Tulala vs OpenTable
The question is not which is cheaper. It is whether you are renting access to your own customers.
OpenTable fills empty tables. That is a real service and for some restaurants it is worth every penny, particularly a new room in a busy city that nobody has heard of yet.
The part worth reading carefully is what happens to the diners you already had. On the entry plan, a cover fee applies to bookings that come through your own website, not only to diners who found you on OpenTable. The plans that waive that cost more per month. So the cheapest way in is the one that charges you for your own regulars, and the way to stop paying for them is to pay more.
The numbers side by side
| Tulala | OpenTable | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost to start | Free. You can take a booking without paying anything. | Reported at $149 a month for the entry plan, rising to about $299 and $499. |
| Fee per diner from your OWN website | None, on every plan including free. | Reported at about $1.50 per cover on the entry plan. Waived on the higher plans. |
| Fee per diner from their network | We do not have a diner network, so there is nothing to charge for. | Reported at about $1.00 to $1.50 per cover depending on plan. |
| What a busy month costs | The plan price. Table bookings do not carry a fee. | The plan price plus every cover. Volume is what makes it expensive, so the better your month, the larger the bill. |
| Who owns the customer list | You do, on every plan. Export it whenever you want. | Diners who arrive through the network are theirs. Access to them stops when you stop paying. |
| Your own website | Included. Your domain, your pages, your menu, your storefront. | A reservation widget you place on a site you build elsewhere. |
Pricing for OpenTable checked on 4 September 2026. Prices change, so verify them here: OpenTable for Restaurants pricing. Ours are on our pricing page.
OpenTable's own pricing page did not load when we checked, so the figures below come from public reporting rather than from their site directly. Read their page before you decide, and tell us if we have it wrong.
Where OpenTable is genuinely stronger
They have diners. Millions of people open OpenTable looking for somewhere to eat tonight, and if you need to fill a Tuesday in a room nobody knows yet, that is worth paying for. We do not have that, and pretending otherwise would not survive a single week of use.
Their floor management is deeper than ours: table combinations, pacing, shift handovers, waitlists at scale. A hundred cover restaurant with a complex floor should look hard at what they lose by leaving.
The cover fee model is not unreasonable in itself. Charging for a diner they genuinely introduced is a fair trade. The part worth questioning is the entry plan charging for diners who came from your own website.
Who should actually switch
- Most of your bookings come from people who already know you, and you are paying per head for them.
- Your monthly bill grows on your best months, which is exactly backwards.
- You want your menu, your bookings and your website in one place instead of a widget bolted onto a site you maintain separately.
- You want the customer list to be yours when you leave, not a reason you cannot.
Keep OpenTable and try this alongside
You do not have to choose on day one. Put your own page up, send it to your regulars, and let the network keep doing what the network is good at. If your own bookings move across, you will see it in a month.