Guides

Super44 or ChatGPT? What to use to run your café, pub or restaurant

ChatGPT is brilliant at the questions you bring it. Super44 is connected to your till, Google profile, Instagram and rota, so it brings you the questions and does the work. Here is when each one is the right call, and what each costs in the UK.

Alex Riesenkampff

29 October 2026 · 10 min read · Markdown

For one-off questions, ChatGPT is enough, and the free plan will do: a supplier email, a menu description, an idea for a quiet Tuesday. For running the place day to day it falls short in one specific way, because out of the box it works from what you paste or upload. Super44 Core costs £19 a month against £20 for ChatGPT Plus, and comes connected to your till, Google Business Profile, Instagram and rota, so the morning numbers, the review replies and next week's posts arrive without you exporting anything.

orChatGPT

This guide is published by Super44, and Super44 is one of the two things it compares. Super44 advertises on ChatGPT and is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI. Super44 is a multi-agent system that runs on a variety of AI models, mostly Anthropic's Claude, with Google's Gemini for images, video and voice calls.

When ChatGPT on its own is the right choice

If your AI jobs are writing and thinking, ChatGPT is the right tool and you may never need to pay for it. ChatGPT's free plan covers the work most owners start with, and in the UK Go costs £7 a month and Plus £20 when you need more of it.

It is very good at the jobs that start with a blank page. Ask it for three versions of a menu description, a job advert for a weekend barista, a calm reply to an awkward supplier, or the German version of your allergen notice. Upload last month's sales export and it will chart the takings by weekday and explain what moved. It makes images too, so a poster for a quiz night is a prompt away. Our ChatGPT prompts for restaurants collects the ones worth keeping.

OpenAI's own case study of a Thai restaurant shows how far that approach goes: the owner uses ChatGPT to draft replies to Google and Yelp reviews, cost dishes and plan social posts. Used on its own, ChatGPT starts each of those jobs from the facts you bring in.

Stay with ChatGPT on its own if any of these describe you:

• You do not have a card till yet, or you take so few sales that the weekly numbers fit on a napkin.
• Your hardest weekly job is writing, translating or planning rather than the till, the reviews or the rota.
• You like working in spreadsheets and do not mind exporting a report each week.

Where chat-window AI stops for a venue

Large language models are the most common kind of AI in UK businesses, which is why this question comes up at all. The ONS found that large language models were the most widely used AI technology among UK businesses with 10 or more employees in June 2026, used by 18% of them.

The catch for a venue is that the answer is only as good as what goes in. Paste last week's takings with a day missing and ChatGPT will explain a dip that never happened. Paste reviews from one platform and it summarises half the story. Dom Jacobs, managing director of The Cadogan Arms, set the standard plainly at a Restaurant Online roundtable on AI:

The same table was positive about what AI does well. Jacobs said that "AI can do a summary of reviews for us. It’s not as good as a human doing it, but it’s fine, and it removes a job." That is the right test for any tool: does it remove a job, or move it? A summary of reviews you first had to copy out has moved the job to you. A summary of reviews the tool already reads has removed it.

The same six jobs, done both ways

Four of the six jobs a venue repeats every week mean exporting, pasting or copying when you use ChatGPT on its own. With Super44 the connections fetch the data: you approve the results and supply the photos and invoices, and nothing needs exporting or pasting.

What a connected assistant does with no prompting

The point of the connection is that the work starts before you ask. Every morning at 8, Super44 sends a short brief from your till: yesterday's sales against the same day last week, what stood out, and one or two things worth changing today.

ChatGPT can get part of the way there. From Go upwards, scheduled tasks run in the background, but they work from what you give them: the week's sales still have to be downloaded from the till and uploaded, each job needs a task of its own, and there is no rota your team can see. Super44 does those jobs from the moment the connections are in.

Super44 carries on through the week. New Google reviews arrive with replies drafted in your voice; approve them in a tap, and once you trust the drafts let Super44 answer on its own. Your own photos become a week of Instagram posts, Reels and Stories in your brand's style, taken from your Instagram and website, and are published from your account after you approve each one. Instagram publishing went live for Super44 merchants on 28 October 2026, and Google posts publish the same way. Supplier invoices are pulled from your Gmail, or you photograph them or send them in the chat, and they are read against your recipes, so a price rise is flagged with the dishes it hits.

The same assistant drafts next week's rota from your sales, and your team clocks in, swaps shifts and books leave in Super44's staff app. Plus, at £49 a month, adds team chat, opening and closing checklists and payroll exports. You chat with Super44 in the app, on the web or on WhatsApp; approvals happen in the app and on the web, and your team uses the staff app.

What that looks like in practice: a café in East London compared its own trading days in Super44 and found that closing at 4pm capped a day at about £804, while staying open to around 8pm produced £1,062 or more. Working that out in ChatGPT is possible. It starts with someone exporting months of sales and knowing which question to ask.

What each one costs

On price, the paid plans land within a pound of each other. ChatGPT Plus costs £20 a month in the UK and Super44 Core £19, and both have a free plan you can start on today without a card.

Super44's own aim is to add around £500 a month to a venue's profit within about twelve weeks. Treat that as the goal it is, and weigh the £19 against the jobs it takes off your week.

Your data and your guests' data

The defaults differ, and they matter once your chats include guests' names or staff hours. OpenAI says that on ChatGPT Free, Plus and Pro it "may use your content to train our models" unless you switch off "Improve the model for everyone", and its pricing page shows the same opt-out for Go; Business plans are not used by default, and Super44 never uses your data to train AI models.

At the same roundtable Katy Hamilton, marketing director of the hospitality technology company Access Hospitality, named the risk directly: "The danger of ChatGPT is that you’re putting your data out there." Super44 hosts your data in Frankfurt, in the EU, and is GDPR compliant. Whichever tool you use, leave out personal data the job does not need, and use ChatGPT's temporary chats for anything sensitive: OpenAI does not use them to improve its models while they stay temporary.

Which should you pick?

The default for most single-site venues is both: ChatGPT, free, for writing and ideas, and Super44 for the till, the reviews, the socials and the rota. If you only do one thing, pick by where your week goes: ChatGPT if it goes on words, Super44 if it goes on numbers, reviews, posts and shifts.

The default changes for a group running several sites with its own finance team: it needs forecasting and P&L across sites, which neither of these is built for, and the AI tools worth using to run a restaurant covers the options.

If you use Claude rather than ChatGPT, the comparison runs differently, because Super44's multi-agent system runs on a variety of AI models, mostly Claude: Super44 or Claude covers it.

How to try Super44 without changing anything else

You do not need to give up ChatGPT, move your till or sign a contract to find out whether a connected assistant earns its place. Super44 Starter is free with no card, and it publishes your first three Google review replies, one Google post and one profile update before you pay anything.

Start by connecting your Google Business Profile, because that is where the quickest win sits for most venues: a backlog of unanswered reviews. Super44 reads them, tells you what guests keep mentioning, and drafts replies in your voice that you approve one by one. Ask it for this week's post from a photo on your phone and see what comes back.

If that is useful, Core at £19 a month connects the till. Once it is connected the 8am brief arrives on its own, and the questions you used to answer with an export and a ChatGPT prompt get answered from the real numbers. Add Instagram when you want posts and Reels published rather than drafted, and the staff app when next month's rota comes round. Keep ChatGPT open in the other tab for the writing jobs; plenty of owners will use both, and that is fine.

Try Super free and connect your Google profile first.