Como Alternative: The Best Como Alternatives for Restaurant Loyalty
What is Como?
Como is a loyalty and customer engagement platform used by restaurant groups and food retail chains. It covers CRM, loyalty programmes, personalised marketing automation and gift cards, and it usually plugs into the restaurant's POS.
It's built for multi-location groups, not independents. The typical Como customer already has a POS and an ordering setup, and wants a dedicated loyalty and CRM layer on top.
Why restaurants look for a Como alternative
Four complaints come up more than any others.
The first is that Como is a separate system. It connects to your POS instead of being part of it, so you end up with a separate contract, a separate login, a separate pile of customer data and an integration that somebody has to keep working. If you're trying to run fewer tools, that's a hard sell.
Cost is the second. Como isn't a low-cost product, and a smaller or growing group can struggle to justify it when other platforms include loyalty as part of a wider restaurant suite.
Third, it doesn't take orders. Como is loyalty and CRM only. There's no POS, online ordering, kiosk or kitchen management in it. If you want one platform that handles both the ordering and the customer relationship, you either look elsewhere or stitch two products together.
Fourth, the rollout. Putting Como across a multi-site estate takes real integration work, and more of it if your POS isn't on Como's preferred partner list.
What to look for in a Como alternative
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Native loyalty integration | Loyalty built into your ordering system, not bolted on |
| Customer data ownership | Full access to your customer database |
| Marketing automation | Automated campaigns based on order behaviour |
| Multi-channel loyalty | Loyalty working across app, website, kiosk and POS |
| Segmentation | Filter customers by frequency, spend, location and more |
| POS integration | Loyalty that works at the till as well as online |
| Cost-effectiveness | A platform fee that makes sense for your stage of growth |
Most of that list is easy to tick off in a sales call. The row that matters most is the till. Ask every vendor the same thing: if a customer earns points in the app at lunchtime, can they spend them at the counter that evening? If the answer involves a sync, ask how often it runs and what happens when it fails. Loyalty programmes that look fine in a demo tend to fall apart on exactly this point.
The second thing to check is who owns the customer data. You want to be able to see it, filter it and take it with you if you leave.
The best Como alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish - best overall Como alternative
Flipdish is the best Como alternative for restaurant groups in the UK and Ireland. It doesn't treat loyalty and CRM as a separate layer on top of your POS. Loyalty, marketing automation and customer management are part of the same platform as the POS, online ordering, kiosks and apps.
For loyalty and customer engagement, Flipdish includes:
- A built-in loyalty programme with points, rewards and stamp cards across all ordering channels
- Marketing automation triggered by order behaviour, such as win-back, first order and milestone rewards
- SMS marketing to segmented customer groups
- AI Marketing, which finds at-risk customers and targets them automatically
- A customer CRM with order history, frequency and spend data
- Loyalty on self-service kiosks, so customers earn and redeem there as well as online and in the app
- Loyalty in your branded mobile app, where customers can track their points
The main reason to pick Flipdish over Como is that there's nothing to connect. Your loyalty programme, POS, online ordering and kiosks are one platform, so every order from every channel lands on the same customer profile and the same loyalty account.
Como needs your POS and ordering channels linked to it through an API. If your POS provider doesn't have a strong Como integration, loyalty gets patchy. Customers earn online but not in store, or the other way round. On Flipdish that problem doesn't exist, because there's only one system.
Marketing is the other gap. Como's marketing tools are more rules-based. Flipdish's AI Marketing spots customers who are drifting away and sends win-back campaigns without a marketing manager building the rules by hand. For a small team running a lot of sites, that saves a real amount of setup time.
Flipdish suits QSRs, takeaways, café chains and multi-location restaurant groups in the UK and Ireland that want POS, ordering, loyalty and marketing in one place.
2. Yoyo Wallet
Yoyo does mobile loyalty and payments, mostly for food-to-go and hospitality. It's aimed at larger groups and integrates with several enterprise POS systems. Its scope is narrower than Flipdish's. It's loyalty and payments, not a full restaurant platform, so you'd still need separate tools for ordering and the rest. It makes sense if you're a bigger group already on a POS that Yoyo supports and mobile payments-led loyalty is the main thing you're after.
3. LoyaltyLion
LoyaltyLion is an ecommerce loyalty platform, and some hospitality operators adapt it for restaurants. It was designed for retail, not food service, so a few things don't fit well: table ordering, kiosk loyalty and kitchen integration in particular. If most of your sales are online and your menu behaves like a product catalogue, it can work. For a restaurant with a counter and a kitchen, it's a stretch.
4. Airship
Airship is a customer engagement and CRM platform used by hospitality operators in the UK. Its email and SMS marketing is strong, and it works with several hospitality POS systems. But it's a marketing tool, not a POS or ordering platform, so it sits on top of your existing stack in the same way Como does. If the layering is what you're trying to get away from, Airship doesn't solve it.
5. Marsello
Marsello offers loyalty and email marketing for retail and hospitality. It integrates with several POS systems and costs less than Como, which suits smaller groups. The hospitality side is still developing rather than mature, and it doesn't have the restaurant-specific marketing depth that Flipdish does.
Como vs Flipdish
| Feature | Como | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Loyalty programme | ✓ | ✓ |
| CRM and customer database | ✓ | ✓ |
| Marketing automation | ✓ | ✓ |
| AI-driven marketing | Limited | ✓ |
| POS included | ✗ | ✓ |
| Online ordering included | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded mobile app included | ✗ | ✓ |
| Kiosk loyalty | Via integration | ✓ (native) |
| SMS marketing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-location management | ✓ | ✓ |
| Setup complexity | High (integration required) | Low (native platform) |
On the loyalty features themselves, the two are close. The difference is everything around loyalty: whether the POS, ordering and app come with it, and how much work it takes to get them talking to each other.
Loyalty programme design: what works in restaurants
Decide what the programme is for before you pick a platform. Getting people to come back more often is a different goal from getting them to spend more per visit, and the mechanic should follow from that.
Frequency-based programmes, like stamp cards and visit-based rewards, suit coffee shops, lunch spots and QSRs. They reward the one thing you want, which is a return visit. "Buy nine, get the tenth free" needs no explaining at the counter.
Points per pound work better when the average order is higher and visits are less frequent. A table of four spending £120 once a month earns more under that model than it would under stamps.
Tiers (Bronze, Silver, Gold) can give a growing group something to aim at, but they're fiddly to run and easy to get wrong. Get the basic mechanic working first. Add tiers later, if at all.
Whatever you choose has to work on every channel. A programme that works in the app but not at the till loses credibility fast. A customer who earns points online and can't use them in store stops trusting the whole thing, and they won't tell you why. They'll just stop using it.
Also work out what each reward costs you before you launch. A free coffee after ten visits has a clear price. A points scheme with loose redemption rules can quietly eat into your margin for months before anyone checks.
This is where a native platform has the edge over a tool that sits on top of a POS.
Moving off Como
If you're already running Como, switching isn't a weekend job, so plan for it. Before you commit, find out what you can export: customer records, points balances and campaign history. Then ask the new vendor what they can import. Existing members will have points they've earned, and losing those is the quickest way to annoy your best customers.
Tell customers early. Tell them what's changing, what happens to their points and when. Running the old and new schemes side by side for a short period can ease the handover, but it also means managing two systems, so keep that window short.
If you're moving to a platform that includes your POS and ordering as well, think about doing the loyalty switch at the same time as the rest. One cutover is less disruptive than two.
Which one to pick
Como is a capable loyalty and CRM platform for large restaurant chains that need a dedicated engagement layer on top of an established stack. If you've already got a POS, an ordering platform and a marketing tool, and your problem is tying the customer data together, it's worth evaluating.
Most UK and Irish restaurant groups are in a different position, especially those that are growing or trying to cut down the number of systems they run. For them, one platform covering loyalty, POS, ordering and marketing costs less to run and breaks less often.
Flipdish is the best Como alternative if you want that without the integration work. It's built for UK and Irish restaurants, with multi-location management, AI-driven marketing and loyalty that works across every ordering channel from day one.
For more restaurant technology comparisons, visit restauranttech.co.uk.
Want to see how Flipdish handles loyalty and customer marketing? Book a demo with a restaurant technology specialist.