Quantic Alternative: The Best Quantic POS Alternatives for Restaurants
What is Quantic?
Quantic is a POS system for retail and food service businesses. It takes orders and payments, gives you basic reporting and has a few inventory tools. You'll mostly find it in independent restaurants, cafés and quick service shops where the owner wanted something fairly cheap with an interface staff can pick up quickly.
For a single site with a short menu, that can be plenty. The problems start when the business wants more than a till: online ordering on its own website, self-service kiosks, a loyalty scheme, an app with its own branding, or several sites run from one login. Quantic doesn't cover much of that out of the box, and that's usually the point where owners start looking around.
Why restaurant operators look for Quantic alternatives
Nobody switches POS for fun. It costs time, retraining and a few shaky services, so the reasons below are usually things that have been annoying an owner for months. Most of them come down to the same thing: the till does its job, but everything around it lives somewhere else.
Commission is the first reason. Every Uber Eats or Just Eat order costs the restaurant a cut, so plenty of operators want customers ordering from their own website or app instead. That needs a POS with direct ordering built in, or one that connects to a direct ordering tool cleanly. Quantic's native online ordering is limited.
Kiosks come next. Self-service kiosks are now normal in quick service and fast casual sites, and Quantic doesn't offer them natively. If you add a kiosk from another supplier, you end up with a second system, a second copy of the menu and a second set of numbers to reconcile.
Marketing is the third gap. If you want to know who your regulars are, what they order and when they last came in, a basic POS won't tell you much. Loyalty schemes and email or push campaigns need that customer data in one place.
Then there's scale. Once a group has three or four sites, changing a price or hiding a sold-out item in one place becomes a real need. So do consolidated reporting and staff management across the group. Operators with multiple sites often find Quantic hard to stretch that far.
Last, integrations. Hooking Quantic up to delivery platforms, accounting software or loyalty tools takes extra work, and the data ends up scattered across several systems.
The best Quantic POS alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish
Flipdish is the best Quantic alternative for restaurants that want to go beyond a basic POS. It combines POS, online ordering, kiosks, payments, loyalty, marketing and management tools in one system, so you're not stitching together five suppliers.
The main reason it comes first is that it replaces several things at once. Your POS, your online ordering platform, your kiosks, your loyalty programme, your marketing tool and your payment processor all sit on the same platform. That means fewer subscriptions and one set of data instead of six.
The POS itself is built for restaurants rather than adapted from a general retail till. Restaurant POS features include table management, split bills, kitchen display systems, modifier handling and multi-course ordering.
For direct orders, Flipdish online ordering gives you a branded website and app. Every order that comes through them is one you don't pay a delivery platform commission on.
Flipdish kiosks run on the same platform as the POS, so in-store, kiosk and online orders all land in one kitchen queue and show up in one report. Nobody has to retype anything.
If your phone still rings a lot at peak times, the AI phone agent answers calls, takes the order, offers upsells and takes payment, without someone having to stand at the counter doing it.
Groups can manage menus, staff, pricing and promotions for every site from one dashboard. Payments go through Flipdish Pay, which works across the POS, online ordering and kiosks, so you don't need a separate processor.
If you're on Quantic now and want to grow, take more direct orders or add locations, Flipdish is the obvious next step.
2. Square for Restaurants
Square for Restaurants is an entry-level POS that most people have heard of. It's easy to set up, cheap for small operators and works with Square's own payment hardware. You can take online orders through Square Online. Multi-location and enterprise features are thin, and the product is built to be simple, not to handle complicated setups.
It suits very small, single-site restaurants and cafés that want a low-cost start.
3. Lightspeed Restaurant
Lightspeed is a cloud POS used by independent restaurants and small groups in the UK. Menu and table management are strong, it connects to a lot of third-party tools and the reporting is good. It doesn't include native kiosks, and its branded direct ordering isn't at the level of Flipdish's.
It suits independent restaurants and small groups that want a feature-rich POS and don't need direct ordering or kiosks.
4. Epos Now
Epos Now is a UK-based POS used by a lot of small restaurants, cafés and retailers. It's low cost and easy to find through resellers. The restaurant features are less developed than on platforms built only for restaurants.
It suits small independents and cafés that want a cheap POS with UK support.
5. Zettle by PayPal
Zettle is a mobile-first card reader with a basic POS attached, from PayPal. It's meant for very small businesses taking simple payments. There's no real order management, kitchen printing, table management or multi-location support, which are the things a growing restaurant ends up needing.
It suits market stalls, pop-ups and very small food businesses that just take card payments.
Comparing Quantic with Flipdish
| Feature | Quantic | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant POS | Yes | Yes |
| Online ordering channel | Limited | Native |
| Branded mobile app | No | Yes |
| Self-service kiosks | No | Yes |
| AI phone ordering | No | Yes |
| Loyalty and marketing | Basic | Full |
| Integrated payments | Yes | Yes |
| Multi-location management | Limited | Yes |
| Kitchen display system | Limited | Yes |
Both have a restaurant POS and both have integrated payments. The gap is everything around the till. If you only ever need to ring up orders and take payment at one counter, you won't notice most of the rows in this table. If you want orders coming in from a website, an app, a kiosk and the phone, you'll notice nearly all of them.
How to choose a Quantic alternative
Pick for where the restaurant is going, not just where it is today. A system that fits you now but can't handle your second site means switching again in a year.
There's also a case for staying put. If you run one site, your orders are mostly walk-in and you've never wanted a website or app, Quantic may be doing exactly what you need, and moving would cost you more than it saves. Switching makes sense once you're feeling the gaps listed above, not before.
If you want direct online orders and less dependence on commission, look for a platform with its own ordering channel, meaning your own website and app. Flipdish's online ordering platform includes this as standard.
If you're opening more sites, you need multi-location menu management, central reporting and group-wide staff tools from the start. Ask the vendor to show you a menu change going out to five sites at once. Don't take "yes, we do multi-site" as an answer.
If you want kiosks, check whether the kiosk and the POS are really one system. With Flipdish, the kiosk and POS share a platform, so both send orders to the same queue and the same reports. Not every POS connects to kiosks that cleanly, and a loose connection tends to mean menu mismatches and missing orders at busy times.
If phone orders are a big part of your day, the AI phone agent can take those calls automatically. It's worth asking any vendor what they do about phones, because staff taking orders while serving customers in the restaurant is where mistakes happen.
A few questions are worth asking in every demo, whichever vendor you're talking to. What does the hardware cost, and is it tied to the software contract? Who handles payments, and what are the rates? How long is the contract and what does it cost to leave? What happens when the internet drops? Can you see a real kitchen display with real modifiers, not a slide?
Making the switch from Quantic
Changing POS is a big operational decision, and the day it goes wrong is usually a busy one. Some things to sort out first.
- Write down every integration your current setup depends on. Accounting, delivery platforms, reservations, loyalty. Check that the new platform supports each one before you sign.
- Run a pilot at one site first, not the whole estate.
- Plan the menu migration properly. Get a clean export from Quantic and confirm the new platform can import it. Modifiers and combos are where imports tend to break, so check those by hand.
- Check when your current contract ends and what notice you need to give. It's easy to end up paying for two systems.
- Train staff before go-live, not during a Friday dinner service. Let them practise on the new screens with dummy orders.
- Confirm your hardware works. Flipdish supports its own POS hardware and can tell you what you need, and whether any of your existing kit can stay.
Pick a quiet day for the cutover, keep the old system available for a few days in case you need to look something up, and have someone from the vendor on call for the first service.
If you'd like to see how Flipdish compares with your current Quantic setup, you can request a demo at flipdish.com/pos-system.
For an independent guide to restaurant POS options in the UK, visit restauranttech.co.uk.