HeyMenus vs Menubly

What Menubly actually is

Menubly is a mini-website builder aimed at restaurants and cafes: one link that holds your menu, your hours, your socials, your booking link and your location. Around that it wraps commission-free pickup and delivery ordering, WhatsApp ordering, and a wide spread of payment methods. It also converts an existing PDF menu into a digital one, which for a lot of small venues is the single feature that gets them off paper.

It is a genuinely well-judged product for its audience. If you are a small independent whose entire online presence is an Instagram bio, Menubly gives you a real home page, a menu and a way to take orders for about ten dollars a month, and the setup is quick. There is nothing cynical in that offer, and we would rather point you at it than pretend it does not exist.

What HeyMenus actually is

HeyMenus publishes menus, and only 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 on yours. There is no link-in-bio page, no socials block, no ordering and no payment methods.

Our own gaps, stated plainly: HeyMenus is in beta. The Free plan is real and does not expire, but Pro — carrying the custom domain, multi-language menus and analytics — is priced and defined but not yet on sale, because those features are still being built. That is why the custom domain row reads “partial” above. We also have no PDF import yet, which is a real onboarding advantage Menubly has over us today.

Pricing, and a caveat about it

Both products have a free plan that does not expire, which makes this a rare comparison where you can simply try both. The differences are in what the free tiers withhold. Menubly Free shows Menubly branding on your page and has no custom domain; removing the branding and adding your own domain is what Pro is for. HeyMenus Free carries no HeyMenus branding on the published menu and does not cap dishes or edits, but publishes on a meee.nu address, because our custom domain also sits on a paid tier.

One honest caveat about the numbers. Menubly’s pricing page renders entirely in the browser, so when we fetched it in August 2026 the served HTML contained no prices at all — we could not read them at source the way we can for other vendors. The figures we quote — 9.99 US dollars a month, or 7.99 on annual billing — are what we recorded from the vendor earlier in 2026. Treat them as indicative and confirm on their site before you buy. Taken at face value, Menubly Pro is roughly half the price of HeyMenus Pro, and it does more things.

The published page: what we actually measured

This is the section where we stop comparing marketing copy. In August 2026 we fetched Menubly pages, including a live published one, and read the HTML the server returned. Each was roughly 1.8 KB and contained an empty application container plus twelve script tags. There was no page content in it: no menu, no dish names, no prices, and no structured data. The title was a generic product string rather than the venue’s name.

For a link-in-bio product that is a defensible engineering choice — the thing is an app, and apps boot. It has two consequences worth knowing about before you choose. A guest on bad restaurant wifi waits for the shell, then for the data, before a single dish appears; a published HeyMenus menu arrives complete in one request, about 6 KB compressed for a twenty-item menu, and renders with JavaScript switched off entirely. And a crawler arriving at that Menubly page finds an empty container and a generic title, where a HeyMenus menu hands it the restaurant’s name, a description built from the menu, and schema.org Restaurant and Menu markup rendered on the server.

We should be fair about the limit of that claim: Google does execute JavaScript, so a client-rendered page is not strictly invisible. It is slower to index, indexed less reliably, and it hands the crawler a generic title either way. If you want someone searching for a dish you are known for to find your menu, that difference matters. If your traffic comes from an Instagram bio link, it matters much less, and Menubly is built for exactly that visitor.

Allergens: the clearest gap

This is where the two products separate most sharply, and it is not really a criticism of Menubly — it is a consequence of building a website tool rather than a menu tool. HeyMenus models the fourteen EU allergens under Regulation 1169/2011 as structured per-dish data, alongside dietary labels and nutrition per dish, and renders the statutory disclaimer on the published page. That means a guest can filter, a server can answer a question from the same page, and the information is in the markup rather than typed into a description field.

On Menubly you can of course write allergens into a dish description. What you do not get is allergens as data. If you operate in the EU, or you take allergen questions seriously anywhere, that difference is the reason to pick a menu product over a website product. Accessibility runs the same way: we test every release against axe and with a screen reader and ship zero violations, and we could not find an accessibility statement on Menubly’s site — which is not evidence their pages are inaccessible, only that they publish no position.

Switching from Menubly

There is no direct transfer, but a PDF of your menu can be imported on any plan, allergens and nutrition included. Failing that you rebuild by hand: sections, dishes, prices and, if you want them as data rather than prose, allergens. For a single-venue menu that is an evening’s work, and the allergen pass is the part that takes the time, because you are entering information that probably lived in a description field before.

Worth noting: because these two products do different jobs, plenty of venues run both. A Menubly page as the link in your Instagram bio and a HeyMenus menu on the table QR code is a perfectly sensible arrangement, and cheaper than buying one tool that does both badly. And the reverse risk applies to us as much as anyone: if you leave HeyMenus you rebuild elsewhere, and we are a small beta-stage product with none of Menubly’s operating history.

So which should you pick?

Pick Menubly if the menu is one part of a bigger problem: you have no website, your links live in an Instagram bio, and you would like to take a pickup order. It is cheap, it is quick to set up, and it solves that problem properly.

Pick HeyMenus if the menu is the problem. If it is long, if it changes, if allergens have to be right, if guests scan it at the table on poor wifi, and if you want it to turn up in search — then a menu product beats a website product, and the free plan is a real one rather than a trial.