Tablez vs OpenTable

What OpenTable is good at

Be fair about it: OpenTable has millions of diners in its app, and in big cities, tourist areas and for special occasions, some of those diners will find you through it and would not otherwise. It has a mature floor plan, waitlist, guest profiles, deposits, and integrations with EPOS systems. If you are a 120 cover restaurant in a city centre with a general manager and a reservations person, it may well earn its keep.

What it costs an independent

OpenTable charges a monthly subscription and, on its main plans, a fee per diner on bookings that come through its network rather than your own website. The subscription starts from around £149 a month at the time of writing. The per diner fees are the part that stings, because they scale with your success: a full Saturday of network bookings costs more than an empty one. For a 40 cover venue that runs a couple of full services a week, those fees can add up to more than the subscription. We have worked through the maths in what OpenTable's per cover fees really cost a 40 seat restaurant.

The less obvious cost is that the diner belongs to OpenTable. They booked in the OpenTable app, they get OpenTable's emails, and OpenTable shows them the restaurant next door next time. You pay a fee for a customer who may well have found you anyway on Google, and then you keep paying for them.

What Tablez does instead

Tablez does not have a marketplace, so it cannot send you diners. What it does is take bookings from the diners you already reach through Google, Instagram, Facebook, your website, your menus and word of mouth, for a flat price: free up to 60 bookings a month, £5 a month up to 150, £15 up to 500, paid yearly. Never a fee per cover, at any level.

The booking page is deliberately simple. Party size, day, time, name, phone. Three ways to confirm, including live check where the customer waits a couple of minutes while your staff tap accept. A staff app with push alerts. Turn times, pacing and cover caps so the kitchen is not slammed. Confirmation and reminder emails with a manage link. That is the whole thing, and for most independents it is the whole job.

Where Tablez falls short

No floor plan with drag and drop tables. No waitlist with text messages. No deposits yet (coming soon). No Reserve with Google yet (on the roadmap; you can still put your Tablez link on your Google Business Profile). No EPOS integration. If those are must-haves today, OpenTable or ResDiary will suit you better and cost accordingly.

Running both

Some restaurants keep an OpenTable listing for the marketplace diners and use Tablez for everything that comes through their own channels, so those bookings do not attract network fees. Both systems then need to know about each other's bookings, which means capping availability in each. It is workable for a venue that genuinely gets business from the marketplace and wants to stop paying fees on its own regulars.

Switching

Sign up to Tablez free, add your tables and hours, put the link on your website and Google, and start taking bookings the same day. Enter the next few weeks of existing bookings by hand in the staff app. Give notice to OpenTable according to your terms. Our guide to taking bookings online covers the set up in detail.