OrderOut Alternatives for Restaurants
OrderOut routes delivery tickets into the POS. Six alternatives, two different kinds of buyer, and the duplication test that stops you buying two pipes.
On this page
The tablet on the pass beeps, the printer spits the order out twice, and nobody minds, because a duplicate ticket is a small annoyance and a dropped one is a refund. Then the phone rings at 6:50, the pass is buried, and nothing beeps at all.
That is the difference between the two channels in one sentence. A marketplace order announces itself. A phone call just leaves.
So the middleware that fixes the loud channel is easy to justify: 15% to 30% commission per order, toward 30% to 40% all-in with fees and promotions by industry estimates. The quiet channel has no invoice at all, which is why nobody buys for it first.
TL;DR
- OrderOut is delivery integration and dispatch middleware: marketplace orders in, POS tickets out, quoted rather than published (October 2026).
- Two different buyers search for its alternatives, and only one of them wants a different pipe.
- If you sell on four channels, the peers are Otter and Stream, and the test is whether you are paying twice for one job.
- Commissions run 15% to 30% an order, toward 30% to 40% all-in, so a $34 delivery ticket and a $34 phone ticket are not the same $34.
- Answer the phone first: Kovo is $99 for 750 connected minutes or $299 for 5,000 (plans), 14 days free, no card to start.
Two buyers, one search term
The first reader runs four channels and one broken mapping. The tablet prints, but the modifications arrive as a paragraph in a notes field, or an order lands on the rail as the wrong item, and the fix has been promised twice. That shop needs a different pipe, and the honest alternatives are two other pipes plus what your POS already does.
The second reader is further along. They have counted the tickets and discovered that the orders they lost last month were not on DoorDash at all. They were calls that rang out at 6:50. That shop does not need another middleware; it needs something to answer.
Both searches land on the same page because both products are sold as "getting orders into the POS". They are not substitutes. Ordering the shortlist below by reader fit is the only honest way to do it, which is why the first two rows are pipes and the rest are not.
The shortlist in one table
Kovo is one of the options below, marked and disclosed. Every other cell comes from the vendor's public pages in October 2026; where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says so rather than guessing.
| Option | Best for | Published price | Order on the call | POS path | Card on the call | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OrderOut | One pipe for marketplace tickets | Quote | Not a phone product | Routes DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub into the POS | Not applicable | Not publicly listed — confirm |
| Otter | The same job, different vendor | Quote | Not a phone product | Marketplace routing and POS integration | Not applicable | Not publicly listed — confirm |
| Stream | The same job, different vendor | Quote | Not a phone product | Marketplace routing and POS integration | Not applicable | Not publicly listed — confirm |
| Reachify | POS-first order routing | Quote | Yes, with text-link fallbacks | Pushes orders into the POS | Not publicly listed — confirm | Not publicly listed — confirm |
| Flipdish | Owning the ordering channel | Quote | Yes, phone AI in the stack | Not publicly listed — confirm | Not publicly listed — confirm | Not publicly listed — confirm |
| Loman | Closing the whole call | From $199/mo, no per-minute fees | Yes, with modifiers | Toast, Square, Clover, SpotOn, SkyTab, Aloha, Olo | Charged during the call, per vendor | Vendor claims live in under 24 hours |
| Kovo (ours) | Takeout phone lines | $99/mo or $299/mo Unlimited | Yes, with modifiers | Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, Epson, Star | A card the shop already holds, charged on the line; link for a first-time caller | Self-serve; a test call the same day is typical |
The six alternatives, one at a time
Otter
Otter and Stream do the job OrderOut does: take an order from a marketplace and put it where the kitchen looks. OrderOut's own site describes the routing, and the three companies quote rather than publish, so the comparison is a spreadsheet you build, not a page you read. The reason to move is usually a mapping that will not hold, a channel that is not supported, or support that stopped answering. The reason not to move is that it mostly works.
Stream
Stream is the other peer, with the same caveat. Before you switch between pipes, check whether you are paying for two at once, because the failure is quiet: two routers disagreeing about a modifier until a Friday order prints wrong in both directions. One pipe per channel, one owner of the menu, and a named person on each side.
Reachify
Reachify is closer to the phone than to the marketplace: it pushes orders into the POS rather than leaving them as messages, with text-link fallbacks where a call cannot finish. It suits a shop that has committed to a POS workflow and wants the front end unified. Pin down which parts of an order close on the call and which get finished by text, because a text at midnight is a missed order.
Flipdish
Flipdish sells the other strategy: online ordering, a website, and a branded app, so more of your demand arrives as a direct order instead of a marketplace ticket. That is the real answer to a 30% commission, and it is a bigger project than changing a middleware. If direct ordering is the plan, this is the row to study; if the plan is a quieter phone line, skip it.
Loman
Loman is the phone option that ends the call paid, by charging the card during the conversation, from $199 a month with no per-minute fees (published pricing, October 2026). Its accuracy and revenue figures are vendor claims, operator-reported and not audited. The catch is the fixed floor at low volume. It does not route marketplace orders either, so it sits beside your pipe, not in place of it.
Kovo
Kovo answers the phone, takes the order the way the caller says it, reads it back, and sends the ticket to Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or an Epson or Star receipt printer. Starter is $99 for 750 connected minutes, about 300 calls; Unlimited is $299 for 5,000. At the cap, calls forward to your own phone instead of billing an overage, and no call bills past 12 minutes. With a card on file it charges it while the caller is still on the line; a first-time caller gets a texted Stripe link with the line held open, and paying it vaults the card.
Three things to say plainly. Kovo does not dispatch to DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub, so it is not a middleware replacement. The order limit belongs to the shop: defaults of 10 items in total and 8 of one item, either one changeable, an optional value limit, and zero to remove a limit. Above it the call rings your handset if you asked for large-party routing, and otherwise the agent says the order is too large to send through and keeps taking what fits. The narrow comparison is Kovo vs OrderOut.
What each layer costs at 1,200 orders and 900 calls
Take a shop doing 1,200 delivery orders and 900 phone calls a month, at a $34 average ticket.
Delivery first. 1,200 × $34 = $40,800 of marketplace sales, and at the 15% to 30% commission range that is $6,120 to $12,240 a month before the all-in figure that includes fees and promotions. That commission is what the middleware exists to manage, so it looks cheap next to it.
Phone second. Kovo Unlimited is $299 for 5,000 minutes, which covers 900 calls. Now apply the QSR Magazine estimate that the average restaurant misses roughly 150 calls a month and the industry estimate that 60% of those are orders: 90 lost tickets × $34 = $3,060 a month. Multiply by twelve and the phone leak is $36,720 a year, which is the only one of those two numbers nobody sends you a report about.
The arithmetic is blunt on purpose. Middleware protects a large number you can already see; a phone agent protects a smaller number you have never been shown, which is why shops buy the pipe first and the phone last.
The duplication test, before you sign a second pipe
Pull last week's tickets and answer three questions.
Does any order appear twice? A duplicate is the visible symptom of two routers on one channel, and it usually starts after a menu change rather than at install.
Which system owns a price change? Both layers read a menu. If the marketplace dashboard and the POS disagree, the caller and the tablet will hear different prices on the same night.
Who refunds a wrong ticket? Ask each vendor, in writing, before you need to know. The answer tells you which one considers the finished order theirs.
If the answers are clean, you are buying a replacement and the spreadsheet decides. If they are muddy, you are buying a duplicate, and the spreadsheet is not the problem.
What none of them will do for you
None of the pipes answers a call, and none of the phone agents dispatches to a marketplace. Buying one does not remove the need for the other, and pretending otherwise is how a shop ends up with two middlewares and an unanswered line.
Kovo's table booking is its own book, not a write into OpenTable or Resy, and it is one store per subscription, so a second location is a second line and a second menu rather than a pooled plan. A group with three sites is a different buying conversation than this page.
FAQ
Does Kovo replace OrderOut?
No. OrderOut is delivery integration and dispatch middleware that routes DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub orders into a POS. Kovo answers the phone and writes the completed order to Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or a receipt printer, from $99 a month for 750 connected minutes. Kovo does not dispatch to any marketplace, so a shop selling on those channels still needs a pipe for them.
What does each layer cost at 1,200 delivery orders and 900 calls?
Kovo is $299 for 5,000 connected minutes, which covers 900 calls of normal length. OrderOut quotes each shop rather than publishing a rate, so the number to ask for is the all-in monthly cost at 1,200 orders across your channels, in writing. Compare that figure to the commission it protects: 1,200 orders at a $34 ticket is $40,800 of sales, and 15% of that is $6,120 a month.
Can I run OrderOut and a phone agent at the same time?
Yes, and they push into the same ticket pool from two directions, so the first thing to settle is the menu. Both products read a menu, OrderOut maps the marketplace side and Kovo reads a POS catalog or a menu page with a refresh once a day. That leaves one 24-hour window where the two can disagree, so ask each vendor which system owns a price change.
Which one should a takeout shop buy first?
The phone, if the phone is unstaffed. The QSR Magazine analysis estimates the average restaurant misses roughly 150 calls a month; if 60% of those are orders at a $34 ticket, that is about $3,060 a month that no marketplace report ever shows. Kovo starts at $99 for 750 connected minutes, and a second delivery pipe is worth adding when the channel count justifies it.
How do I know if I am paying for two middlewares?
Look for the same order arriving twice, or a menu that changes in one dashboard and not the other. OrderOut, Otter, and Stream publish overlapping routing, and some POS systems now ingest marketplace orders themselves. Send 10 test orders through both, count the tickets, then apply the rule: one shop, one pipe per channel, one owner of the menu.
Final Thoughts
The decision is which gap is expensive, and the answer is in your own month. If you sell on four channels into a POS that ingests none of them, buy the pipe, and treat Otter and Stream as the same row as OrderOut until a live mapping test says otherwise. If the tickets you lost were calls, the pipe will never see them.
Kovo covers the second gap at $99 for 750 connected minutes or $299 for 5,000, with the ticket path described in the Toast walkthrough and the leak priced in what missed calls cost. Keep the middleware you have and run the phone test for 14 days. Take a test call with your own menu.