Zenchef fills your dining room. We also fill your schedule.
- Price
- Free up to 10 staff · Pro €19/month · Ultra €39/month (excl. VAT)
- Start
- Every new venue gets 30 days of Ultra, no card
- Contract
- None — cancel any month, no setup fee
- Dimona
- Export to your payroll office (no direct declaration)
- Who it’s for
- Cafés, restaurants, bars, hotels — and any team that works in shifts
First the honest part: Zenchef is a strong product. They say themselves it runs in roughly 25,000 restaurants. The table plan is well thought through, the waitlist works, the guest CRM remembers who is allergic and who comes every Friday, and the 24/7 phone assist is a real relief for a large brasserie. If you are comparing on reservations alone you can land on Zenchef quite happily — we are not claiming it is bad, because it is not.
But reservations are not the only thing that happens in a venue. We take those same bookings, and on the free plan they cost €0. What Zenchef does not do — and does not try to do — is the service itself: who is on tonight, who clocked in, what is left on the opening and closing list, and what has to be ordered from the supplier tomorrow. That is not a weak module over there. It is not in the product.
Zenchef knows who is coming to eat. Not who is working.
Put the two products side by side and the dividing line is the door. Zenchef handles everything on the guest side: the booking, the table, the confirmation, the reminder, the guest profile, the campaign afterwards. On the other side of that same door stands a team that needs a schedule, a closing list, an hours record and an order that has to go out on Friday. Zenchef has no screen for that, because that is not the product they sell.
At SuperHoreca all of it lives in one system, on that same free plan: a drag-and-drop weekly schedule, availability and shift swaps, opening and closing tasks that get ticked off, orders that leave as email to your supplier, and a time clock on a QR tablet or on your staff member’s own phone. And because the reservations sit in that same system, tonight’s team sees on their own schedule how many covers are coming — nobody retypes anything.
For a Belgian venue the difference is in the detail of that schedule. Flexi-job and student are real contract types with their own hourly rate, not a word typed into a free-text box. The student quota is set to 650 hours for 2026, so you see someone approaching their ceiling before the social security office tells you. And the wages you enter are PC 302 wages, which makes the labour-cost report accurate rather than approximate.
We take those reservations too — and on the free plan they cost €0
Concretely: online booking on your own domain through a widget you paste into your site, confirmation emails leaving from your venue’s own from-address (not ours), capacity per time slot, closed dates you switch off per day, minimum and maximum party size, how far ahead a guest may still book, inside or terrace, food or drinks, and a notification to the manager the moment something lands. If a guest replies to their confirmation, that mail reaches you instead of a black hole.
Zenchef publishes no price: you get one after a demo, in a quote, usually with an annual contract that renews — something Trustpilot reviews keep surfacing as a surprise. Our prices sit on the site: €0 up to 10 staff, €19 a month for Pro with unlimited staff, €39 for Ultra. Cancel monthly. Prices excl. VAT.
Where Zenchef beats us
Their guest CRM is deeper than ours. We keep who has been in and what was noted; Zenchef builds segments and campaigns on top of that, birthday triggers included. If you have somebody who actually works that, it earns you revenue we do not give you.
We send no SMS confirmations, only email. Pay-at-table is not in our product, and we cannot take a deposit to cut no-shows — Zenchef can, as an add-on. Their table plan is graphical and ours is not: we work with capacity per time slot and a table preference as free text, not a floor plan where you drag guests from table to table. There is no 24/7 phone line here; there is one person who calls back. And guest reminder emails sit in our Pro plan (€19 a month), not in the free one.
If you run a fine-dining address doing 200 covers a service, with a marketing lead and a guest file you actively work, Zenchef is probably the better tool for that side of the house. Only: the schedule for that same house is then still somewhere else.
What it looks like
Pricing comparison, no asterisks
Pricing pulled straight from their public pricing page (verified May 2026).
| What you get | Zenchef | SuperHoreca |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | No amount on the Plans page. The price arrives in a quote after a demo. | €0 (up to 10 staff) · Pro €19/mo · Ultra €39/mo |
| Free tier | ||
| Setup fee | Unknown | None |
| Contract | Annual contract | Monthly or annual |
| Demo required for pricing | ||
| Online reservations | ||
| Table map / management | ||
| Waitlist | ||
| SMS confirmations | ||
| Branded confirmation emails | ||
| Guest CRM | ||
| Multi-venue | Centralised multi-venue sits in the top "Grow" tier only. | |
| Pay at the table | ||
| Embeddable widget | ||
| Drag-and-drop schedule | ||
| Time clock | ||
| Email orders to suppliers |
Questions we get a lot
Can I move my Zenchef data into SuperHoreca?
You export your guest file from Zenchef as CSV and import it with us. We do not move historical reservations across — they stop being useful after a few months anyway. Start clean from the week you switch and keep your old Zenchef account in read-only for a month as a reference.
How does the Zenchef annual contract work?
Read your contract carefully: Zenchef contracts generally auto-renew unless you cancel in writing beforehand, and Trustpilot reviews surface that regularly as a surprise. Your exact notice period is in your own quote — ask for it before you decide anything. With us it is monthly: no registered letter, no notice period, no next fiscal year you still owe.
I only use Zenchef for reservations. What does switching win me?
It wins you the rest of the day. The same bookings, plus next week’s schedule, the time clock, the opening and closing list and the supplier order — in one system, on one login, and up to ten staff for €0. What you give up is listed honestly above: CRM depth, SMS, deposits, a graphical table plan and the phone line.
Does SuperHoreca send SMS confirmations?
No. Only email confirmations from your own from-address, with double opt-in. SMS is deliberately out: it costs per message, it does not work for tourists on foreign numbers, and email solves it fine for normal café volume. If SMS is critical for you, Zenchef is genuinely stronger there.
Same time as a Zenchef demo: 30 minutes. Difference: no sales rep, no quote afterwards, no annual contract. Make an account, paste the reservation widget on your site, and put next week’s schedule right beside it. Up to ten staff that costs €0.
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