Top 5 Restaurant POS Systems in Ireland
What is a restaurant POS system?
A restaurant POS is the software and hardware that takes orders and payments. It's the till, plus everything wired into it. A good one also holds your menu, sends tickets to the kitchen, pulls in orders from your website and the delivery apps, and tells you what you sold last Tuesday at every location.
The choice touches nearly everything. It decides how orders reach the kitchen, how staff key them in, how customers pay, and whether your online and in-person sales end up in one place or two. Switching later is a pain, so it's worth getting right the first time. Retraining staff, rebuilding menus and moving hardware all cost money and a few bad weeks of service.
Here are five POS systems used by restaurants in Ireland, ranked by how well they fit the Irish market.
1. Flipdish
Best for restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and multi-location groups in Ireland.
Flipdish is an Irish company, founded in Dublin. Its POS was built for hospitality from the start rather than adapted from a retail product, and you notice it in the small things: the workflows, the wording, the integrations and the people on the support line all assume you run a restaurant.
The Flipdish POS is cloud-based and covers dine-in, takeaway, delivery and kiosk orders from one platform. What that means in practice:
- Online orders from your Flipdish website, app and self-service kiosks land in the same queue as counter orders, so staff watch one screen
- The Kitchen Display System replaces paper tickets with screens and routing rules, so the grill gets grill items and the fryer gets the rest
- Menu changes happen once and apply across every channel and location
- Flipdish Pay takes in-person and online payments on the same platform as the orders
- Reporting and analytics show live sales in the manager app, from wherever you happen to be
- The AI Phone Agent answers the phone and takes orders in Irish and UK English
- Marketplace integration sends Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders straight into the POS
One shop or twenty, the setup is the same. For groups, the Restaurant Management System puts staff, inventory, scheduling and reporting in one place.
Take a takeaway with a counter, a website and a Just Eat listing. Normally that's three sources of orders and, often, three screens or a pile of tablets by the till. With Flipdish they all arrive in one queue, the kitchen sees them on one display, and the owner sees one set of sales figures at the end of the night. For a group, the same applies across sites, so the owner doesn't have to ring each manager for numbers on Monday morning.
The support team also knows Irish payment processors, Irish VAT and the integrations Irish operators actually use, which saves a lot of explaining.
Learn more about Flipdish POS →
2. Lightspeed Restaurant
Best for larger restaurants that want detailed table management and a big app ecosystem.
Lightspeed Restaurant is a cloud POS with solid tools for floor plans, tables and cover management. Its app store links to dozens of other tools, including reservations, accounting and delivery management, so you can build a fairly custom setup.
For a full-service dining room with a lot of tables, it does more than the basic options. The catch is cost, because subscriptions can add up. Support is run internationally, which can be a problem when you need someone on the phone during a Friday service in Cork. It also has no Irish-market focus, and direct online ordering and AI tools aren't part of the core product the way they are with Flipdish.
3. Square for Restaurants
Best for very small cafés and food stalls with low volumes, where simple is the goal.
Square's restaurant product is quick to set up and cheap to start. If you're a single operator serving a modest number of customers, it does the job and you won't think about it much.
It struggles once tickets pile up or the menu gets complicated. Online ordering, loyalty and marketing tools are thin next to a platform built for restaurants. If you plan to grow, or already have more than one site, you'll outgrow it.
4. Epos Now
Best for hospitality businesses that want a familiar UK and Ireland EPOS.
Epos Now is widely used across both countries. Its hospitality product covers basic table service and till management, and third-party add-ons exist for online ordering and delivery aggregation.
It's less restaurant-specific than Flipdish and ships with fewer hospitality features. Operators with several locations or a lot of delivery orders end up bolting on extra services to match what Flipdish does natively, and each add-on is another bill and another login.
5. Tevalis
Best for mid-sized hospitality groups that want enterprise-style POS features.
Tevalis is a UK hospitality POS provider with installs in pubs, restaurants and hotel groups. It copes with complicated tabling and multi-location setups.
Rollout is heavier than with a cloud-native system. You see it less often in Ireland than the other four, and it doesn't include native online ordering or AI marketing tools, so you'd need to add those from somewhere else.
What to look for in a restaurant POS in Ireland
Start with delivery platforms. Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo all operate in Ireland, and Just Eat is the dominant marketplace. Your POS should take their orders directly so nobody retypes a ticket into the till at 7pm on a Saturday.
VAT is next. Irish VAT on hospitality is not the same as in the UK, and rates differ for food, hot takeaway and alcohol. Check that the system handles Irish rates properly out of the box, including the reduced ones, and ask to see a sample report.
Payments matter too. Contactless and mobile wallets are everywhere in Irish restaurants, so the integrated payments setup needs to accept every common card type and wallet your customers use.
If you take collection or delivery orders, the POS and online ordering should be one platform or very tightly linked. Two separate systems mean double handling, and double handling means wrong orders.
Last is support. When the system goes down mid-service you want someone who picks up the phone and understands the Irish market. Flipdish has an Irish team for this.
Questions to ask before you sign
Whichever POS you shortlist, put these to the salesperson and get answers in writing.
What happens when the internet drops? Cloud systems differ on what keeps working offline, and you don't want to find out during a dinner rush.
How long is the contract, and what does leaving cost? Ask about hardware too. Some providers sell terminals outright, some rent them, and the monthly figure can look very different once you add screens, printers and a kiosk.
Who handles menu setup and onboarding? A system that takes three weeks to get going is expensive even if the subscription is cheap.
Can you export your sales and customer data if you leave? Is the data yours?
And finally, ask for a reference from a restaurant like yours, same size, same type of food, same country. A chain of fifty sites says little about whether a single chipper in Galway will be well looked after.
Which one to pick
It depends on what you run, but the answer is clearer than most "best of" lists admit.
If you're a one-person café or a food stall doing a few dozen orders a day, Square is fine. Don't overbuy. Just know that the day you add online ordering or a second site, you'll be shopping again.
If you run a big sit-down restaurant and your biggest headache is tables, covers and floor plans, Lightspeed is worth a demo. Price it carefully, and ask how support works for Irish customers.
Pubs and hotel groups with complicated tabs and several bars might look at Tevalis, though you'll want to ask how many Irish venues use it. Epos Now suits a business that already has it, or one that wants a name it recognises.
For everyone else, which is most Irish restaurants and takeaways, Flipdish is the better fit. A takeaway doing a third of its sales through a website, an app and the marketplaces needs those orders in the same queue as the counter. It needs a kitchen screen that sorts them, a card reader that talks to the till, and a phone that doesn't ring out when the staff are busy. Flipdish does all of that without stitching together products from four different companies, and the whole thing is supported by a team based in the country where you trade.
POS comparison for Irish restaurants
| Feature | Flipdish | Lightspeed | Square | Epos Now | Tevalis |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Irish-founded and supported | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Cloud-based POS | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Native online ordering | ✓ | Limited | Limited | Third-party | Third-party |
| Branded mobile app | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-service kiosk | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| AI phone ordering | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Just Eat integration | ✓ Native | Third-party | Third-party | Third-party | Third-party |
| Multi-location management | ✓ | ✓ | Limited | Limited | ✓ |
| Restaurant management system | ✓ | Partial | ✗ | Partial | Partial |
How Flipdish serves Irish restaurants
Flipdish started in Dublin in 2015 and still supports Irish restaurants: independent takeaways, café groups, QSRs and multi-site chains. Thousands of Irish operators use it.
The Flipdish platform covers POS, online ordering, kiosks, payments, loyalty, marketing and AI. One provider handles all of it, so you have one integration, one support team, one contract and one place where your restaurant data lives.
Get a Flipdish demo for your Irish restaurant →
For independent comparisons and reviews of restaurant technology in Ireland and the UK, see restauranttech.co.uk.