Fourth Alternative: The Best Fourth Alternatives for Restaurant Groups
What Fourth does
Fourth is a restaurant management platform for multi-site hospitality groups, mostly in the UK. It handles employee scheduling, time and attendance, HR and payroll integration, inventory and procurement. It joined up with HotSchedules in 2019, which made it one of the biggest workforce management vendors in hospitality.
Most groups searching for a Fourth alternative want something cheaper, or something that does one job well instead of ten. A few want a platform that goes after revenue as well as running costs.
Why restaurant groups look elsewhere
Price comes up first. Fourth is built for large groups and priced for them. If you run somewhere between 5 and 50 sites, it's hard to justify the bill when cheaper tools cover the one or two modules you actually use.
Then there's the setup. A full Fourth rollout takes real IT and operations time, at launch and for as long as you run it. Groups without a technology team often end up paying for features nobody switches on.
Fourth is also entirely back of house. It's good at workforce and purchasing. It doesn't take direct online orders, it doesn't cut delivery commission and it doesn't build customer loyalty. A group that only spends on back-office tools can miss the front-of-house side, which is where the revenue comes from.
Staff sentiment matters here as well. Rota apps are used by every employee, not only managers, so a clumsy interface gets complaints fast. Deputy is a good example of a tool built around the mobile app.
Integrations are another. Fourth has to connect to your POS, payroll and accounting systems, and when one of those links is shaky, someone ends up re-keying data by hand. That's the exact job the software was bought to remove.
Last, ask every vendor what they've actually shipped with AI, not what's on the roadmap. It's a fair way to compare platforms you'll be living with for years.
The best Fourth alternatives
1. Flipdish
Best for groups that want to grow revenue, cut third-party costs and run every site from one place.
Flipdish is a restaurant technology platform for the UK and Ireland. It doesn't do rotas or payroll, so it isn't a like-for-like swap for Fourth. It's first on this list because for most groups the biggest technology decision isn't scheduling. It's what happens to delivery orders.
Plenty of groups spend heavily on back-office software while paying 25-35% commission on a large share of their orders. Here's the sum for a group with 15 sites doing £40,000 a month each in delivery sales, at 30% commission. That's £180,000 a month going to delivery platforms, or £2.16 million a year. Move 20% of that volume to a direct channel and you stop paying about £432,000 a year in commission, before the cost of running the direct channel. No scheduling tool is going to move a number that size.
What Flipdish gives you:
- An integrated restaurant POS that puts in-store, online, kiosk and phone orders into one system
- Online ordering on your own branded website and mobile apps, with no marketplace commission
- Self-service kiosks that push up average order value and take pressure off staff at peak times
- An AI phone agent that answers calls and takes orders without anyone on the till stopping what they're doing
- AI marketing that uses customer behaviour to bring people back
- Menu management for every location from one dashboard
- Reporting by site, channel and group, in real time
Phone orders get forgotten in these discussions. A busy site misses calls at exactly the moments it's busiest, because everyone is on the floor or the pass. The AI phone agent picks those up and sends the order straight into the same system as everything else, so nobody has to type it in later. Kiosks work the same way for walk-in trade: the order goes in once, and the customer is the one entering it.
If you're reviewing your whole technology stack, put Flipdish next to whatever back-office platform you're considering. Where your money is lost decides where to invest first, and for a lot of groups that's commission, not labour.
2. Deputy
Best for groups that want modern, affordable scheduling.
Deputy is a workforce management tool used in hospitality, retail and other service businesses. It does employee scheduling, time and attendance, leave management and payroll integration.
It costs a good deal less than Fourth for a mid-size group, and the mobile app is simple enough that staff pick it up without much training. Clock-in works by GPS, it links to payroll and accounting platforms, and it can build schedules from POS sales data. Implementation is faster and lighter than with an enterprise platform.
The gaps are in procurement and inventory, where Deputy is thinner than Fourth. It also has no restaurant-specific food cost or recipe features, so a group that wants those will need another tool alongside it.
3. Sona
Best for UK groups that want a workforce platform built for hospitality.
Sona is aimed at hospitality and care employers in the UK. It covers scheduling, time and attendance, HR and payroll, and it's designed around shift work: split shifts, variable hour contracts, bank holiday rules and the staff turnover that comes with the sector. Generic workforce tools tend to handle those awkwardly. Sona was built with them in mind.
It also has compliance tools for UK employment law, and the interface is designed for operators running several sites. Scheduling, HR and payroll sit in one platform.
It's a smaller company than Fourth. For an enterprise group thinking about who'll still be around in ten years, that's worth weighing. Procurement and purchasing are also less developed than in Fourth.
4. Planday
Best for mid-size groups that mainly want scheduling and labour cost tracking.
Planday is a scheduling and workforce tool used in hospitality and retail. It concentrates on rotas and labour cost analysis and leaves out the broader HR and procurement suite that Fourth offers.
That's an advantage if you already have HR systems you're happy with. You get a clear drag-and-drop scheduler, labour cost tracking with overtime alerts, and a mobile app for shift changes and staff messages. It connects to POS systems so schedules can follow demand, and the pricing suits mid-size groups.
What it doesn't do is inventory, procurement or detailed HR management. If you want one system for the whole back office, Planday will leave you short.
5. Restaurant365
Best for groups that want a full back-office suite with strong accounting.
Restaurant365 covers accounting, inventory, purchasing, workforce management and operations analytics. It's designed for restaurant groups and franchises with complicated back-office needs, and it handles multi-unit and multi-concept setups well, with solid financial reporting across sites.
It grew up in the US market and has since expanded abroad. If you're in the UK or Ireland, check how deep the local integrations go before you sign, especially with UK payroll and accounting software. A US-first product can have gaps in the details that matter to you. Implementation can also run long and take a lot of staff time.
Questions to answer before you pick
Start with the pain point. Is it scheduling, stock control, direct ordering or getting customers to come back? Each of those points to a different platform.
Then look at where the money is. If delivery marketplaces make up a big part of your sales, commission is probably costing you more than any operational inefficiency.
Think about size and direction too. How many sites do you run now, and how many in two years? Enterprise platforms pay off at scale but are overbuilt for a smaller group.
Decide who will own the tool, too. A scheduling platform that the area managers don't trust ends up as a spreadsheet with extra steps. If you don't have anyone to run an enterprise system day to day, that points you towards the lighter options, Deputy or Planday, or towards Sona if UK shift rules are your main headache.
And check the POS. A back-office tool that doesn't connect to it creates the manual work it was supposed to get rid of.
| Priority | Best platform |
|---|---|
| Direct ordering and revenue growth | Flipdish |
| Integrated POS and customer engagement | Flipdish |
| Affordable workforce management | Deputy or Sona |
| UK hospitality scheduling | Sona |
| A focused scheduling tool | Planday |
| Complete back-office suite | Restaurant365 |
Running a fair comparison
Ask each vendor for pricing per site, not a headline figure, and find out what's included and what costs extra. Training, integrations and support are the usual surprises. Get the list of POS and payroll systems they connect to, and check yours is on it by name.
If you can, trial the tool at two sites before rolling it out across the group. One quiet site and one busy one will show you more than any demo. Read the contract length and exit terms too. Switching away from an enterprise platform is slow, and you want to know the cost before you're in.
Talk to a group about your size that already uses the product. Vendors will usually arrange it, and the questions you ask them (how long did setup really take, what broke in month two) are worth more than the feature list.
Where the technology budget does the most
Many groups put most of their technology budget into scheduling, purchasing and HR, and not much into ordering and customer-facing tools. If a group is paying millions a year in marketplace commission, it's looking at the wrong line when it reviews spend. Scheduling software won't change that figure. Direct ordering will.
Flipdish is built for exactly that: direct ordering, integrated POS, loyalty and AI marketing in one system, for UK and Irish restaurant groups.
If you already use Fourth and are happy with it for rotas and purchasing, you don't have to leave. Flipdish can sit alongside it and handle the ordering and customer side. The two solve different problems.
Talk to Flipdish about what direct ordering could do for your group's margins.
For independent comparisons of POS, ordering, workforce and operations platforms, see Restaurant Tech, a resource for UK and Irish operators.