What is the alternative to booking-only software?

What booking software covers, and what it does not

Fixed-subscription booking software organises demand for tables: time slots, capacity, floor plan, confirmations, reminders and sometimes a card hold against no-shows. Because it is billed at a flat rate, its cost does not rise with the number of covers, which makes spending predictable — that is the main advantage of this family over marketplaces billed per cover.

That scope stops at the booking itself. The menu a guest opens once seated, its translations, its allergen information, its time-based pricing and the QR code on the table all belong to a different tool. A venue that wants both therefore ends up with two subscriptions, two management interfaces and two places where the same information has to be corrected.

Which cost should actually be compared?

An honest comparison does not put two booking subscriptions side by side; it compares two scopes. On one side, standalone booking software plus whichever digital menu solution the venue already uses or will have to buy. On the other, a single subscription covering the menu, with booking added as a module.

Standalone booking tools sit noticeably higher on the French market than a digital menu does at entry level — an order of magnitude observed in August 2026 of around 129 € per month for an entry tier. Add the cost of your menu solution to that figure to get the total you are really committing to each month.

SimplyRestau's own prices are deliberately not repeated in this article: the Pricing page is the single reference, so that no stale figure survives here.

What changes when the menu and the booking sit together

Bringing the two together is not simply adding up features. A guest reading the menu is already in the middle of choosing; offering the booking in the same place avoids sending them to a second address, and spares the restaurateur from maintaining two systems that describe the same venue.

On the management side, it means one set of opening hours, one place to correct a price or flag a sold-out dish, and statistics that relate menu views to booking requests instead of observing them separately.

Three needs a booking module does not carry

What to check before switching tools

• List what you pay today for booking and for the menu, separately.
• Check whether your bookings come from a discovery channel or from guests who already know you.
• Confirm that the floor plan and confirmations match how your service actually runs.
• Verify which languages are genuinely served to the guest, not merely advertised.
• Look at which tool carries allergen information and how it gets updated.
• Ask about exit terms and data retrieval before subscribing.

Where SimplyRestau sits in this comparison

SimplyRestau starts from the digital menu and adds booking as a module, where booking software starts from covers. For a venue whose first need is publishing an accurate, translated and documented menu, then organising the bookings it already receives, that order matches actual use more closely.

It does not claim to bring in new custom: it is not a discovery directory. Feature detail is on the Features page, and direct booking options are compared in the commission-free restaurant reservations guide.

Frequently asked questions