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

The software is free: recipe costing, live stock, waste tracking, gross profit and variance, unlimited users and sites, no subscription and no contract. What costs money is the AI work — David AI reading your invoices, products and count sheets. New businesses start with £160 of credit included, and after that an invoice scan is about £1.

So we are not the cheapest for everyone. A busy multi-site operation scanning forty invoices a week will spend more with us than a £129 flat fee. A single site with a quiet winter will spend a fraction of it, and pays nothing at all in a month it does not trade.

• Best for: independents and small groups who want costing and scanning without a contract, and whose trade is seasonal or uneven.
• Watch: usage-based pricing is harder to budget than a flat fee. If predictability matters more to you than proportionality, choose a flat-rate competitor.
• 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.

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.