What are the best apps for restaurants? The best ones cover six jobs: scheduling and payroll, online ordering, reservations, inventory, point of sale (POS), and marketing. The strongest setup is a small set of restaurant management apps that share data with each other.
Restaurants of today are infused with technology in many new ways, and it’s making a difference.
The National Restaurant Association tracks this shift in its 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry report. According to the report, operators are looking to invest in more technology that boosts efficiency and strengthens guest connections.
Restaurants turned to restaurant management apps to keep up, and it appears there’s no going back.
With the right tech tools, managers can ease their workloads, employees enjoy a much smoother scheduling process, and guests benefit in countless ways — from mobile ordering to digital menus to better ways of making and managing reservations.
What are the best apps for restaurants? Quick picks by job
| Job to be done | Best pick(s) from this list | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduling, team communication, payroll, and tips | 7shifts | Builds schedules, runs team chat, pools tips, and runs payroll in one platform |
| Accounting | QuickBooks | Tracks budgets and costs, and syncs scheduling and attendance with payroll |
| Payroll and HR | 7shifts (or RUN Powered by ADP for non-restaurant businesses) | Restaurant payroll that pulls hours, tips, and PTO from the schedule, plus hiring, onboarding, and training |
| Online ordering and delivery | ChowNow, Chowly, Otter | Branded ordering apps, ordering from Google, and delivery order management |
| Reservations | OpenTable, Resy, Eat App | Help guests find and book tables, and help you manage seating |
| Inventory and food cost | BevSpot, BlueCart, Meez | Track stock, order from suppliers, and cost out recipes |
| Sales forecasting | Tenzo | AI sales forecasts and real-time reporting |
| Training | 7shifts (plus Opus or 1huddle for specialized content) | Assign and track staff training in the same platform as scheduling and onboarding |
| POS | Revel Systems, plus seven POS systems that integrate with 7shifts | Takes payments and sends sales data to your other tools |
| Guest feedback and listings | Ovation, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Yelp | Collect feedback, answer reviews, and keep hours up to date |
| Social media | Buffer, Hootsuite, Later | Schedule posts and track engagement |
| Team engagement | Speakap | Branded employee app for news and messaging |
Each entry below explains what the app does well and where to download it.
1. 7shifts
Most managers are familiar (and frustrated) with traditional paper scheduling techniques. 7shifts is the HR platform for restaurants. It allows owners and managers to schedule restaurant employees, approve shift trades, and communicate with staff from one easy-to-use mobile app.
The app is useful for both your front- and back-of-house staff, allowing them to check upcoming shifts, submit availability, request shift trades, and more.
7shifts is a major player in the restaurant industry, serving 55,000 restaurants and offering the most important restaurant management tools all in a single platform. In addition to scheduling, 7shifts handles restaurant payroll, tip management, hiring and application management, employee training, and much more. With 7shifts Payroll, hours, tips, and PTO flow straight from the schedule and time clock. And automated tip pooling handles complex tip-outs.
7shifts works for restaurants from single locations to multi-location groups, helping you simplify and automate scheduling, payroll, and more. Try 7shifts for free.
“Having that one umbrella ecosphere of information for employees from time cards to payroll to schedule to communication… it doesn’t feel overwhelming for an employee to consume the information… that for me has been a absolute game-changer.”
Team communication
The Team Communication tool from 7shifts fixes the chaos of disconnected conversations, text threads, and email chains that seem to go nowhere. With Team Communication, you can message individual staff members or the whole team about announcements or shift changes. You can even share important documents, like updated policies or tax forms.
Staff gets automatic alerts for upcoming breaks and newly published schedules so they can stay in the know. The app also lets employees take their scheduling changes into their own hands by making approved shift swaps and securely communicating with each other.
7shifts’ team communication tools can cut calls, texts, and emails by 50%. We built Team Communication to help restaurants increase team collaboration and accountability and cut the time managers spend solving scheduling conflicts.
Manager log book
Synced with 7shifts employee management software, the Manager Log Book is the perfect place to take shift notes on the go and centralize them in one place. Whether it’s kudos for an employee’s job well done or a reminder to restock for tomorrow’s shift, this is the ideal solution for those of us who are a little… forgetful.
As an added bonus, you can share these notes with other managers so that everyone has the context they need when on the floor.
2. ChowNow
ChowNow is a customized online ordering app for restaurants. ChowNow builds, publishes, and maintains your branded iOS and Android apps for your customers to download.
3. QuickBooks
Restaurateurs are no strangers to QuickBooks accounting software. Payroll can be a huge chore in this industry due to its time-sucking nature, and other accounting needs like inventory and budget management aren’t exactly easy (or exciting).
But QuickBooks makes these financial obligations more manageable and more insightful. With it, you can make better decisions about your restaurant, scheduling, and cost structure. Plus, QuickBooks integrates with 7shifts, syncing employee scheduling and attendance with payroll without any added steps. You can quickly export reports and view overtime hours with just a few clicks.
4. OpenTable
As diners’ habits and preferences evolve, reservations are more important than ever for many full-service restaurants. OpenTable says it helps more than 70,000 restaurants worldwide fill 2 billion seats a year. It’s arguably the go-to platform for diners looking to make a reservation.
Diners can use OpenTable to search for available reservations at any restaurant near them. For newer restaurants hoping to bring in new customers, this app can be an effective way to get found by area visitors and locals alike.
OpenTable offers unique back-end benefits to restaurants, too, providing a customer management system, seating optimization tools, and monetizable experiences restaurants can use to grow their reach, turn guests into regulars, and reduce chaotic peaks and valleys.
5. RUN Powered by ADP
ADP’s RUN is another payroll option used by SMBs. RUN also acts as an HR software, connecting payroll to core employee functions like training, record keeping, and onboarding.
Unlike 7shifts Payroll, however, it isn’t built specifically for restaurants. 7shifts Payroll software pulls time-clocking, tips, PTO and labor/compliance data and employees can access their paystubs within the mobile app.
6. Eat App
Eat App is a guest experience platform that Eat App says is used by hospitality brands in 90+ countries, primarily for reservation management. However, Eat App’s capabilities touch so much more than reservations: payments, email marketing, and simpler operations all come with this app.
Eat App helps increase profits by helping restaurants retain more customers and providing businesses with actionable data about their guests.
Eat App says there’s no commission on reservations from Instagram, Google, and your restaurant’s website, which keeps costs low even as the platform simplifies your operations. Restaurants can also use Eat App for table management, building a guest database, and brand management.
7. Speakap
Speakap is a branded employee app that brings staff together in a social media-like tool that provides onboarding, task management, and workplace messaging features. It’s helped large brands bring team members together.
Speakap is also a king of integrations and works with plenty of other apps to keep your team engaged and productive while on the job. And even when employees are off, you can use Speakap to reach them from anywhere to ensure they’re up to date on essential workplace news.
8. BevSpot
BevSpot is a food and beverage management software that handles inventory management, ordering, invoicing, and sales data. With BevSpot, restaurants can take inventory “any time, anywhere.” Multi-location businesses can manage inventory centrally, with staff at each restaurant adding to the same database.
BevSpot helps restaurants reduce the time spent on inventory and the amount of inventory sitting in each restaurant. Thanks to its recipe editor, BevSpot also helps you understand and track cost percentages.
9. Chowly
If your restaurant wants to start offering online ordering (or you need a better system than the one you have in place now), try Chowly. It’s a suite of tools for restaurants that includes online ordering, order integration, menu management, smart pricing, and more.
One of the most powerful features is direct integration with Google. Used to the fullest, Chowly allows customers to place food orders directly from your Google page.
The menu management and smart pricing tools are a nice one-two combo: as soon as you identify changes you need to make to pricing, menu management lets you push those updates throughout your digital ecosystem.
10. Tenzo
Want more accurate sales forecasts? Look no further than Tenzo, which uses AI forecasting to create forecasts that Tenzo says are “typically 30–50% more accurate than traditional four-week rolling averages.” More accurate forecasts result in less food waste, more accurate labor costs, and an overall better guest experience.
Plus, with data available in real time, you can make immediate decisions about your business with confidence (and the numbers to back it up). Tenzo’s reporting is detailed but easy to digest, so you’ll be spending less time analyzing reports and more time acting on them.
2026 Labor Costs Playbook
Increase your bottom line with insights from over 500 restaurant pros—learn the true cost of employee turnover, the best way to manage labor costs, and proven strategies to protect profits.
11. Resy
Resy is the go-to solution for many restaurants looking for a way to level up their guest experience and broaden their restaurant’s reach. More than just a reservation service, Resy (and its restaurant-facing Resy OS) is an end-to-end restaurant technology solution that majors on guest experience and customer touchpoints.
With Resy, restaurants can create curated experiences, one-off events, original content, and more. And simply by being present on Resy, restaurants can grow their discoverability, especially among higher-end diners looking for unique experiences.
12. Ovation
With a two-question SMS-based survey, restaurants use Ovation to obtain higher-quality guest feedback in real time. Ovation helps win over unsatisfied guests by giving you a better opportunity to solve their problems — and even ways to reach out to them after they leave. It also integrates well with several online ordering platforms, helping you grow revenue and garner better reviews even as you improve the guest experience.
13. BlueCart
Inventory woes plague every restaurant professional. That’s where BlueCart comes in. An online ordering platform for the hospitality space, BlueCart allows restaurants to order all of their necessary inventory from all of their suppliers at once.
This simple app can help ease the struggles of printed order forms, email requests, and back-and-forth phone calls, which keeps kitchens well stocked. With built-in inventory tracking, re-orders are just a click away on the BlueCart app when stock is low.
An added perk? BlueCart’s digital catalog is filled with wholesale food distributors to meet your need for every ingredient!
14. Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) & Bing Places
Hours change for holiday weekends. Menu items might not be available. Maybe you have a new online ordering solution. For all these reasons, you need the right apps to manage your presence on search engines. Diners don’t want to head to your restaurant only to find that you’re closed and your hours haven’t been updated. Conversely, if you are open and Google doesn’t reflect it, you might be losing out on business. Getting set up on these pages is one thing — maintaining your presence is another.
For those reasons, keep track of both of these services for quick access when needed. Also, learn how to add your restaurant to Google Maps.
When Alphabet rebranded Google My Business as Google Business Profile, it did away with the standalone app. But you can still access everything you need at the Google Business Profile website.
15. Opus
Opus delivers on-the-job training built for your frontline employees. With Opus, you can create media-rich, mobile-friendly training that employees can access from any device.
Opus is designed to be multilingual, auto-translating your content into 130+ languages, according to Opus. That way, you can create and share content in the languages that provide the best experience for all your employees.
It’s a learning management system built for the way frontline restaurant staff actually operate, and it’s got plenty of power behind the scenes (like AI Assist for building better training faster).
16. 1huddle
1huddle takes employee training and motivation to the next level with gamification, turning learning into something fun and engaging. It’s a great solution for providing training that employees will want to do.
The app claims to harness cognitive psychology and learning science in its design. Anthony Valletta of bartaco says they use 1huddle to teach in “a way that resonates better with our employees and our leaders and our managers”.
17. Meez
If you’re looking for an upgrade to the way you organize recipes, build menus, and handle food costing, Meez could be the solution. This platform provides a secure, simple way to share knowledge on executing your brand’s food and drink standards, making it perfect for multi-location hospitality groups.
Meez also helps restaurants understand their food costs and engineer menus that deliver reliable profits based on those costs. The platform also handles kitchen training, invoice processing, and nutrition labeling.
18. Revel Systems
POS system Revel is used by individual units, small chains, and enterprise restaurant businesses. One of Revel’s strong suits is its open API, which allows for third-party app integrations (like 7shifts) and tailored solutions for key digital elements like loyalty and online ordering.
The app also extends to other important areas of your restaurant, like self-order kiosks and drive-thru management — all while offering flexible payments. For managers, the app provides cloud-based insights into the entire business’s performance, enabling decisions based on real-time data.
19. Otter
Delivery and online orders still matter, and the National Restaurant Association expects operators to keep investing in digital ordering and payments in 2026. Otter helps restaurants track and manage these channels by integrating orders with point of sale and syncing menus across platforms.
Once you sign up for Otter, the team will ship you tablets with the apps preloaded or work with you to set up the software and integrations on existing devices. Designed to simplify and grow your delivery business, restaurants use Otter to increase restaurant sales, save time, and deliver better.
20. Yelp Manage My Business
Yelp is a major review site, with about 330 million reviews submitted as of December 2025. It’s important to stake your restaurant’s claim online. Having the app on hand allows you to monitor and respond to customer reviews in real time and check out your competitors to see how they rank compared to you. Best of all, claiming and managing your Yelp business page is free.
Yelp Manage My Business is the restaurant-facing portal Yelp provides for restaurants to take ownership of their Yelp pages. From this service, you can engage in brand management, set up Yelp ads (a paid option), and engage with customers and potential customers.
21. POS systems
Point of sale systems, or POS systems, are the machines restaurants use to take payments and handle transactions. Every restaurant needs some form of POS system, whether a classic PC-based system or something more portable, like the many phone- and iPad-based POS platforms released in the last decade.
These are seven of the POS systems that integrate with 7shifts:
- Square: Widely popular solution with powerful features and wide-ranging integrations
- GoTab: POS popular among breweries and hotels; integrated KDS and mobile ordering systems
- Clover: Scalable POS solutions popular with smaller operators
- TouchBistro: POS system with accompanying restaurant management software
- Revel: Cloud-based POS with real-time analytics
- Lightspeed: POS system with focus on customer experience
- Rezku: Highly customizable POS with unlimited support
When these POS systems integrate with 7shifts, sales data feeds labor forecasting, so managers can build schedules around expected sales.
22. Social media apps
Your restaurant needs apps for social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok — but what about apps to manage your social media presence and performance? Some popular options to monitor your mentions and post engagement include:
- Buffer (Apple | Android): Praised for its ease of use, it’s the best option for getting started with social media content.
- Hootsuite (Apple | Android): For more seasoned social media users, it’s a more powerful option for publishing and reporting.
- Later (Apple | Android): If your restaurant’s main presence is on Instagram, Later’s your best bet.
Bonus: 6 general-purpose apps useful for restaurants
Those 22 restaurant-specific app recommendations are a great place to start — but there are plenty of general-purpose apps you should be using, too!
- Google Workspace: This cloud-based productivity suite includes email, storage, documents, spreadsheets, and more, serving as the foundation for your everyday office work.
- Notion: A combination of a super-powered notepad and lightweight project management software, Notion is a great place to store notes, create plans, and house all that data and information that doesn’t fit anywhere else.
- Evernote: If Notion feels too open-ended, Evernote provides similar capabilities with a different feel.
- Canva: This “graphic design for regular people” platform is great for creating graphics, advertisements, posters, and other restaurant collateral quickly, even if you don’t have a design background.
- ChatGPT: This generative AI tool can craft written content based on your inputs. You could use it to create menu descriptions and other blurbs of content. Just be sure to check the results for accuracy!
- 1Password: This password manager keeps your business data secure by eliminating the use and reuse of simple, easy-to-crack passwords.
How to choose the right apps for your restaurant
A good restaurant tech stack gives you hours back each week. A messy one adds logins, double entry, and more texts to your personal phone. Use these five checks before you add or cut an app.
Start with your biggest time drain
List the tasks that eat up most of your week. If scheduling and payroll take six or more hours, start with team tools before you add a new ordering or marketing app.
Check integrations before you buy
The apps that save the most time share data with each other. Your POS sends sales to your schedule, and your time clock sends hours and tips to payroll. Check which apps integrate with the tools you already use.
Cut down on tool sprawl
Every extra app means another login for your team and another place for information to get lost. A few connected restaurant apps beat a dozen that don’t talk to each other. Two restaurant tech leaders use the same test: will the team actually want to use it?
Josh Sharkey, CEO of Meez stresses empowering teams with simple, easy-to-use tools:
“The question you always have to ask is… will this be a tool that will require my team in order to be successful, or will this be something that my team will require to be successful? Does the tool rely on the team, or does the team rely on the tool? … If they have to do all this work and it’s a chore for them, then they’re not going to be super happy.”
Test apps with your team
Use free trials and demos before you commit. Ask a few front- and back-of-house staff to try the mobile app for a week. Then ask what slowed them down.
Plan for more than one location
For groups with two to five locations, pick tools with group-wide reporting and shared templates. That way, every location schedules, trains, and reports the same way.
Frequently asked questions about restaurant apps
What are the best apps for restaurants?
The best apps for restaurants include 7shifts for scheduling, payroll, and tips, OpenTable or Resy for reservations, and ChowNow or Otter for ordering. For inventory and food cost, BevSpot and Meez are strong picks.
What apps do restaurant managers use every day?
Most managers use a POS, a scheduling app, team chat, and a manager log book every shift. With 7shifts, scheduling, team communication, and the Manager Log Book all live in one place.
How much do restaurant management apps cost?
Prices vary by app, plan, and number of locations, and many tools offer free plans, free trials, or demos. Budget for hardware and setup fees too, especially for POS systems.
What’s the difference between a POS and a restaurant management app?
A POS runs sales and payments. Restaurant management apps handle jobs like scheduling, payroll, inventory, and reservations, and the best ones connect to your POS to share sales data.
Is there a free restaurant management app?
Yes. 7shifts offers a free Comp plan, and claiming your Yelp business page and Google Business Profile listing is free.
More restaurant technology resources
Restaurant management apps are some of the best ways to keep yourself organized, your staff productive, and your guests satisfied. Each one can improve your bottom line and profit margins by delivering better insights into your restaurant and customer data and increasing efficiency (in part through integrations with other software).
While most of these apps require an account and cost money to use to their full extent, they all have the potential to help you better manage your restaurant. Many of the entries on this list have free trials or demos, so if any caught your eye, check them out and see if they’re as good a fit for your restaurant’s tech stack as we think they could be.
Ready to keep learning? Check out these additional restaurant technology resources you can use to take your restaurant business to the next level.
AJ Beltis, Author
AJ Beltis
Author
AJ Beltis is a freelance writer with almost a decade of experience in the restaurant industry. He currently works as a content manager at HubSpot, and previously as a blogger at Toast.
