Choosing the right reservation system is essential for any restaurant looking to manage their clients and get the most out of their business. When choosing a WordPress Restaurant reservation plugin, it is important to look at several factors. For example: ease-of-use, reservations features, customization options, mobile-friendliness, monthly reports to track customers’ preferences, and pricing.
In this article we will compare two WordPress Restaurant reservation plugin, Alex Reservations and Five Star Restaurant Reservations. We will explore each of their features and come up with the best one that will help you manage your restaurant reservations.
We will compare the plugins based on these criteria:
- User-friendliness
- Reservation Features
- Customer Insights
- Pricing
- Quick Comparison – Alex Reservations VS Five Star Restaurant Reservations (FSRR)
- User-friendliness – Alex Reservations vs Five Star Restaurant Reservations
- Reservation Features – Alex Reservations vs Five Star Restaurant Reservations
- Customer Insights – Alex Reservations vs Five Star Restaurant Reservations
- Customer Insights – Alex Reservations vs Five Star Restaurant Reservations
- Final Verdict – Alex Reservations VS Five Star Restaurant Reservations
Quick Comparison – Alex Reservations VS Five Star Restaurant Reservations (FSRR)
| Criteria | Alex Reservations | Five Star Reservations |
| Number of Supported restaurants | 1-100 | 1-10 |
| User-friendliness | Easy to use, drag-and-drop functionality | Easy to use |
| Unique Reservation Features | Floorplan with drag-and-drop builder | MailChimp integration |
| Customer Insights | Special tags, Reviews, Reports | Custom Fields |
| Pricing | Flexible, 4 plans with 2 billing options | 4 plans, no flexible payment option |
| Best for | All-size restaurants aiming at improving their reservations and customer service | Restaurants aiming at better managing their reservations |
User-friendliness – Alex Reservations vs Five Star Restaurant Reservations
Alex Reservations
When choosing a WordPress restaurant reservation plugin, the number 1 criterion that one should pay attention to is its ease of use. The plugin should be easy for customers so that they have a seamless experience. Moreover, it should be easy for managers, so that they can manage reservations with no hassle.
Alex Reservations is the best choice for being easy to use. It offers an intuitive interface that ensures a seamless experience for both restaurant managers and customers. What is unique about Alex Reservations is that while being on the WordPress dashboard, the admin panel is hidden. This way, the admins can concentrate on managing reservations without the need to navigate through WordPress. At the very top, the restaurant staff can navigate through the restaurant location with a click of a button.
The dashboard has 4 main sections:
- List,
- Floorplan,
- Calendar,
- Customers, and
- Statistics.
This means that everything is a couple of clicks away for the staff and managers. For a quick search and easy navigation, managers can choose from the reservations statuses and special tags. The booking system has 5 statuses – pending, confirmed, seated, paid, and finished, that allow to keep track of the reservations.
The other way Alex Reservations stands out as one of the best plugins for restaurant reservations is with the “Floorplan” feature. With this feature restaurants can set up their floor plan, and take their booking experience to another level. With Floorplan, managers can easily see the assigned tables and customers, and reservation statuses. Apart from that, managers have full access to weekly and monthly reservations on calendar, and also to statistics about the customer experience.
Alex Reservations is also a mobile-friendly restaurant reservation plugin. It means that managers do not have to work with laptops all the time. Especially during the peak hours they can easily manage the reservations using their phones.
Five Star Restaurant Reservations (FSRR)
Five Star Restaurant Reservations is easy to use, but it does not stand out with many unique features. The dashboard of FSRR has two main sections:
- Get support, and
- Bookings summary
While in the bookings summary section, it has statuses, it does not offer any sorting options for easy navigation.
Five Star Restaurant Reservations is mobile-responsive. Its Ultimate plan offers the Five Star Restaurant Manager mobile app that supports both iOS and Android.
For this criterion the winner is Alex Reservations as the best mobile-responsive WordPress Restaurant Reservation Plugin!
Reservation Features – Alex Reservations vs Five Star Restaurant Reservations
Alex Reservations
This WordPress restaurant reservation plugin allows you to not only manage your booking but also increase your revenue by tracking your customers preferences. Alex Reservations enables you to improve your CRM by creating special tags based on your customers’ culinary preferences. This way, restaurants will be able to create different segmentations and target their customers better.
Alex Reservations also helps distribute bookings and reservations. It allows restaurants to add several managers and give them access to only their bookings so that everything is more organized. Another way Alex Reservations improves your booking management is with filter tags and weekly/monthly calendars.
This plugin has a unique feature of Floorplan with a drag-and-drop builder. This feature allows restaurants to keep track of their customers and reservations better. Restaurants can number the tables and see the reservation statuses.
Alex Reservations also allows to mark special days and events (e.g. live music days, Mother’s day, etc.) and add shift schedules for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The plugin has a library of email templates for different reservation statuses, such as booked, confirmed, canceled, etc.
Alex Reservations allows restaurants to accept deposits. Sometimes, customers who reserved a table in your restaurant might not show up, which might lead to a loss of other customers. Thus, requiring pre-payments will at least pay off the harm they have caused.
Five Star Restaurant Reservations (FSRR)
In the bookings section, Five Star Restaurant Reservations has several bulk actions the restaurant’s staff can apply to the registered customers. These bulk actions are “set to confirmed, “set to pending review,” “send email,” etc. FSRR has also a Mailchimp integration, and your customers that reserve a table online are in your mailing list. This allows you to have repeat customers. Apart from this, the plugin offers email templates to send to your customers when they reserve a table in your restaurant.
FSRR also offers deposit options to avoid and/or minimize no-shows and the potential causes.
While both plugins offer various reservation features, the winner here is Alex Reservations, as it outruns FSRR’s features!
Customer Insights – Alex Reservations vs Five Star Restaurant Reservations
Alex Reservations
To help restaurants improve their functioning and practices, Alex Reservations has 2 features of reviews and metrics. At the end of their experience in your restaurant, the customers will get online review sheets about the food, service, atmosphere, cleaning, and the prices. These online reviews will easily replace paper-based feedback sheets and save time for both parties – customers and restaurants. Having a review base will help managers track their restaurants’ functionality and make their services and food better.
On their end, restaurants can get monthly reports to measure their reservations in forms of graphs. This way, they can better understand the habits of their customers, and also detect the most and least active working days.
“Bookings and Customer Tags” is another feature that the plugin offers for improving your customer service. With this feature, managers can create special tags according to their regular customers’ food preferences, food allergies, or billing habits (by cash or card by card). This will help restaurants avoid inconveniences and make customers’ experiences seamless.
Alex Reservations provides restaurants with monthly reports to identify customer preferences and trends over time.
Five Star Restaurant Reservations (FSRR)
Five Star Restaurant Reservations does not have as many features for improving customer service as Alex Reservations. However, FSRR has got the feature of adding unique custom fields. This means that while making your reservations you can add as many additional questions as you want. For example, you can ask if your customer has any dietary restrictions, or preferred payments options, etc. This way, you will get to know your customers in advance and make their experience as smooth as possible.
While FSRR’s custom fields option is important, Alex Reservations enables some ways to track your customers’ preferences. Thus, the winner here is Alex Reservations!
Customer Insights – Alex Reservations vs Five Star Restaurant Reservations
Alex Reservations
Alex Reservations offers a 30-day 100% free trial to test all their features that come with their paid plans. It gives full access to unlimited reservations for up to 2 restaurants. After the free trial, you are free to switch to any of their pricing plans. As of now, the plugin offers 4 plans with 2 billing options – monthly and yearly. The plans are designed for:
- 1 Restaurant – the plan’s price is €20 per month, helps managing the restaurant tables
- Up to 5 Restaurants – the plan costs €50 per month, allows to manage all restaurant locations from a single dashboard
- Up to 20 Restaurants – the price for the plan is €100 per month, allows to manage multiple restaurants each with their own dashboard
- Up to 100 Restaurants – the subscription is €300 per month, helps develop a platform similar to OpenTable, allowing to cater as many as 100 customers
Five Star Restaurant Reservations (FSRR)
Five Star Restaurant Reservations offers two plans – Premium and Ultimate. It also has a 7-day free trial for testing the Premium version. The Premium plan comes with 3 licenses:
- Single Site License – $67 per month
- 5 Site License – $247 per month
- 10 Site License – $397 per month
All Premium licenses come with the features of custom fields, MailChimp integration, bookings export, advanced email templates, and much more.
The Ultimate plan comes with only a single license option and costs $297 per month. The additional features of the Ultimate plan include:
- SMS text message and email reminders for bookings
- Table selection and assignment
- Pre-payment options
Alex Reservations has flexible payment methods and plans and is suitable for restaurant owners with different needs, making itself as one of the best restaurant reservation plugins. Comparing the features that both plugins offer and their pricing strategies, Alex Reservations is a winner here!
Final Verdict – Alex Reservations VS Five Star Restaurant Reservations
Now that we have explored two of the Best WordPress Plugins for Restaurants, let us choose the winner. Both Alex Reservations and Five Star Restaurant Reservations have a great deal of useful features for making reservations. FSRR might be perfect for those who only need to manage seamless reservations, send SMS messages and email reminders, and avoid no-shows. On the other hand, Alex Reservations might be perfect for those who also want to get to know their customers better, improve their customer service, and track their performance over time.
Ta-da-da-dam! As a result, we have Alex Reservations as the best restaurant booking plugin!
