Best restaurant inventory software UK: an honest comparison

Every comparison of restaurant inventory software you will find is written by one of the vendors, and every one of them concludes that the vendor who wrote it is the best choice. This one is written by a vendor too — us — so treat it accordingly. What we have tried to do differently is say plainly where somebody else is the better answer, because you will find that out eventually anyway and we would rather you heard it here.

Prices below were correct at time of writing, July 2026. Check them yourself before deciding — they move.

The four questions that actually decide it

1. Is recipe costing included, or is it a paid tier? Counting stock without costing dishes tells you what you hold, not whether you make money.
2. How do invoices get in? If the answer is 'you type them', the system will be abandoned within a month. This is the most under-weighted question in the whole decision.
3. What does it cost as you add sites and users? Per-seat pricing that looked cheap at one site becomes the largest line on the bill at four.
4. What happens to your data if you leave? Ask before you put six months of history in. Get the answer in writing.

MarketMan

The established name, strong supplier integrations, and used by large multi-site groups. Onboarding is typically quoted at four to eight weeks. If you run several sites, have a central purchasing function and need deep supplier integration, this is a serious and sensible choice — more so than us.

• Best for: multi-site groups with an ops or finance team to run it.
• Watch: implementation length, and cost as sites and users grow.

Jelly

UK-built, flat rate around £129 a month with no per-user fees, and genuinely fast to get value from — price alerts within a day of your first invoice. If you want one predictable monthly number and you trade steadily all year, a flat fee is easier to budget than usage-based pricing, and that is a real advantage over us.

• Best for: busy single or small multi-site venues that want one predictable bill.
• Watch: you pay the same in a quiet January as a busy December.

Kitchen CUT

Long-established UK brand, strong on recipe and menu engineering, with an entry tier around £75 a month for a single site and a free trial. Good pedigree in professional kitchens and culinary education.

• Best for: chef-led operations that care most about recipes, specs and allergens.
• Watch: check what the entry tier includes before comparing it to anything else on price.

Supy and Apicbase

Full back-of-house platforms covering inventory, procurement, recipe costing and analytics. Capable, and aimed at operators who want one system for everything. Both are more system than a single independent site usually needs, and priced accordingly.

• Best for: groups wanting a single back-of-house platform.
• Watch: scope. If you only need stock and costing, you will pay for a lot you never open.

FoxEra — ours, assessed the same way

FoxEra has no subscription, per-seat fee or contract. Core access, saved data, reports, users and David AI text chat are free; the metered AI, import, integration and workflow actions listed on Pricing use credits. Every company starts with 24,000 credits, the same balance as the £160 top-up.

That makes the fixed software cost zero, but usage is not unlimited: busy operations use credits faster than quiet ones. The cost-per-action table on Pricing is the honest comparison point.

• Best for: independents and small groups who want costing and scanning without a contract, and whose trade is seasonal or uneven.
• Watch: we are new. Competitors are ten years old with case studies; we are proving ourselves one kitchen at a time.
• Also: we do not do EPoS, bookings or CRM yet. If you need one system for all of that today, we are not it.

Choose a competitor if…

• You need deep, established supplier integrations across several sites — look at MarketMan.
• You want one flat, predictable monthly bill and you trade steadily — look at Jelly.
• Recipes, specs and allergens are the whole point for you — look at Kitchen CUT.
• You want one platform covering procurement, production and analytics — look at Supy or Apicbase.
• You need EPoS or bookings in the same system today — none of our roadmap helps you now.

Best for multi-site pub groups, or for restaurants and hotels

If you run several sites — a small pub group, a couple of hotel kitchens, a handful of restaurants under one owner — the honest short answer is: MarketMan if you have an ops or finance person to run supplier integrations across every site properly; Jelly if you want one predictable monthly bill and steady trade; FoxEra if your sites trade unevenly through the year and you would rather pay for what each one actually uses than a flat fee per site. None of the three is the universal right answer — it depends which of those three things matters most to you.

For a mixed estate — restaurants alongside a hotel kitchen, or a hotel with more than one food outlet — the same four questions from the top of this page apply per site, not once for the whole group: does each kitchen need its own recipe costing, does stock move between them, and do you want one rolled-up number or a view per site. Get that answer before comparing prices.

Is it any good? Our honest answer

We are not going to point you at reviews — we do not have enough of them yet to be a fair sample, and inventing ones would be worse than having none. Here is where we would tell a friend to be cautious: we are new, so if you need a vendor with a ten-year track record and a stack of case studies, that is a real reason to pick someone else on this page. Metered pricing means a very high-volume single site can end up paying more with us than a flat fee elsewhere — do the sums on Pricing before you commit, not after. And we do not do EPoS, bookings or CRM, so if you want one system for everything, we are not it yet.

Where we would tell the same friend to actually consider us: no contract to get out of if it does not work out, no per-seat fee that punishes you for adding staff logins, and a quiet month costing close to nothing rather than the same flat fee as your busiest one.

The thing that matters more than the choice

Whichever you pick, the setup determines whether it works: correct pack sizes, real yields, and recipes that match what the kitchen actually does. Skip that groundwork and every system on this list will give you confident, precise, wrong numbers — ours included. Budget a day or two for it, or get somebody to do it with you.