How we compare restaurant waitlist apps

Who runs this site

TablesReady owns and runs RestaurantWaitlistSoftware.com. TablesReady also makes a restaurant waitlist app of the same name, and that app is one of those compared here, so TablesReady has something to gain when you choose it. Weigh what you read with that in mind.

That is also how the site pays for itself. We don’t sell listings or placements, and no other vendor pays us anything. TablesReady benefits only when a visitor clicks one of its ads and signs up for its app.

Here is how the ownership shows up on the pages:

• Ad labels. Every TablesReady promotion is marked “Ad · Our own app”: the card on the home page and on each best-of list, the card beside other apps’ details, and the top spot on alternatives pages.
• Tagged links. Links in those spots are marked as sponsored links and carry tracking tags, so TablesReady can count the visits it gets from this site.
• Pinned, not ranked. TablesReady also has an ordinary app page. On every best-of list it qualifies for, and on alternatives pages, its full card sits on top with that ad pill rather than in its A-to-Z spot. The card is built from the same pricing, feature and label data as every other card.
• No other paid spots. Other vendors cannot pay to be listed or to be placed higher.

Because TablesReady has a stake in your decision, the rules are published on this page, and each fact on an app page links to where it came from. Anything you can click through, you can check for yourself.

Which apps you’ll find here

An app is included when it offers a waitlist that a restaurant can run at the host stand and its pricing has passed the second check described below. If a vendor’s pricing page can’t be read, for example because it blocks automated reading, the app stays off the site until a person can check that page.

Below that one ad card, every list runs A to Z. On a best-of list you can narrow the cards with filter chips and re-sort them by update activity or market presence, but those are choices you make. Nothing is ranked by default, and no app gets a score.

How prices are recorded

Prices, free plans and trial lengths come from the pricing page on the vendor’s own website. Nothing is taken from review sites, resellers, news articles, help-center pages or sales quotes. If the vendor’s pricing page doesn’t cover its waitlist product, but another page on the vendor’s own site states what that product costs, that page is used instead. If no page on the vendor’s site lists the price at all, the site owner may supply it, and that app’s page tells you the figure came from the site owner rather than the vendor’s pricing page.

Each app ends up with one pricing line on its card:

On the card	What it means for you
From $X per month	The cheapest paid plan that includes the waitlist
Free plan: Yes	The pricing page plainly offers a $0 plan with the waitlist in it
No free plan listed	No $0 plan with the waitlist appears on the pricing page
14-day free trial	The trial length the pricing page states
Book a demo for pricing	No prices are published, so you go through sales
See vendor pricing page	Prices are posted, but without a currency or billing period we can quote

The details that decide the number:

• The cheapest plan that has the waitlist. A lower-priced plan or module that leaves out the waitlist does not set the starting price.
• Billed monthly or yearly. If the pricing page itself shows a month-to-month price, that’s the one you see. If it shows only a price billed yearly, you see that figure, and the pricing notes on the app page say it is billed annually.
• Currency. Prices stay in whatever currency the pricing page opens with, and they are never converted. When a page shows only a “$” sign, you see US dollars, unless that page was made for customers in another country.
• Prices inside pictures. A price that appears only in an image, with no text that can be quoted, counts as not published unless a person has read the image on the vendor’s live page and the figure is recorded with that page’s link.
• Contract length. Terms other than monthly or annual show as unknown, and the real term goes in the pricing notes.

Free plans

A free trial is not a free plan. An app is marked “Free plan: Yes” only when its pricing page clearly shows a $0 plan, or states outright that a free version exists, and the waitlist is part of that free plan. When a vendor’s free plan leaves the waitlist out, you’ll see “No free plan listed”, and the pricing notes may explain why.

A vendor with no pricing page can still show “Free plan”. If the vendor’s own site plainly says the product is free, the card says so and does not say “Book a demo for pricing”. The same test applies: the free product has to include the waitlist, and the page that says it is free is linked on the app page. With no price to quote, the card shows “Free plan” alone.

A second check before an app goes live

After an app’s pricing is recorded, a separate pass re-reads the live pricing page and confirms each pricing field (whether prices are published, the starting price, the free plan, the trial and the contract) against a quote copied from that page. When the two passes disagree, the more cautious reading wins. An app is published only after this second check passes, and a free plan is shown only when the second check confirms it on the live page.

Features: Yes, No or Unknown

• Yes needs a link to a page on the vendor’s own site that shows the feature. Help docs are preferred over marketing pages. A feature that comes only with a higher plan still counts as Yes.
• No means the vendor says the feature isn’t supported, or a complete plan-comparison table leaves it out.
• Unknown: neither answer shows up on the vendor’s site. Ask the vendor before you count on it.

Best-of cards show confirmed features only. The POS line on cards and the POS column in comparison tables name Square, Toast and Clover; an app’s own page lists its other integrations too. A marketplace link appears only when the app has an actual listing in the Square App Marketplace, the Toast integrations directory or the Clover App Market. SOC 2 and HIPAA claims are shown as “claimed by vendor”, with a link to the page where the vendor makes the claim.

The three labels

Every app carries three labels. Code works each one out from the data, in the same way for every app, and the app page lists the numbers behind it under “Update activity and company”. The labels describe public data. They don’t grade how well an app works at your host stand.

Update activity

Two counts are compared and the higher one is used: iOS app versions released in the last 12 months, and dated entries on the vendor’s public changelog in that same window. Android doesn’t add to the count, since a Google Play listing shows only its latest update date, but that date does count when deciding how recent the newest update is. The rules are tried in this order, and the first one that fits sets the label:

Order	Label	When it applies
1	Unknown	No iOS version history and no changelog to count
2	Low	2 updates or fewer
3	Moderate	3 to 5 updates, or 6 or more with the newest one older than 90 days or undated
4	Active	6 or more updates, the newest within 90 days

A web-only app that ships changes without a public changelog will show Unknown. That reflects missing data, not a judgment about the app.

Market presence

This label uses four public signals: the vendor’s position in the Tranco top-sites ranking, Google Play installs, whether Google’s Chrome UX Report holds real-visitor data for the site, and the registration year of the vendor’s domain.

Order	Label	When it applies
1	Established	Tranco rank of 200,000 or better; or 100,000+ Play installs; or Chrome UX Report data together with a domain registered at least 5 years ago
2	Growing	Any rank in the Tranco top million; or Chrome UX Report data; or 10,000+ Play installs
3	Unknown	Traffic data couldn’t be collected, or the Chrome UX Report check returned an error
4	Small	None of the above

Market presence tells you how visible a vendor’s website and Android app are. It says nothing about how good the product is.

Buying style

Order	Label	When it applies
1	Sales-led	No public prices; the card shows “Book a demo for pricing”
2	Self-serve	Public prices and sign-up without talking to sales, even if the app also has a custom or enterprise plan through sales
3	Sales-assisted	Public prices, but self-serve sign-up isn’t confirmed

In plain words: an app that offers a self-serve plan is labeled Self-serve, even when it also has a custom or enterprise plan that goes through sales. That sales plan is noted as a detail on the app’s page, not as the label. Sales-assisted now means the prices are public but we can’t confirm you can sign up on your own. Sales-led means no public prices. The small restaurants list takes the Self-serve apps, and today that is 16 restaurant apps: 6 are Sales-led and 7 are Sales-assisted.

Where the data comes from

• Vendor websites: home, pricing and features pages, help docs, terms and changelogs. The home, pricing and features pages are saved as text along with the date they were read.
• Apple App Store: last update, first release, rating and rating count from Apple’s lookup service, plus the version history on the app’s App Store page.
• Google Play: the latest update date and the install range on the app’s listing.
• Internet Archive: the year the Wayback Machine first archived the vendor’s home page, shown on app pages as “First archived”.
• RDAP: the registration year of the vendor’s domain.
• Tranco: where the vendor’s domain sits in the Tranco top-sites ranking, if it makes the top million.
• Chrome UX Report, read through Google’s PageSpeed Insights: whether real-visitor data exists for the vendor’s site.
• Status pages: a status page the vendor links to, or one on a “status” subdomain of the vendor’s website. When it publishes an incident feed, incidents from the last 90 days are counted.
• Square, Toast and Clover marketplaces: whether the app has a listing there.
• Reviews: posts on Reddit, G2 and Capterra, plus Google Play and App Store reviews, read only to spot themes that keep coming up.

What you won’t see here

• Star ratings from Capterra, G2 or other directories. Review themes are written in our own words, appear only when a point comes up at least twice across sources, and link to those sources.
• App Store ratings from fewer than 10 people. The average is too easily swayed, so it is hidden for every app below that count.
• Vendor marketing claims, such as customer counts, rankings a vendor gives itself, or a rival’s prices quoted on a vendor’s own site.
• Copied text. Descriptions are written fresh from the facts, not lifted from vendor or review sites.

App icons

The small icon beside each app’s name belongs to that vendor. It comes from the app’s App Store listing when there is an iOS app; otherwise it is the icon the vendor’s website supplies for phones and browser tabs. When neither can be found, you’ll see the app’s first letter on a plain tile. Icons are stored on this site, so showing them sends no request to the vendor.

How often this is updated

The site is updated monthly. Each update collects the App Store, Google Play, traffic, archive and status-page data again and recalculates the labels. Every app page shows a “Last checked” date, so you can tell how fresh its facts are. If something looks wrong, send it in through Add or correct an app; it is checked against the vendor’s own pages before anything changes.