Fourth Alternative: The Best Fourth Alternatives for Restaurant Groups
What is Fourth?
Fourth is workforce management and back-office software for hospitality. It handles employee scheduling, HR, labour costs, inventory, procurement and analytics. It merged with HotSchedules, so the product now serves large restaurant chains, hotel groups and multi-site operators under one name.
People searching for a Fourth alternative usually want one of two things. Either they want a better scheduling or inventory tool, or they want the other half of the stack that Fourth doesn't really cover: POS, digital ordering and customer engagement. This guide goes through both, with UK and Irish operators in mind.
Why restaurant groups look for a Fourth alternative
The reasons are fairly consistent:
- The price is hard to justify for a smaller or mid-size group.
- Workforce data lives in one system and sales data in another, and the two don't connect well.
- The group wants fewer vendors, not more.
- They want ordering, loyalty and marketing tools, and Fourth doesn't offer them.
That last one is the biggest gap. Fourth can tell you who is rostered on Friday night. It can't take the order, run the loyalty scheme or bring a lapsed customer back. Most groups end up buying that side of the stack from somebody else, and that's where Flipdish comes in.
The best Fourth alternatives for restaurant groups
1. Flipdish
Flipdish covers the customer-facing side of a restaurant group. It includes a restaurant POS system, online ordering, branded mobile apps, self-service kiosks, loyalty, AI marketing and an AI phone ordering agent, all on one platform.
To be clear, Flipdish doesn't schedule staff or run payroll. It isn't a like-for-like swap for Fourth. A group that keeps Fourth, or moves to a cheaper scheduling tool, still needs something to take orders and bring customers back, and that's the job Flipdish does for UK and Irish operators.
The Flipdish POS handles in-store orders and connects directly to online ordering, kiosks and phone orders. Staff at the counter use one system. The kitchen sees one order queue, whether the order came from the app, the website, a kiosk or a phone call. Nobody has to keep an eye on three tablets and a ticket printer.
Multi-site groups manage menus, promotions and pricing from a single dashboard. Change a price once and it goes to every location, with site-level overrides for the one branch that needs something different, such as an airport unit with higher prices or a campus site that doesn't serve breakfast. Flipdish works with some of the largest multi-site restaurant groups in Ireland and the UK.
Flipdish AI marketing finds customer segments and sends personalised campaigns automatically, aimed at getting people to come back more often. Your team doesn't have to build each campaign by hand.
The Flipdish AI Phone Agent answers inbound calls and takes the order. If a site gets a lot of phone orders, that frees up whoever was stuck on the phone during the Friday rush, and every call ends up as a digital record instead of a scribbled note.
Flipdish suits restaurant groups and franchise operators in the UK and Ireland that already have workforce tools and need a POS, ordering and customer engagement platform to go with them.
2. Deputy
Deputy is a scheduling and HR platform that a lot of hospitality businesses use. It does employee scheduling, time and attendance, payroll integration and team messaging. It has no POS, ordering or customer-facing features. It does workforce management and nothing else.
If your main complaint about Fourth is that you're paying enterprise prices for a scheduling tool, Deputy is worth a look. It's cheaper, and it does that one job well. Multi-site hospitality operators who want scheduling and HR in one place are the obvious fit.
3. 7shifts
7shifts was built for restaurants rather than hospitality in general, and it shows in the features: scheduling, labour compliance, tip pooling and team communication. Tip pooling is a good example. It's a headache in restaurants and barely registers in a hotel or a retail chain, so general-purpose tools tend to handle it badly.
There's no POS or ordering. Restaurant groups that want a dedicated scheduling platform with restaurant-specific labour tools are the people it's for.
4. Harri
Harri covers recruitment, onboarding, scheduling and HR. Its pitch is high staff turnover, which most restaurant operators know well. If you're constantly hiring, constantly onboarding and constantly filling front-of-house gaps, a platform that starts with recruitment makes more sense than one that treats hiring as an add-on.
It's a good fit for hospitality groups with heavy turnover and a steady recruitment pipeline. A group with a stable team and a handful of vacancies a year probably doesn't need it.
5. Nory
Nory is an AI-powered restaurant management platform. It covers operations, scheduling, stock control and analytics, and it's aimed at multi-site restaurant operators. Of the five, it's the closest to Fourth in scope, with a more modern interface.
Mid-size restaurant groups that want one operations platform built for restaurants, instead of something that also has to serve hotels, are the target.
How the pieces fit together
A restaurant group needs software in two separate areas.
On the back-of-house side:
- Workforce scheduling and labour management
- Inventory, stock control and procurement
- Recipe management and food cost tracking
- Analytics and reporting
On the customer-facing side:
- POS
- Online ordering across website, app and kiosk
- Loyalty
- Customer marketing and CRM
- Phone ordering
Fourth is mostly a back-of-house product. Flipdish is mostly customer-facing. They solve different problems, and plenty of groups run both. Here's how the five compare on the functions that tend to decide a purchase.
| Function | Fourth | Flipdish | Deputy | 7shifts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Employee scheduling | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| HR and payroll integration | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Inventory and procurement | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| POS system | Limited | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Online ordering | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Self-service kiosks | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Loyalty and marketing | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Multi-location management | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Harri and Nory aren't in the table because their scope is harder to pin to a single tick. Harri is built around hiring and Nory around operations, so check their current feature lists directly before comparing.
Choosing between them
Start with the problem. If scheduling is the issue, Deputy and 7shifts both cost less than Fourth and focus on that. If the problem is POS, ordering and customer engagement, Flipdish covers that layer. If it's both, you need one tool from each category. That's how most well-run groups operate anyway.
Then look at your site count. Enterprise workforce platforms get expensive as you add locations, and at five to ten sites the bill is noticeable. List the features your managers use every week and compare the cost to that list, not to the full feature sheet.
Digital ordering share matters too. If a decent chunk of revenue comes from direct online orders, apps or kiosks, the ordering platform is earning money, not just costing it. Flipdish customers have used direct ordering to depend less on delivery marketplaces and keep more margin on each order, which matters most for groups with a big delivery operation.
Last, work out which parts of Fourth you actually use. It does a lot, and many groups use maybe a third of it. A focused scheduling tool plus a good ordering platform often does more useful work than one enterprise suite that covers everything at a shallow level. Ask each vendor for a demo using your own rota and your own menu, not the sample data.
Questions to ask before you switch
Moving off Fourth is a bigger job than signing up for something new, so find out a few things early.
What happens to your historical data? Labour cost reports, stock counts and rota history are hard to rebuild. Ask whether the new vendor can import them, and whether Fourth will export them in a usable format before your contract ends.
When does your contract end? Some groups spend months evaluating alternatives and then find out they're locked in for another year. Check the renewal date and the notice period first.
Who does the integration work? If you pair a scheduling tool with a separate POS, sales data has to reach the scheduling tool so managers can roster against forecast demand. Ask each vendor which POS systems they connect to, whether the connection is built in or custom, and who pays for it.
How long does a site take to go live? Roll one location first, ideally a mid-volume one, not your busiest. Let the managers break it before the rest of the estate gets it.
Where Flipdish fits
For a UK or Irish restaurant group, the question usually isn't whether to have workforce software. You probably already do. The question is whether the ordering, POS and customer tools are good enough to bring in the revenue the group needs.
Fourth handles scheduling and operations for large groups. The weak spot in most of those groups is the ordering and customer side, and Flipdish was built for that, specifically for the UK and Irish market.
A group on Flipdish runs a single POS platform across its locations, takes direct orders through apps and websites, adds kiosk ordering where it makes sense, and handles marketing and phone orders with AI. It's all managed from one dashboard.
See how Flipdish supports multi-location restaurant groups, or read about Flipdish's AI marketing tools.
For independent reviews of restaurant technology in the UK and Ireland, visit restauranttech.co.uk.