees one revenue number, not four to add up by hand.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square sells card terminals alongside its restaurant POS. It's cheap to start and you can be up and running fast.
It copes well with simple counter service on a single site. The trouble shows up when you want delivery orders in the same flow, several sites under one login, or reporting that goes deeper than daily sales. At that point you're either bolting on other tools or living with gaps.
3. SumUp
SumUp makes card readers for small businesses and its pricing is easy to understand. Setting one up takes minutes.
But it isn't a restaurant POS, and it doesn't connect to delivery platforms the way a restaurant needs. It suits a market stall or a tiny café. A restaurant with table service, a kitchen and online orders will hit the ceiling quickly.
4. Dojo
Dojo is a UK payments company with card terminals and some POS features. Its transaction rates are competitive and it settles the next day, which matters if cash flow is tight.
On payments alone, Dojo is a stronger option than Teya for UK operators. What it doesn't have is the restaurant-specific side: ordering, kitchen tools and multi-site management are all things you'd need to find elsewhere. Flipdish has them.
5. Zettle by PayPal
Zettle offers card readers, a POS app and some inventory tracking. You'll see it at markets and with small independent food sellers.
Same story as SumUp and Teya, really. It's a general small business product, and the reporting is too light for a restaurant that needs to know its food cost by site or its best-selling dish by hour.
What a restaurant needs from its payment setup
A shop sells a thing and takes the money. A restaurant takes an order, sends it to a kitchen, adds a tip, splits the bill four ways, refunds a cold plate and does all that again online at the same time. The payment system has to keep up with that.
| Requirement | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Integrated POS and payments | No double entry, so fewer reconciliation errors |
| Online payment processing | Takes card-not-present payments for delivery and pre-orders |
| Kiosk payment integration | Takes payment at self-service terminals |
| Multi-channel reconciliation | One view of in-person, online and kiosk revenue |
| Tipping management | Tips are recorded correctly whichever channel they come through |
| Refunds and voids | Done from the POS, no separate device |
| Chargeback management | Your provider deals with them, you don't chase them |
Teya covers in-person card payments. Flipdish covers every channel a restaurant sells through.
What a separate card machine and POS really costs you
Many restaurants run one system for the till and a different card machine on the side. It works, until you look at what it takes to keep going:
- Someone reconciles two sets of figures at the end of every shift
- You pay two monthly fees where one would do
- Staff carry a handheld to the table, then walk back to the till to key in the same amount
- Nothing links what was ordered to what was charged, so a mismatch means digging through receipts
- When something breaks, you work out which of two support lines to ring
None of that is dramatic on its own. Over a year it's hours of manager time, and the mistakes it causes are small enough that they rarely get chased.
Connect the terminal directly to the POS and the amount goes across automatically. Nobody types it twice. Flipdish Pay does this for in-person, online and kiosk payments, so the same logic applies whether the customer paid at the table or from their sofa.
Teya vs Flipdish
| Feature | Flipdish | Teya |
|---|---|---|
| Card payments | ✓ | ✓ |
| Restaurant POS | ✓ | Basic |
| Online ordering | ✓ | ✗ |
| Self-service kiosks | ✓ | ✗ |
| Kitchen display system | ✓ | ✗ |
| Delivery platform integrations | ✓ | ✗ |
| AI phone ordering | ✓ | ✗ |
| Loyalty and marketing | ✓ | ✗ |
| Multi-location management | ✓ | Limited |
| Unified reporting | ✓ | Basic |
Teya does take card payments well. Everything else on that list is where a growing restaurant starts to feel the gap.
Picture a Friday night. Tables are turning, three delivery tablets are beeping, two people are waiting at the counter and the phone is ringing. On a payments-first setup, someone is copying delivery orders into the till, someone else is answering the phone with a pen, and the kitchen is reading from three different places. With orders from every channel arriving in one system, the kitchen gets one queue and the person at the counter just takes payment.
Other places to compare
restauranttech.co.uk has independent comparisons of restaurant payment and POS systems for UK and Irish operators, if you want a view that isn't ours.
Switching from Teya
Moving payment providers sounds worse than it is, but a few things are worth sorting before you start.
Check your Teya contract first. Look at the term, the notice period and whether there's a fee for ending early. If you're mid-contract, it can make sense to run the new system at one site, or alongside the old one for a while, and let the Teya agreement run out.
Next, the menu. Your items, modifiers and prices have to be rebuilt in the new POS, and that's the part that takes the longest if the menu is large. Do it once, properly, and use the same menu for the till, the website and the kiosk. That's one of the quieter advantages of a single platform: you change a price in one place and it changes everywhere, instead of editing it three times and forgetting the app.
Then staff. Pick a quiet day, not a Saturday, and let the team ring through a few dummy orders before service. Servers pick up a till quickly if it's laid out like the floor they work.
Lastly, think about what you'd like to add once the basics are stable. You don't have to switch everything at once. Start with POS and payments, turn on online ordering later, then look at a kiosk. Flipdish is set up so you can add pieces one at a time without changing provider again.
So which one?
Don't pick on card machine price alone. Ask what you'll be running in two years. If it's one counter and card payments, Teya or Square will do the job. If you're adding online ordering, kiosks, delivery or a second site, you'll want a platform that does all of that from the start, because moving later means retraining staff in the middle of a busy period.
Flipdish does everything Teya does on payments and adds the restaurant side: ordering, kitchen, kiosks and reporting across sites.
Request a Flipdish demo and see it running on a real menu.