Deliverect vs Flipdish: Which Restaurant Technology Platform Is Better?
What these two platforms actually do
Deliverect and Flipdish get compared a lot, but they do different jobs. Putting them side by side is a bit like comparing a multi-plug adaptor with the wiring in the house.
Deliverect is middleware. It takes orders from delivery marketplaces like Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo and pushes them into a restaurant's POS. Instead of three tablets on the counter, each beeping on its own schedule, the orders come through as one stream.
Flipdish is a restaurant technology platform. It has its own POS system, online ordering, branded apps, self-service kiosks, AI phone ordering, AI marketing, loyalty and payments, and they were built to work together from the start.
So the question isn't which one does the same thing better. Deliverect makes marketplace orders easier to handle. Flipdish gives a restaurant its own ordering channels, so fewer orders have to go through a marketplace in the first place.
What is Deliverect?
Deliverect sits between the delivery marketplaces and whatever POS a restaurant already uses. Without it, a takeaway listed on Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo usually has one tablet per marketplace. Someone reads each order off the tablet and keys it into the till by hand. On a busy Friday that's where mistakes creep in - a missed modifier, a wrong quantity, an order typed in twice.
With Deliverect, the Just Eat order goes to Deliverect and Deliverect sends it straight to the POS. Same for Uber Eats, same for Deliveroo. Menu changes can be pushed out to each marketplace from one place, so when you run out of a dish you mark it once instead of logging into three separate portals.
For a restaurant doing a lot of marketplace volume across several apps, that fixes a real problem.
What Deliverect's core product doesn't do:
- Provide a POS system
- Build direct ordering channels
- Offer branded apps or websites
- Run self-service kiosks
- Take phone orders
- Run marketing or loyalty programmes
It's a layer on top of systems you already have. If those systems are weak, Deliverect doesn't fix them. It also needs a POS to talk to, and if yours isn't on its list of integrations, you've got a problem before you start.
What is Flipdish?
Flipdish is used by thousands of restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and multi-location operators in the UK, Ireland and further afield. The platform covers:
- Restaurant POS - cloud-based point of sale for one site or many
- Online ordering from the restaurant's own website, commission-free
- Branded mobile apps for iOS and Android, carrying the restaurant's name and logo, not Flipdish's
- Self-service kiosks, hardware and software, mostly used in QSRs
- An AI phone agent that takes phone orders without a member of staff picking up
- AI marketing that sends campaigns based on what customers actually bought
- A Kitchen Display System that shows orders from every channel on one screen in the kitchen
- Loyalty, with points, rewards and personalised offers
Because it's one system, an order placed on the app, at a kiosk or over the phone lands in the same POS and on the same kitchen screen. There's no middleware between them because there's nothing to connect.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Deliverect | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Marketplace order aggregation | ✓ | Via integrations |
| Restaurant POS | ✗ | ✓ |
| Direct website ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded mobile app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-service kiosks | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Kitchen Display System | ✗ | ✓ |
| Marketing automation | Limited | ✓ |
| Loyalty programme | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-location management | Via third party | ✓ |
| Direct customer data ownership | ✗ | ✓ |
The table compares each company's core product. Deliverect has added some ordering tools of its own over time, so if one of these features matters to you, check what it currently offers. The POS row won't change, though. Deliverect doesn't make one.
The real difference: who owns the customer
If you're choosing between the two, this is the part that matters.
Deliverect makes marketplace ordering easier. It doesn't make it cheaper. Every order that comes through Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo still pays the marketplace's commission. The customer's details stay with the marketplace. And the restaurant still relies on the marketplace to send it traffic, so when Deliveroo changes its fees or how it ranks restaurants in the app, the restaurant has no say.
Look at what the restaurant actually gets from a marketplace order. It gets the order and a name on a ticket. It usually doesn't get an email address it can market to, or a record of what that person ordered last month. The marketplace keeps that, and next time the same customer opens the app it's free to show them a competitor first.
Flipdish works from the other end. Its apps, ordering website, kiosks and phone agent are all direct channels. When a customer orders through one of them, there's no marketplace commission on the order and the restaurant keeps the customer record. That record is what makes the loyalty programme and the AI marketing useful. Someone who ordered a large pepperoni three Fridays in a row can get an offer on a Friday. A marketplace won't do that for you. It'll do it for itself.
Deliverect helps you run marketplaces better. Flipdish helps you need them less. Those are different goals.
When Deliverect makes sense
There are cases where Deliverect is the right buy:
- You do a lot of marketplace volume, you plan to keep doing it, and juggling tablets is the problem
- You already have a POS, ordering website, apps and loyalty you're happy with, and the only gap is getting marketplace orders into the till
- You're big enough that marketplace aggregation really is your main operational headache
That isn't most independent restaurants. It isn't most growing groups either. For them, paying for middleware on top of marketplace commission means paying twice to stay on the marketplaces, and the direct ordering they need still hasn't been built.
What Flipdish replaces
A restaurant moving to Flipdish usually drops some or all of these:
- A separate POS
- A separate website ordering platform
- An app builder
- A loyalty platform
- A marketing automation tool
- Middleware for marketplace orders (Flipdish integrates with marketplaces and runs direct channels alongside them)
That's one contract instead of five or six, and one support line to ring when something breaks on a Saturday night. When the POS supplier blames the ordering platform and the ordering platform blames the middleware, nothing gets fixed. With one supplier there's nobody else to point at.
The data sits in one place too. Sales from the kiosk, the app and the counter show up in the same reports. Nobody has to export spreadsheets from three systems and try to make the numbers match.
Multi-location and franchise operators
Deliverect can aggregate marketplace orders across many sites. But it depends on whatever POS and ordering systems each site happens to run. If one site uses one POS and another site uses a different one, Deliverect connects both to the marketplaces, and head office still has two systems, two sets of menus and two sets of reports.
Flipdish handles that layer itself. Menus and prices are managed centrally. Reporting covers every site. Permissions can be set up for franchisees, so a franchise owner sees their own location and head office sees all of them. A new site is set up from a standard configuration instead of being built from scratch.
That last point gets underrated. A group opening its eighth or ninth site doesn't want to rebuild the menu by hand, test a fresh set of integrations and train staff on a setup that's slightly different from every other location. On one platform, the new site looks like the others from the day it opens.
For franchise networks the alternative is usually a pile of third-party systems held together with integrations. Every integration is one more thing that can break, and one more thing nobody in head office fully understands.
Pricing
Deliverect charges a monthly fee based on the number of locations and the number of orders going through it. Marketplace commission is on top. Deliverect doesn't change what Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo charge - it just gets their orders into your POS.
Flipdish pricing covers the whole platform and depends on which products you use and how big the business is. Orders through Flipdish's own channels carry no marketplace commission. The restaurant keeps that money.
The sums are simple enough. Marketplace commission takes a cut of every order. Move a decent share of those orders to your own app or website and that cut stops on those orders. A restaurant doing real volume through Flipdish's direct channels usually finds the platform costs a lot less than marketplace commission plus middleware put together. That's before counting what the customer data is worth in repeat orders.
The catch is that direct ordering only pays back if customers use it. If nearly all your orders come from marketplaces and you've no plan to change that, the commission saving won't show up.
Which should you choose?
Deliverect is a reasonable choice if your business is built around marketplaces and you need to tidy up several marketplace feeds. It solves that one problem well.
Flipdish is the better long-term choice if you want to:
- Own your customer relationships instead of renting access to them from a marketplace
- Build direct ordering that improves your margins as it grows
- Run your POS, online ordering, apps and loyalty on one system
- Add kiosks or AI phone ordering
- Open more locations, or franchise, without stitching new systems together each time
Most growing restaurants are trying to take more orders direct and fewer through marketplaces. Flipdish is built for that. Deliverect is built to make the marketplace model run more smoothly, and that's the model those restaurants are trying to rely on less.
Find out more
Flipdish works with restaurants across the UK and Ireland that want more direct orders and less reliance on marketplaces. See what the platform includes: