ComparisonsUpdated

The AI tools worth using to run a restaurant, and who each one suits

Six options an independent owner would actually shortlist, judged on the one thing that decides most of it: whether the tool can see your venue's numbers, or whether you have to paste them in.

Alex Riesenkampff

26 August 2026 · Updated 27 August 2026 · 10 min read · Markdown

Most comparisons of this kind sort tools by price. For an independent venue that is the wrong axis, because the free tiers are good and the paid tiers are all within a few pounds of each other. The question that actually decides it is whether the tool can see your venue's numbers, or whether you are the integration. Three of the six below publish no way to read a UK till, booking system or review inbox. They are still worth using. You just need to know that every answer they give you about your own business is an answer about whatever you last pasted in.

That distinction sorts this list more usefully than cost does, and it is why the free option at the top is a serious entry rather than a courtesy.

There is a second question hiding behind it, and it is the one that separates a tool you use from a tool that works: does anything happen without you starting it? Four of the six below wait to be asked. A dashboard waits, and so does a chat window. That is fine when you have the time to go looking, and it is the reason most owners drift away from both by about week three.

Who publishes this, and what connects us to it

Super44 publishes this page and is one of the six entries. Nobody pays to be listed. Our founders came from SumUp and SumUp is in our partnership pipeline, which is worth knowing on a page that discusses tills, though SumUp is not an entry here.

Nothing is scored out of ten. A grade hides its own weighting, and the weighting is the argument: a bakery with one till and a group with six sites are not weighing the same things. The columns sit side by side so you can weigh them yourself.

The reporting already in your POS

Start here, because you are already paying for it. Every modern till ships a back office, and the good ones are better than owners expect. Square for Restaurants puts live sales reporting in its Plus tier at £69 a month per location plus processing fees, and describes real-time data for finding "ways to boost profits and performance". Whatever till you run, look up what your own tier includes before you assume it does not.

What it does well is the thing nothing else on this list can claim without a connection: it is looking at your actual transactions, with no pasting, no summarising and no chance of you accidentally giving it last month's figures. Item-level sales, staff performance and daypart patterns are usually all in there.

Who should not rely on it: anyone who has not opened it in three months. That is most people, and it is not a discipline problem. A dashboard asks you to arrive with a question, and the questions that matter are the ones you did not think to ask. If you have opened your back office twice this year, the honest read is that more reporting will not help you, and that is the specific gap the connected tools below are trying to fill.

Cost: included in what you already pay, though the tier carrying the good reporting is often not the cheapest one.

If you are on Square, check Square AI before paying for anything else on this list. It answers plain-language questions about your own Square data, which is the thing the general assistants below cannot do. It is Beta on Square's US site with no UK availability or price stated, which is why it has no entry of its own here.

ChatGPT

The default, and for good reason. For everything that does not require knowing your numbers, ChatGPT is excellent and the free tier covers a surprising amount of it: menu descriptions, supplier emails, translating your allergen notes into three languages, drafting a staff handbook, turning a rambling complaint into a calm reply.

What it does well is language and reasoning at a standard that was not available to a small business at any price three years ago. It is also the one most people reach for first, which matters more than it sounds: a tool nobody has to be taught gets used.

Who should not pick it as their only tool: anyone who wants an answer about their own venue that is true next month as well as today. It documents no way to read your till, so you are the pipeline, and the pipeline is what breaks. Owners paste in a month of sales, get a genuinely useful answer, mean to do it again in four weeks, and never do.

Cost in the UK: free, then £7 a month for Go, £20 for Plus, £89 for Pro, and £200 for the highest Pro tier. Almost every venue is fine on free or Plus; the £89 and £200 tiers buy usage limits a restaurant will not reach.

Claude

Close to ChatGPT in what it can do and different in feel. It handles long documents better, so if your question involves pasting in a twelve-page lease, a supplier contract or a year of exported reviews, start here.

What it does well: careful, qualified reasoning, and a readiness to say a thing is uncertain rather than produce a confident number. For decisions with money attached that is a feature.

Who should not pick it: anyone whose use is short and conversational. For "write me a caption for tonight's special", the difference between these tools is nothing, and you should use whichever you already have open.

Cost: a free tier at $0, and Pro at $20 a month billed monthly or $17 a month billed annually, both published on Claude's own pricing page. The prices are quoted in dollars rather than pounds.

Google Gemini

The argument for Gemini is not the model, it is proximity. If your venue runs on Gmail and your rota lives in Sheets, your working files are already in the same account Gemini signs into, and the friction of getting them in front of it is lower than exporting them somewhere else.

What it does well: working on things you already keep in Google. For a venue whose entire back office is a Drive folder, that is a real advantage over a chat window in a separate tab.

Who should not pick it: anyone not already in that ecosystem, for whom it is simply a third general assistant. The integration is the reason to choose it, so if you do not have the integration you are choosing on nothing.

Cost: free with a Google account, then €4,99 a month for AI Plus and €21,99 for AI Pro. Google lists those in euros, so expect the sterling equivalent at checkout.

Super44

Ours, and it fills the column the general assistants leave empty. It connects to your till, rotas, Google reviews and listing, email and books, then turns all of it into a short list of actions with numbers rather than another dashboard. If it does not yet connect to something you run, and that thing has a cloud back office, we normally have it connected within days.

What it does well is the follow-up. An approved review reply gets published to your Google Business Profile within a day or two. Wrong opening hours get corrected rather than reported. It runs a full staff system rather than a rota bolt-on: the agent drafts the schedule from availability and demand, you publish it, staff clock in and out, and approved hours export to payroll. It answers by voice, when your hands are full.

Who should not pick it: a group with a central finance function and stock control across sites, which is not what it is built for. Nor anyone wanting an ordering system, because it is not one. And if you want AI purely for writing, the free assistants above do that as well as we do, for nothing.

Cost: a free tier, no card, covering review analysis, reply drafting, chat and voice. The connected half is paid, on plans at €19 and €49 a month, with staff management on the €49 tier. Having a reply published for you is paid; on the free tier you post it yourself.

Nory

The most different thing on this list, and the one a single site is most likely to misjudge in either direction. Nory calls itself "the agentic AI restaurant operating system that predicts demand, builds schedules, manages ordering and payroll, and keeps your P&L on track — across every location", and it lists Independent brands alongside Franchise Networks, Multi-Location Brands and Enterprise Groups as who it serves.

What it does well is breadth that nothing else here matches: demand forecasting, scheduling, ordering and payroll under one roof, reconciled to a P&L. If you are opening your third site and currently doing that across four systems and a spreadsheet, that consolidation is worth real money, and its customer list of Black Sheep Coffee, Dave's Hot Chicken, Boston Tea Party and P.F. Chang's is evidence it works at that scale.

Who should not pick it: probably a first single site, and read its own positioning carefully before deciding you are the exception. It says it serves independent brands, and the company it keeps is multi-site. A system built to reconcile across locations carries setup weight that only pays back when there are locations to reconcile.

Cost: not published. Neither the homepage nor the pricing page carried a figure, plan name or minimum commitment on 26 August 2026, so evaluating it means booking a call first. For a group that is routine. For an owner comparing options at eleven at night it is a real obstacle, and worth knowing before you start.

So which one

If you are in your first year and money is tight, use the free tier of whichever general assistant you already have open, and put an hour in your diary to actually open your POS back office. That combination costs nothing and beats what most venues are doing. Do not buy anything yet.

If you keep meaning to look at your numbers and keep not doing it, stop buying tools that wait for you. That is the honest case for us, and it is a narrow one: the reply you approved gets published, the wrong opening hours on your listing get corrected, the rota arrives already drafted. Nothing on this page except Nory does that, and Nory is built for groups. The test is not whether the data exists. Every tool here can show you data. It is whether anything happens because of it.

If you are running three sites or more and forecasting, ordering and payroll are spread across different systems, look at Nory before you look at us. That is what it is built for and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

And if what you actually want is help writing things, stop reading comparisons. ChatGPT's free tier will do it this afternoon.

For the prompts themselves rather than the choice of tool, our library of hospitality prompts has the copy-paste versions for menus, review replies and rotas. And if your question is the other direction, how to get an assistant to recommend your venue to a guest rather than how to use one yourself, that is a different problem with a different answer. Before paying for any of this, it is worth knowing which channels actually bring guests through the door, which our breakdown of restaurant discovery channels sets out with the numbers.