HeyMenus vs FineDine

What FineDine actually is

FineDine sells a restaurant operations platform, and by the standards of that category it is a broad one. A single account covers QR menus and tablet menus for dine-in, delivery and pickup ordering, a lightweight point of sale, order-and-pay checkout, online reservations, a guest CRM with a loyalty programme, an AI website builder, and a marketing layer that generates social posts and ads. There is an AI menu importer, an AI photo enhancer, and reporting they brand as FineDine IQ. Their homepage lists hospitality names you will recognise, including Hilton, Grand Hyatt, InterContinental and Pizza Hut.

That breadth is the product. If you are currently paying for a menu tool, a booking tool, a loyalty tool and a website, then consolidating them into one contract at EUR 65 a month is straightforwardly good value, and no amount of page-weight argument from us changes that arithmetic. It is also a real operational win to have one vendor to call when something breaks during service.

What HeyMenus actually is

HeyMenus publishes menus. You build the menu in a drag-and-drop editor, and we publish it as a single page a guest opens from a QR code — with allergen declarations, dietary labels and nutrition attached to each dish, and a custom domain if you want the page to live on yours. There is no ordering, no payments, no bookings, no CRM and no POS, and we are not building any of them.

In the interest of not overselling: HeyMenus is in beta. The Free plan is real and does not expire, but Pro — the tier that carries the custom domain, multi-language menus and analytics — is priced and defined but not yet on sale, because those features are still being built. We have marked that “partial” rather than “yes” in the table above. FineDine ships its equivalents today, and it would be dishonest to score an unreleased feature against a shipped one.

Pricing, and what the entry price really buys

FineDine publishes three tiers, and the figures it advertises — EUR 27, EUR 65 and EUR 127 a month — are the annual rates, discounted 20 per cent. Their pricing page does not display a month-to-month figure, so if you want to pay monthly you should treat the real number as meaningfully higher than the one on the page and confirm it with them directly. To FineDine’s credit, we found no setup fee, per-order fee or commission advertised anywhere on that page.

The row worth studying is Starter. At EUR 27 a month it caps a menu at 100 items, allows one language and one currency, and limits the guest CRM to the last ten records. A hundred items sounds generous until you count a real menu with variants, sides and a wine list. The moment you exceed it — or want a second language, or want the menu on your own domain — the next stop is Growth at EUR 65 a month. That is the honest entry price for a normal restaurant, and it is worth budgeting from there rather than from EUR 27.

HeyMenus charges nothing for a single restaurant with a single menu, and does not cap dishes or edits on any plan, including the free one. Pro is priced at 19 US dollars a month for up to five restaurants, but nothing is billed while we are in beta. The difference is not really a discount; it is that we sell one module and FineDine sells twelve.

The published page: what we actually measured

This is the one section where we are not comparing marketing copy. In August 2026 we fetched one of FineDine’s own publicly listed demo menus and read the HTML the server returned. It was roughly 4 KB, contained an empty application container and thirteen script tags, and pulled from a spread of third-party hosts including an image CDN, a font CDN, a tracking endpoint and a Facebook pixel. There were no dish names in it, no prices, no allergen data and no structured data. The page title was a generic product string rather than the restaurant’s name, and it is the same title on every FineDine-hosted menu we looked at.

Two consequences follow. The first is what a guest experiences: the shell arrives quickly, and then the menu has to fetch its own data and images before anything readable appears. On restaurant wifi at seven on a Friday, that gap is the whole experience. A published HeyMenus menu arrives complete in a single request — about 6 KB compressed for a twenty-item menu — and renders with JavaScript switched off entirely.

The second is what a search engine sees. A crawler reading that FineDine menu finds an empty container and a generic title. A crawler reading a published HeyMenus menu finds the restaurant’s name in the title, a description built from the menu itself, and schema.org Restaurant and Menu markup in the head — all rendered on the server before the page is sent. If you have ever wondered why your digital menu never shows up when someone searches for a dish you are known for, this is usually why. We should be fair about the limits of our own claim: Google does execute JavaScript, so a client-rendered menu is not strictly invisible. It is slower to index, indexed less reliably, and it hands the crawler a generic title either way.

Allergens and the accessibility question

Both products handle allergens. FineDine lists allergens, nutrition information and calories as features across its plans, and for most operators that is enough. HeyMenus models the fourteen EU allergens under Regulation 1169/2011 as first-class per-dish data alongside dietary labels and nutrition, and puts the statutory disclaimer on the published page rather than leaving it to you.

Accessibility is where the gap is wider, and it is worth stating plainly what kind of claim this is. We test every release against axe and with a screen reader, and the published menu ships zero violations. We could not find an accessibility statement, VPAT or conformance claim anywhere on FineDine’s site — which is not evidence that their menus are inaccessible, only that they do not publish a position. Since the European Accessibility Act began applying in June 2025, that is a question worth putting to any vendor you are about to sign with, including us.

Switching from FineDine

There is no direct transfer between the two, but the retyping is avoidable: if you can export or print your FineDine menu to a PDF, HeyMenus imports it on every plan and pulls out sections, dishes, prices, allergens and nutrition for you to check over. Failing that, a single-venue menu is an evening of typing. The part people underestimate is the QR codes. If your printed codes encode a FineDine URL, you reprint them; if they point at a domain you control, you repoint the domain and the printed codes keep working. That is a good argument for putting your menu on your own domain whoever you buy from, and a good reason to check what a vendor charges to let you do it.

It also cuts the other way, and we would rather say it than have you find out later. If you leave HeyMenus, you export your menu and rebuild it somewhere else, the same as leaving anyone. We are a small beta-stage product, and that is a real risk to weigh against a vendor with enterprise customers and years of operating history.

So which should you pick?

Pick FineDine if you are replacing several tools at once — menu, ordering, bookings and your guest database. A suite is genuinely the cheaper answer to that problem, and FineDine is a mature one. HeyMenus will not get you there, because none of it is on the roadmap.

Pick HeyMenus if the menu is the thing. If your guests scan a code, read, and order from a server; if you want the page to be quick on bad wifi, legible to a screen reader, and findable in search; and if you would rather not pay EUR 65 a month for eleven modules to get the one you use — then that is the product we built, and the free plan is a real one rather than a trial.