Top 5 Self-Service Kiosk Systems for Restaurants
The best self-service kiosk systems for restaurants
Kiosks pay for themselves in two ways. Customers who order on a screen tend to spend more, because the screen offers a side or a drink every single time and nobody feels awkward saying yes. And the counter queue gets shorter, so staff spend less time typing in orders and more time making food. That holds in QSRs, casual dining restaurants, cafés and fast-casual places.
Which kiosk you pick matters more than whether you buy one. A good kiosk sends orders straight into your POS and onto the kitchen display. A bad one turns into a second ordering channel: its own menu to keep up to date, its own order screen to watch, its own sales report to reconcile at the end of the week. A lot of restaurants only find that out after the install.
Here are five options for UK and Irish restaurants, ranked. Flipdish is first and the reasons are below. The other four are each good at something, and for some businesses one of them is the right call.
1. Flipdish
Flipdish self-service kiosks are built for food service and run on the Flipdish POS. A kiosk order lands on the kitchen display exactly like a counter order. Nobody retypes it, and there's no spare tablet sitting by the pass.
The upselling is what to look at closely. If a customer adds a burger, the kiosk suggests sides and add-ons based on what actually sells alongside that burger. It does this on every order, which a person at a busy counter won't. Average order values typically go up when a kiosk replaces counter ordering.
What's included:
- Kiosk orders appear on the same kitchen display system as counter orders, so there's no separate tablet or management layer
- Change a price or add an item once and it updates on the kiosk, the POS and online at the same time
- Customers earn and redeem loyalty points at the kiosk
- An optional tipping prompt at checkout
- Card, contactless and digital wallet payments
- A design built to meet accessibility standards
- An interface that matches your brand
For groups with several sites, kiosk management is central. You make one change and it reaches every kiosk in every location. That's a big deal if you've ever had to walk a price change round ten sites.
Best for QSRs, fast-casual restaurants, cafés and multi-site groups in the UK and Ireland.
2. Acrelec
Acrelec builds self-service kiosks for large QSR and fast-food chains around the world, and it has big deployments with major quick-service brands. The hardware is high quality. The software copes with complicated menus at scale, which matters when you've got hundreds of items, combos and regional variations.
The catch is size. Acrelec is set up for large enterprise accounts, and a rollout needs real IT resource behind it. An independent restaurant or a small chain without a technology team will find it overengineered, expensive to deploy and hard to run alone. Implementation takes a long time. It's also a kiosk specialist, not a full restaurant platform, so you'll still need a separate answer for POS, online ordering and the rest.
Best suited to national and international QSR chains that are rolling out at scale and have in-house IT.
3. Lightspeed Restaurant (with kiosk add-on)
Lightspeed Restaurant has a self-ordering kiosk module that plugs into its POS. If you already run Lightspeed, this is a sensible extension and you don't have to bring in another vendor.
The module covers the basics: menu display, item customisation and payment. It's reasonably well connected to the core POS, so orders don't go astray.
But it's an add-on to a POS, not a kiosk product in its own right. The upselling logic is less sophisticated than Flipdish's, and the marketing and loyalty links are thin. If you're not on Lightspeed already, there's little reason to move to it for the kiosk. You'd do better starting with a platform that has kiosks built in.
Best suited to existing Lightspeed customers who want basic kiosk capability and don't want to switch.
4. Evoke Creative
Evoke Creative is a UK kiosk hardware and software company, strongest in hospitality and retail. It makes its own hardware, and its software handles complex menus in high-traffic venues.
Evoke is a hardware and kiosk software specialist more than a restaurant platform. Connecting its kiosks to your existing POS takes development work or middleware, so somebody has to build and maintain that link. If you want orders to flow from kiosk to kitchen without a technical project in the middle, a system like Flipdish, where POS, kiosk and kitchen display come as one, is the more practical route.
Best suited to large hospitality groups with in-house technical staff who want custom hardware.
5. Vita Mojo
Vita Mojo is a restaurant technology platform used by branded restaurant chains in the UK. Kiosk is one channel it offers, next to online ordering and POS. It's designed around branded QSR and fast-casual chains that care about nutritional information, detailed menu setup and ordering across several channels.
That's a specific type of customer. Independent restaurants, traditional takeaways and any business where digital ordering isn't the main channel will find it a poor fit. It also has less presence outside London and the branded casual dining scene in the UK.
Best suited to branded fast-casual and QSR chains with a health-focused or nutrition-led menu.
What to look for in a restaurant kiosk system
| Feature | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Native POS integration | Orders should go straight to the kitchen, not through a separate channel |
| Centralised menu management | One update should reach the kiosk, POS and online at once |
| Upselling logic | Good suggestions lift average order value, bad ones get ignored |
| Loyalty and tipping | Brings customers back and adds to staff income |
| Multi-site management | One dashboard for every kiosk in every location |
| Payment flexibility | Card, contactless, Apple Pay, Google Pay |
Questions to ask before you sign
Vendor demos always look good, so ask the awkward things.
What happens when the internet drops? Some kiosks stop taking orders. Others queue them and carry on. You want to know which before a Friday night finds out for you.
Where does the menu live? If the kiosk has its own menu, you're maintaining two. Sold-out items are where this bites hardest: someone marks the last portion of a dish as gone on the POS, and the kiosk keeps selling it for another hour.
Can you see kiosk sales next to counter, online and phone sales in one report? If the answer involves exporting spreadsheets, the answer is no.
Who supplies and fixes the hardware? A cracked screen on a kiosk in the middle of your dining room is a lost sales channel until it's replaced. Ask about turnaround, not just warranty.
What does the payment setup look like? Check whether the kiosk uses the same payment provider as the rest of your business, and what the fees are on each channel.
How does the upselling work? Ask to see it with your menu, not the demo menu. Suggestions that make sense on a burger menu can look silly on a menu full of set meals.
The business case for restaurant kiosks
Customers who order on a screen aren't under any pressure from the person behind them in the queue, so they take their time and add things. The upsell prompts do the rest. That's where the higher average order value comes from.
Labour is a separate gain. A kiosk takes orders during the lunch rush without anyone standing at it, so you can move a person from the till to the kitchen or the pass. It won't remove staff, but it does shift where they're needed.
Accuracy goes up because customers enter their own customisations. Nobody mishears "no onions" over a noisy counter. And queues get shorter when a share of the counter traffic goes to the screens.
Whether it all adds up depends on volume. A busy QSR or fast-casual restaurant taking 300+ covers a day typically gets its money back in twelve to eighteen months. A quiet café with a handful of orders an hour will take a lot longer, and might not be worth it at all. Four things drive the maths: how many orders you take, what share of them go through the kiosk, how much more each kiosk order is worth, and what the hardware and software cost.
Why Flipdish is the strongest kiosk option
The Flipdish kiosk isn't a standalone product. It's one channel in a full restaurant platform that also covers POS, online ordering, phone ordering, marketing and reporting.
Run Flipdish across all of them and every order goes through one system, whether it comes from the counter, the kiosk, the website, the app or a call answered by the AI phone agent. One kitchen display. One reporting dashboard. One customer database.
That last one is the real point. If you want to know who your customers are and market to them, you need their orders in one place. A kiosk-only product gives you kiosk orders and nothing else.
For independent comparisons of kiosk systems and other restaurant technology, visit restauranttech.co.uk.
Request a Flipdish kiosk demo to see how it fits your restaurant.