Foodhub Alternative: The Best Foodhub Alternatives for Takeaways

Why takeaways look for Foodhub alternatives

Foodhub is a UK takeaway marketplace, and its commission is lower than Just Eat's or Uber Eats'. For a lot of independent takeaways that made it the cheap way into delivery. Nobody has to apologise for using it.

The trouble starts when Foodhub becomes most of your orders. Commission is paid on every single one, month after month. Take a takeaway doing £10,000 a month through Foodhub at 6-10%. That's £600 to £1,000 handed over every month, or £7,200 to £12,000 across a year, and the number only goes down if your sales do.

There's also the customer problem. When someone orders through Foodhub, they're Foodhub's customer. You get a name on a ticket and not much else. You can't send them a text when you launch a new menu, you can't offer them a free side on their fifth order, and you can't win them back if they stop ordering. The platform decides how your restaurant is listed and where it ranks, and it can change commission or add marketing charges whenever it likes. You find out when the invoice arrives.

The fix isn't to leave Foodhub tomorrow. It's to build a direct ordering channel next to it and move your regulars across.

1. Flipdish - the best Foodhub alternative for takeaways

Flipdish is the pick if you want to own your customers and stop paying a percentage on repeat orders. It's the only option on this list that does that, because the others are marketplaces.

What you get:

A branded website with ordering built in, under your name and not a marketplace's
A mobile app with your logo on it, which regulars can keep on their home screen
No commission on direct orders. You pay a flat platform fee instead of a cut of every sale
Loyalty and marketing tools, so a first-time customer gets a reason to come back
An AI Phone Agent that answers the phone, takes the order and can point callers to your online ordering
A POS system where direct and marketplace orders land in the same queue, so the kitchen isn't watching three tablets

That last point matters more than it sounds. A lot of takeaways run a tablet for each delivery app plus a phone, and someone ends up retyping orders at 7pm on a Friday. One queue means one place to look.

What it does to your numbers

Say you do £10,000 a month through Foodhub at 8%. You're paying £800 a month, £9,600 a year.

Now move 30% of that to your own channel. That's £3,000 a month in orders that no longer carry 8% commission, so you keep £240 a month, or £2,880 a year. Move half and you keep £400 a month. Those orders also tend to be your best ones, because they come from people who already know you and don't need a discount to order.

The comparison isn't free on the other side. You pay Flipdish's monthly fee, and card payments carry processing charges wherever you take them, so put both next to your current Foodhub bill when you work it out. Still, a flat fee that stays the same as your direct volume grows is a different deal from a percentage that grows with it.

It gets more favourable if you also sell through Just Eat or Uber Eats. Every repeat customer you move from those platforms saves you 14% or more, and at Uber Eats rates, 25-30%.

Flipdish suits independent takeaways, pizza shops, Indian and Chinese restaurants, fish and chip shops, and takeaway groups with more than one site.

2. Just Eat, kept as a second channel

Just Eat is still the biggest UK takeaway marketplace by order volume. If you've just opened, or you're in a new area, it will put your menu in front of people who've never heard of you. A new website can't do that on day one.

So don't think of it as a replacement. Think of it as advertising you pay for per sale. A customer finds you on Just Eat, the order arrives with a flyer or a card in the bag pointing to your own site or app, and the second order goes direct. You pay commission once to get the customer and not every time they come back.

Plenty of takeaways run Just Eat and Flipdish side by side. It isn't either/or.

3. Uber Eats

Uber Eats is strong in UK cities, and its customers tend to spend more per order. The commission is the highest of the lot, in the region of 25-30%, which makes it a hard channel to rely on for margin.

Use it the same way as Just Eat. It's good for reach in busy areas and bad as the place where your regulars live. If a customer orders from you every week through Uber Eats, you're paying a premium fee for a relationship you've already built. That's the customer to move.

4. Deliveroo

Deliveroo sits at the premium end, with higher average orders and higher commission to match. For some cuisines and some postcodes it brings in customers you wouldn't otherwise reach, and that can justify the fee.

If you're trying to improve margin, though, Deliveroo doesn't help. It's an acquisition cost, and you should treat it as one.

5. A generic ordering plugin on your own website

Some takeaways already have a website and try to bolt ordering onto it with a plugin. It looks like the cheap route to direct orders. In practice the results are usually bad:

The ordering flow is clunky on a phone, where most takeaway orders happen
There's no loyalty scheme and no customer database worth using
Nothing connects to your POS, so orders turn up by email and someone has to retype them
When it breaks, you're the support team

An ordering system built for restaurants fixes all four. Customers get through checkout faster, so more of them finish the order. The kitchen gets tickets automatically. And you can see who's ordering and how often.

Running marketplaces and direct ordering together

Most advice here frames it as a choice. It isn't. The setup that works for UK takeaways is both at once.

Marketplaces find you new customers. Your own channel keeps them. Over a few months a bigger share of your orders goes through the direct side, and the commission line on your accounts shrinks as it does.

Channel	Commission	Customer data	Loyalty	Long-term margin
Foodhub	6-10% per order	No	No	Erodes over time
Just Eat	14%+ per order	No	No	High cost at scale
Uber Eats	25-30% per order	No	No	Very high cost at scale
Flipdish direct	Zero per order	Yes	Yes	Improves over time

The table shows commission only. Payment processing and platform fees are separate, so check them against your own statements before you decide.

How to get customers to switch

A direct channel is worth nothing if nobody uses it. A few things that work for takeaways:

Put a card in every delivery bag with your website or app and a reason to use it, like a free drink or a discount on the next order
Print the ordering link or a QR code on menus, boxes and your shopfront window
When someone phones, have the answer ready: "You can order online at our own site and skip the wait"
Put your direct link in your Google Business Profile and on your social pages
Reward the second and third direct order, not just the first

Your loyalty tool does the rest. Once a customer has ordered direct, you can message them about offers and they're likely to come back to you rather than scroll the marketplace app and pick whoever's cheapest that night.

Watch the split between channels each month. If direct is 10% of orders in month one and 25% by month six, it's working. If it's flat, the problem is usually that customers don't know it exists.

When direct ordering won't help much

It isn't right for every shop. If you're in a spot with very little repeat trade, say next to a station where almost nobody orders twice, a direct channel has fewer regulars to capture, and a marketplace may stay your main source of orders for a long time. The same goes if you've got no way of telling customers about your own site. A direct channel with no promotion behind it just sits there.

It's easy to check. Look at your last month of Foodhub orders and count how many addresses or phone numbers show up more than once. That's your repeat base, and it's the group you'd move first. If it's a few dozen people, expect a slow start. If it's several hundred, the saving is already in your data.

Making the switch

Flipdish handles the technical setup, which covers your website, app, POS connection and payment processing, and supports you through launch. Most takeaways are live within a few weeks.

You don't have to drop Foodhub to start. Keep it running while the direct channel gets going, and move customers across a bit at a time. If a week goes badly you haven't lost your income. Later, once you can see what the direct channel brings in, you can decide whether Foodhub is still worth its commission or whether Just Eat or Uber Eats earn their place instead.

For more takeaway technology comparisons, visit restauranttech.co.uk.

To see what direct ordering would cost you against your current commission, visit flipdish.com/online-ordering.