HeyMenus vs NordQR

What NordQR actually is

NordQR is a Barcelona company selling digital menus behind a QR code, and it is a well-built version of that idea. The editor is genuinely pleasant, the menus look good, and the feature list has real thought in it: Magic Scan ingests a photo or PDF of your existing menu and turns it into something editable, Google Business Profile reviews can be displayed and collected inside the menu itself, menus can be served in up to ten automatically translated languages, and a guest can build a private “my selection” list to show the waiter — a nice answer to ordering that stops short of actually taking the order.

They also post you laminated QR stickers, which is a small thing that saves a real errand, and they bundle a trial of TableMaster, their reservations product. If you are weighing us against them, be clear-eyed that this is a mature product with a deeper feature list than ours in several places we will get to below.

What NordQR does not do is ordering, payments or bookings inside the menu. That is not our characterisation — it is theirs, stated in the structured data on their own site. It is the same line we draw, and it is why the rest of this page is a comparison of limits and output rather than a comparison of scope.

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 the fourteen EU allergens, dietary labels and nutrition attached to each dish. There is no ordering, no payments, no bookings and no POS, and none are planned.

In the interest of not overselling: HeyMenus is in beta. The Free plan is real, has no expiry and no dish cap, but Pro — the tier carrying the custom domain, multi-language menus and analytics — is priced and defined and not yet on sale, because those features are still being built. That is why those rows read “partial” above. NordQR ships its equivalents today, and scoring an unreleased feature against a shipped one would make this whole page worthless.

Pricing, and what the entry price really buys

NordQR loads its prices into the page in the browser rather than writing them into the HTML, so a cached search snippet may still show older, lower figures. Read live in August 2026, its four tiers were: Basic free forever; Lite at EUR 8 a month; Pro, marked most popular, at EUR 13; and Max at EUR 24 — all billed annually. Billed month to month the same tiers were EUR 11, EUR 18 and EUR 30. There is a 14-day free trial of Pro, and no setup fee or per-scan charge advertised anywhere. By the standards of this market that is fair pricing, plainly presented.

The number to study is not the price, it is the dish ladder. Basic gives you 20 dishes. Lite, at EUR 8, gives you 200. Pro, at EUR 13, gives you 600. Unlimited dishes exist only on Max at EUR 24 a month. For most single-venue restaurants 200 or 600 dishes is genuinely enough — but count your own menu with variants, sides, a wine list and a specials board before you assume which rung you land on, because the rung is what sets your bill.

The second number is the custom domain. On NordQR it exists only on Max, and only on the annual plan — EUR 24 a month, committed for a year, to put the menu on a domain you already own. That is not unusual in this market; MenuTiger puts it at USD 119 a month and FineDine at EUR 65. It is worth knowing before you print anything, because the domain on your printed QR code is the one thing you cannot cheaply change later.

HeyMenus charges nothing for one restaurant with one menu, and caps neither dishes nor edits on any plan, including the free one. Pro is priced at 19 US dollars a month for up to five restaurants, and nothing is billed while we are in beta. Compare the free plans directly and the difference is stark: 20 dishes and 500 monthly visits against unlimited dishes and unmetered visits. Compare the paid plans and NordQR is cheaper per month and ships more features today. Both of those things are true at once.

The metered-scans question

NordQR counts how many times your menu is opened. Basic allows 500 visits a month and Lite allows 1,500. To their credit they say they will notify you rather than cut the menu off, which is the humane way to run a limit — nobody wants a blank page at the table on a Saturday. The Pro plan card advertises unlimited visits, though NordQR’s own FAQ on the same page describes Pro as 10,000 visits a month, so ask them which it is before you count on it.

It is worth doing the arithmetic on your own room. A hundred covers a day, half of them scanning, is roughly 1,500 scans a month from one venue — Lite’s entire allowance. HeyMenus does not meter menu views at all, on any plan, because a menu that gets read a lot is the outcome everybody wanted. That is a design choice we can afford as long as the published page stays as small as it is, which is the next section.

The published page: what we actually measured

This section is not marketing copy on either side. In August 2026 we fetched one of NordQR’s own live published menus and read the HTML their server returned, and the result deserves more credit than most of this market gets from us. The page carried a real page title naming the restaurant and its town, a written meta description, Open Graph tags, a robots directive allowing indexing, and translated titles and descriptions for five languages. The menu was listed in a public sitemap at go.nordqr.com containing just over a thousand NordQR menu URLs. Somebody there has thought about search, and most of their competitors have not.

The limit is what sits underneath that head. The served HTML was about 31 KB compressed, and it contained the frame of the menu — navigation, buttons, filter labels, empty templates — but not the menu. No dish names. No prices; the only currency symbol in the document was an unfilled placeholder. No allergen data, and no schema.org structured data of any kind. The dishes are fetched and rendered by script after the page loads, which means a guest on bad wifi waits for a second round trip before they can read anything, and a crawler that does not run JavaScript sees a restaurant name and a description of the menu rather than the menu.

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 dish names, the prices and the schema.org Restaurant and Menu markup are in the HTML the server sends, so an engine that never executes a line of script still indexes your actual food. We should be fair about the limits of that claim: Google does execute JavaScript, so a client-rendered menu is not invisible, and NordQR’s per-restaurant titles and sitemap mean their menus are indexed. The difference is what gets indexed. Their page ranks as a restaurant menu; ours can rank for the dish.

Allergens, nutrition and the accessibility question

Both products tag allergens per dish, and NordQR presents it well — it is a headline feature on their homepage rather than a checkbox buried in an editor. Where we go further is depth: HeyMenus models the fourteen EU allergens under Regulation 1169/2011 as first-class per-dish data alongside dietary labels and per-dish nutrition, and puts the statutory disclaimer on the published page rather than leaving it to you. We could not find nutrition or calorie data advertised anywhere on NordQR’s site. If you serve a market where per-dish kcal is expected or required, check that with them directly rather than taking our word for its absence.

Accessibility is the widest gap, and it is worth being precise about 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 found no accessibility statement, VPAT or conformance claim anywhere on NordQR’s marketing site — the word “accessible” appears there only in the sense of being reachable by scanning a QR code. That is not evidence their menus are inaccessible, only that they do not publish a position. Since the European Accessibility Act began applying in June 2025, it is a fair question to put to any vendor you are about to sign with, including us.

Switching from NordQR

Moving means rebuilding the menu by hand, or exporting it to a PDF and importing that — HeyMenus reads a PDF on every plan, including Free, and lifts out allergens and nutrition along with dishes and prices. If your menu only exists as a photograph, NordQR reads that and we do not, so the move is easier in their direction than ours.

The part people underestimate is the QR codes. A NordQR menu published without the Max tier lives on a go.nordqr.com address, so printed codes encoding that URL have to be reprinted when you leave. If your codes point at a domain you control, you repoint the domain and every printed code keeps working. That is an argument for putting your menu on your own domain whoever you buy from, and a reason to look closely at what each vendor charges to let you — EUR 24 a month on annual billing there, and on Pro here once Pro ships.

It cuts our way too, and we would rather say it than have you discover it. We are a small beta-stage product with a shorter history than theirs, and leaving us means the same rebuild in reverse. Weigh that honestly.

So which should you pick?

Pick NordQR if your menu exists only on paper and you want to photograph it into shape, if you want Google reviews surfaced where guests are already looking, or if you need five or ten languages this week. Those are real, shipped advantages, and no argument about page weight outweighs an afternoon of retyping.

Pick HeyMenus if the menu page itself is the thing you want to be excellent. If your menu is long enough that a dish cap would decide your bill; if you would rather nobody counted how many guests read it; if you want the page to be quick on bad restaurant wifi, legible to a screen reader, and findable in search by the dish you are known for — then that is exactly what we built, and the free plan is a real one rather than a trial.