Compare booking systems

OpenTable alternatives for UK restaurants

Almost everybody arriving at a page like this has done the same sum. You have looked at a monthly invoice, added up the per-cover fees underneath it, and wondered what you are actually buying.

This page tries to answer that honestly, which means it includes the part most comparison pages leave out: for some restaurants, OpenTable is worth it, and you should stay. The rest of it is how to tell whether you are one of them, and where to go if you are not.

What OpenTable costs in the UK

Start with the awkward bit: OpenTable does not publish UK pricing. Its plans page has pointed at "contact us" for some time, so any figure you read — including the ones below — is reported rather than quoted, and the only number that binds anyone is the one on your own agreement.

What is consistent across the reporting:

• There is a monthly subscription, tiered by features.
• There is a fee per cover on bookings that come through OpenTable's own marketplace — its website and app. The last widely-reported UK rate was around £2 a cover, and internationally the range quoted is roughly $1–3.50.
• Bookings from your own website generally carry no cover fee.

That last line is the important one, and it is the whole argument in miniature. You are not paying for software. You are paying a commission for introductions, and a subscription for the diary that comes with it.

The arithmetic

A restaurant seating 1,500 covers a month, with a third of them arriving through the marketplace at £2 a cover:

• 500 marketplace covers × £2 = £1,000 a month, £12,000 a year
• plus the subscription, whatever yours is

Against a flat-fee system at £20 a month, that is £12,240 a year versus £240. Put like that it sounds settled. It is not, because those 500 covers might be 500 people who would never otherwise have found you — and that is the question worth actually answering.

Change the numbers to yours: the cover fee calculator.

Whether your marketplace covers are really incremental

This is the only test that matters, and you can run it from data you already have.

1. Ask for your marketplace covers as a share of total covers. OpenTable reports it. If it is small, the fee is small and this is not where your money is going.
2. Look at how many of those diners are repeat guests. A regular who books through OpenTable because the app is on their phone is a cover you were going to get anyway, bought back at £2 a head. In a neighbourhood restaurant with a loyal book, this is a surprisingly large share.
3. Look at when they land. Covers that fill a dead Tuesday are worth paying for. Covers on a Saturday at 8pm, when you turn people away, cost you twice — the fee, and the table you would have filled for free.
4. Check what your own channels are doing. If your Google Business Profile has no booking link on it, you have an unpriced channel sitting idle and you are paying for introductions instead. That one is free to fix: getting your booking link onto Google.

If the answers come back "small share, mostly regulars, mostly peak", you are paying a commission on your own customers and a flat-fee system will save you most of it. If they come back "meaningful share, new faces, off-peak", OpenTable is doing a job for you and this page is not for you.

The alternatives, by what you are trying to do

You want to keep a marketplace, just not this one. TheFork is the other big UK consumer-facing platform, and the trade is the same shape — visibility in exchange for a fee on the covers it brings. Swapping one marketplace for another changes the rate, not the model.

You want a flat fee from an established UK system. ResDiary has been the UK's commission-free default for years — a flat monthly fee, no fee on bookings from any channel. It does not publish its price, so you will be on a call, and contracts tend to be annual.

You want the cheapest thing that genuinely works. resOS has a free tier with a monthly booking cap and paid tiers above it. NomNom publishes £29.99 a month. Thezi is £0 during early access and £20 a month planned. All three are rolling monthly and all three let you sign up without talking to anyone.

You are a group, or guest data is the point. SevenRooms is the CRM-led option and is priced accordingly. If you are running a single independent room, it is more system than you need.

Scroll the table sideways.

The fuller version of this table, with what we think each one is actually good at, is on what a booking system should cost.

If you do switch

Short version, because the long version is on the page we wrote for restaurants leaving Quandoo and the steps are the same: what to do when a booking platform closes.

1. Check your notice period before you do anything else. Annual contracts with 90 days' notice are normal, and switching early means paying twice.
2. Export your guest list and booking history while your account is live.
3. Run both systems for a fortnight, new bookings to the new one.
4. Change every link: your website's Book button, your Google Business Profile, Instagram, Facebook, email footer, printed QR codes.
5. Tell your regulars once, in an email. That is the audience the marketplace was standing between you and.

Your reviews and your OpenTable profile stay with OpenTable. That is a real cost of leaving, and the reason to keep your Google reviews healthy regardless of who takes your bookings.

Thezi, and what it is not

We built one of the options above, so read this knowing that.

What it does. A booking page in your own colours, on your own site or its own address. A floor plan of your room. Card holds for no-show cover, charged only when a person decides. A guest list you can export whenever you like. No commission and no per-cover charge — not on any booking, ever.

What it is not. No diner app and no marketplace, so it brings you no covers of its own; everything above about incremental covers cuts against us as much as for us. No text reminders yet, only email. The in-Google "Reserve a table" button is not live yet, though a booking link on your own Google profile works today. And it is new: we are building it with our first venues, which is why it is free right now.

Start free — no card, no call.

Common questions

How much does OpenTable cost in the UK?

OpenTable no longer publishes UK pricing, so there is no honest single figure. The shape is a monthly subscription plus a fee per cover on bookings that come through OpenTable's own website and app — last widely reported at around £2 a cover in the UK, and $1–3.50 internationally. Bookings from your own website generally carry no cover fee. Get your own numbers in writing before signing.

Does OpenTable charge a commission on bookings from my own website?

Generally no — the per-cover fee applies to bookings that arrive through OpenTable's marketplace, not through your own site. This is why the share of your covers coming from the marketplace is the number that decides whether the fee is worth it.

Is there a free alternative to OpenTable?

There are two kinds of free. resOS has a free tier capped at a number of bookings a month. Thezi is free with no cap while it is in early access, and £20 a month planned afterwards. Neither has a diner marketplace, so neither replaces OpenTable's introductions — only its diary.

What is the best OpenTable alternative for a small independent restaurant?

If most of your bookings already come from your own website, your Google profile and the phone, a flat-fee system with no per-cover charge is the better shape, and the published UK options start at £0 to about £30 a month. If a meaningful share of your covers are new faces arriving through the marketplace on quiet nights, staying put is the cheaper answer.

Can I run two booking systems at once?

For a couple of weeks during a switchover, yes, and it is the safest way to move. Permanently, no — two diaries that do not know about each other will double-book a table, and it will happen on your busiest night.

Will I lose my OpenTable reviews if I leave?

Yes. Your OpenTable profile and the reviews on it belong to that platform. Your Google reviews do not, which is another argument for making your Google Business Profile the centre of how people find and book you.

Sources

• Where Thezi sits against the reservation-system market — our own price research, with the per-cover figures and where they come from
• OpenTable's plans page, which has listed UK pricing as "contact us" rather than a figure since early 2025

Written 2026-09-12, last checked 2026-09-12. Prices and terms change and most of these companies do not publish theirs — check before you sign. Something wrong here? hello@thezi.app reaches a person.

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