The EPOS decision is one of the biggest IT calls a restaurant operator ever makes, and yet a surprising number of founders make it on gut feel. Someone they trust uses Zonal, so Zonal it is. The new operations director came from a hotel group that ran Oracle Micros, so Simphony lands on the shortlist. A friendly account manager from Tevalis bought the coffees, and a few weeks later the order goes in.

I am not going to pretend that gut feel is always wrong. Quite often the operator’s instinct is right, because they know their business better than any consultant ever will. But an EPOS platform sits at the centre of your service, your stock, your staff, your reporting and increasingly your customer data. It is worth more than a coffee meeting and a hunch.

This post is a measured look at three EPOS platforms we see most often in UK restaurants and bars: Oracle Micros Simphony, Zonal and Tevalis. All three are serious. All three have real trade-offs. None of them is the right answer for everybody.

Why these three

We work with restaurant groups, independent operators and hotel F&B teams across London, and these are the platforms we are asked about week in, week out. Other systems exist, and some of them are excellent, but if you are sitting down to build a shortlist in 2026, the chances are at least one of these three will be on it.

A quick note before we go any further. I am the managing director of a hospitality IT firm. We are independent of all three vendors. We do not take referral fees. The opinions below are based on what we see when these systems land in real venues and what happens when something breaks at half past seven on a Saturday.

Start with the operating model, not the feature list

The most common mistake I see is operators starting an EPOS evaluation with a feature comparison spreadsheet. Eighty rows, three columns, lots of green ticks. By the time you finish it, every system looks broadly similar, because every modern EPOS does the obvious things.

Start somewhere else. Start with how your business actually runs.

Questions worth asking first

  • Are you a single site or a group, and where do you realistically want to be in three years?
  • Is your service model table service, counter service, QSR, or a mix of all three across different brands?
  • Do you need to integrate with a hotel PMS, a delivery aggregator, a loyalty platform, a stock system, or a payroll platform?
  • How much in-house IT capability do you have, honestly?
  • Who supports the system out of hours, and what does that cost?
  • What is your appetite for project complexity at go-live?

Answer those six questions properly and the shortlist usually narrows itself.

Oracle Micros Simphony

Oracle Micros Simphony is the cloud EPOS from Oracle’s hospitality division. It is the platform you are most likely to encounter in large hotel groups, international restaurant chains and venues that need enterprise-grade reporting and integrations.

Where Simphony shines

Simphony is built for scale. If you operate dozens or hundreds of sites, if you need a single source of truth for menu engineering across brands, if your finance team wants to slice data in ways most mid-market systems cannot manage, this is the platform that handles it without breaking a sweat. The integration ecosystem is genuinely deep. PMS integration with Oracle’s own OPERA is a major draw for hotel F&B operations, and the global support footprint is hard to match.

Where Simphony hurts

Cost is the obvious one. Licensing, hardware, professional services and ongoing support add up, and you will rarely walk into a Simphony deployment that comes in cheap. Project complexity is the other. Simphony deployments are real projects with real timelines, and they need experienced hands on both sides of the table. For a single-site independent doing forty covers a night, it is overkill. You will buy capability you never use and pay for it every month.

If you are a small or mid-size operator without an existing Oracle relationship, Simphony probably is not where you should start.

Zonal

Zonal is a UK-grown hospitality technology business with deep roots in pubs, bars and managed hospitality groups. The Aztec cloud platform sits at the heart of their current offering, and their Tills product remains widely deployed across the trade.

Where Zonal shines

Zonal understands UK hospitality in a way that international vendors sometimes do not. The product is shaped by years of working with pub groups, bar operators and casual dining brands, and it shows in the workflows. Hardware is solid and well thought out. The Aztec platform has moved the company firmly into cloud-native territory, and the surrounding ecosystem of bookings, loyalty and order-and-pay tools is genuinely useful for groups that want a more integrated stack from a single vendor.

If you run a pub group, a bar concept or a casual dining brand with several sites, Zonal is almost always going to be on the shortlist for good reason.

Where Zonal hurts

If you are a small independent restaurant doing a single site, Zonal can feel heavier and more expensive than you need. International recognition is more limited than Oracle, which matters less for UK-only operators but can matter for groups with overseas ambitions. As with any larger vendor, the experience of working with Zonal varies depending on which part of the business you end up dealing with.

Tevalis

Tevalis is a UK hospitality EPOS that has carved out a strong position in the mid-market. It is owned and run by a UK team, and the product has a reputation for handheld-first workflows and responsive support.

Where Tevalis shines

For mid-size restaurant and bar groups, Tevalis often hits a sweet spot. The handheld-first approach suits modern table service really well. Servers take orders at the table, fire to the kitchen instantly, take payment without walking back to a fixed terminal. The UK support relationship tends to be close and responsive, and we hear good things from operators about the people behind the product, which counts for more than the marketing usually suggests.

If you are a growing restaurant group of perhaps five to thirty sites, doing table service, and you want a partner who picks up the phone, Tevalis deserves a serious look.

Where Tevalis hurts

The integration ecosystem is smaller than Oracle’s. If your stack already depends on niche international integrations, you may need to check carefully. For very large enterprise deployments with global complexity, the heavyweight enterprise platforms still have an edge. None of this is a flaw in Tevalis. It is simply a question of fit.

What a hospitality MSP brings to the decision

Whichever EPOS you pick, the platform itself is only part of the picture. The system sits on top of a network. It talks to payment terminals, kitchen displays, handhelds, PMS systems, accounting tools and increasingly third-party order channels. It handles cardholder data, which means PCI DSS is part of the conversation whether you like it or not. And it has to keep working at the busiest moment of the busiest service of the year.

That is where a specialist hospitality MSP earns its keep. We design and run the network the EPOS depends on. We sit between the EPOS vendor, the payment provider, the kitchen tech and everything else, so that when something goes wrong nobody can hide behind somebody else’s contract. We bring 24/7 support so that a midnight outage in Soho is somebody’s problem at 12:01 am, not at nine the next morning.

Crucially, we are independent of the EPOS vendors. We have no incentive to push you towards one over another. Our hospitality IT support practice is built around exactly this kind of decision. The managed network underneath your EPOS is where most of the real reliability comes from. And if you are based locally, our Fitzrovia IT support team is round the corner from most of the West End restaurant scene.

So which one should you pick

There is no winner. Anyone who tells you there is, is selling something.

If you are a hotel F&B operation, a large international chain or a group that needs deep enterprise integration, Oracle Micros Simphony is built for you. If you are a UK pub, bar or casual dining group with multiple sites, Zonal probably belongs at the top of your shortlist. If you are a growing mid-market restaurant group that values handheld workflows and a close UK support relationship, Tevalis is genuinely worth the meeting.

Before you commit, ask yourself a few honest questions. Where will the business be in three years, not three months. What does the integration map look like, today and after the next two projects you already know are coming. Who is going to support this thing on a Saturday night when the card terminals stop talking to the till. And what is your real budget, including everything.

If you would like a second opinion from a team that runs all three of these platforms in real venues, we are happy to have that conversation. No sales pitch, no commission, no hidden agenda. Get in touch with our hospitality IT team and we will help you make a decision you can live with for the next five years.