Olo alternatives for enterprise brands, and where Zayos honestly fits.
Olo does not publish pricing and sells to chains: 800 plus brands across 90,000 plus locations. For enterprise the real alternatives are Lunchbox, PAR Ordering and Toast. For one to ten locations, Olo was never the right buy, and ChowNow, Flipdish or Zayos are.
Where a vendor publishes no price, this page says so rather than inventing one. Every other figure is quoted from the vendor’s own page or attributed to a named source, accessed July 2026.
Which of these two people are you?
This query gets typed by two groups with nothing in common, and giving them the same answer helps neither. Pick yours and skip the half of the page that is not for you.
You are a brand at renewal
Fifty, two hundred or two thousand locations, an Olo contract in front of you, and a mandate to test the market. You need to know who else can carry ordering, dispatch, catering and guest data at your scale, and what changed now that Olo is privately held. Everything from here to the comparison table is written for you.
You run one restaurant, or ten
You read that Olo powers the ordering for brands you recognise and went looking for it. Here is the short version: Olo was not built for you, does not publish a price, and has no self-serve signup. That is not a criticism of Olo, it is a scope fact. Skip to the section near the bottom written for your size.
Why do brands evaluate an Olo alternative?
Credit first: Olo is the incumbent in enterprise restaurant ordering for a reason, its integration surface is the deepest in the category, and none of the five points below is a defect. They are the things that come up when a large contract is on the table.
Why can I not see a price anywhere?
Because Olo does not publish one. There is no pricing page on olo.com and no self-serve path, only a demo request (accessed July 2026). That is the enterprise norm, and every serious alternative on this page works the same way. The practical consequence is that you cannot benchmark your own renewal quote against anything public, so the only use you have is a competing quote you actually went and got.
What changed now that Olo is privately held?
Olo announced that Thoma Bravo completed its acquisition on September 12, 2025, at $10.25 per share in cash, approximately $2.0 billion in equity value, and that the common stock ceased trading and would be delisted from the NYSE. Private-equity ownership is completely normal in this category and is not a reason to leave. It does have one concrete effect on your diligence: a public company files quarterly numbers you can read before signing a three year deal, and a private one does not. Replace that lost visibility with contract terms instead.
How many products am I actually buying?
Olo sells its platform as separate modules. Its own site groups them as Online Ordering, Direct Delivery, Marketplace Delivery, Catering, Guest Loyalty, Google Order Management and Digitized Phone Orders under increasing orders; Payments and Fraud Protection, Reservations and Waitlist Management and Local Listing Management under streamlining operations; and Personalized Marketing, Guest Data Platform, Reputation Management and Passwordless Checkout under guest experience. That breadth is the reason enterprise brands choose Olo. It is also why the invoice grows sideways, one module at a time, and why brands compare renewal quotes and find they are not comparing the same bundle they bought three years ago.
Am I actually the customer this is built for?
Run Olo’s own published numbers. It states it is trusted by 800+ top restaurant brands across 90,000+ locations, which works out to an average of roughly 112 locations per brand. That is arithmetic on their stated figures, not a claim about any specific customer. If your brand is nowhere near that average, you are buying software whose defaults, integrations, contract length and support model were all designed around a very different operator.
How hard is it to move once you are integrated?
Olo sits between your POS, your marketplaces, your loyalty programme, your delivery dispatch and your guest data. Every one of those is a wire somebody has to unplug and re-plug. Nobody publishes a switching cost, so treat it as a project with a scope document, not a line item, and do the discovery before you negotiate rather than after. The brands that negotiate best are the ones that already know exactly what a migration would take.
Who can actually replace Olo, and at what size?
Every entry carries the location band it genuinely fits, because in this category size decides the shortlist before features do. Three of these are enterprise options. Three are not, and say so.
Lunchbox
Lunchbox is the most direct like-for-like swap in the enterprise lane: native app and web ordering, loyalty, marketing and third-party order aggregation, sold to chains. Its own site positions the enterprise product as "The #1 choice for native app and web ordering, loyalty, marketing, and third-party order aggregation to help modern restaurant chains grow their online revenue" and says it serves over 5,000 restaurant locations including Firehouse Subs, Torchy’s Tacos and Taco Bueno (accessed July 2026). Two diligence notes, both public. Restaurant Dive reported in July 2022 that Lunchbox cut 60 employees, about 33% of staff. In March 2025 it named James Walker chief executive alongside a funding round led by Shift4, a payments company, which makes "is card processing bundled and at what rate" the first question to ask.
Lunchbox alternatives, in detail →PAR Ordering
PAR is the alternative to look at when the thing that hurts is POS integration rather than the ordering front end. PAR states that "more than 140,000 restaurant locations run on PAR" and describes PAR Ordering as "Built for stability, extensibility, and integration across large restaurant brands", covering unified menu management across web, mobile, kiosk, catering and third-party platforms, marketplace order management and real-time POS synchronisation (accessed July 2026). Pricing is not published. Honest read: menu drift between the ordering platform and the register is the failure mode that quietly costs multi-unit brands the most operations hours, and single-vendor synchronisation is the strongest argument for PAR.
Why POS sync breaks →Toast
Toast is the consolidation answer: one vendor for register, payments, kitchen screens, payroll and ordering, with third-party delivery integrations included, which removes an entire class of integration project. Per NerdWallet (accessed July 2026): $0 Starter Kit or $69 per month Point of Sale, processing at 2.49% + $0.15 card present with hardware bought upfront, 3.09% + $0.15 pay as you go and 3.50% + $0.15 card not present, hardware from $149 to $1,454, a two year contract with early termination fees, and online ordering priced as an extra with no published rate. Honest read: this is the only vendor here whose base pricing is public, and also the only one that requires you to change the register to get it.
Toast ordering alternatives →Flipdish
Flipdish is the one vendor in this comparison that publishes per-site pricing you can read today: Website $149 per month ($119 billed annually), Website and Mobile App $249 per month ($199 annually), Self-Service Kiosk $99 per month ($79 annually), each billed per site, with hardware and implementation quoted separately (accessed July 2026). Founded in Dublin in 2015, with offices in Dublin, London and Karachi. Honest read: this is not an enterprise Olo replacement and does not claim to be, but for a ten or twenty site group it is a real option with a real kiosk. Read the contract first: twelve month initial term, automatic twelve month renewal, and three months of written notice required.
The Flipdish contract, in detail →ChowNow
ChowNow belongs on this page only because so many people who search "Olo alternatives" are independents who never had an Olo option. Its published pricing (accessed July 2026) is Launch $249, Grow $349 and Elevate $449 per month, or $229, $319 and $409 billed annually, plus a $119 to $499 setup fee, card processing at 2.95% + $0.29 per transaction, $7.98 per order on Flex Delivery and a $99 annual Apple developer fee for the branded app. It takes no percentage of your food revenue on any plan. Honest read: direct ordering only, no marketplace consolidation, and nothing about it is enterprise infrastructure.
ChowNow alternatives →Zayos
Our platform, and the useful thing we can say here is where it does not belong. Zayos is not an enterprise ordering platform and it will not carry a 500 location brand’s dispatch, guest data platform and franchise reporting. If that is your requirement, the honest recommendations on this page are Olo, PAR Ordering and Lunchbox, in that order of incumbency. What Zayos does is the independent version of the same job, at a published price you can read without a call: $499, $599 or $699 per location per month, month to month, no setup fee. That covers a branded ordering site on your own domain with SEO schema, a customer list you own, a kitchen tablet, and on the $599 tier, Otter ingestion so Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub orders land on the same screen as direct orders. The per-order economics are flat rather than percentage: the diner pays $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine-in and 10% on catering, and the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and tips. Honest counterweights: it is the newest platform on this page by a wide margin, and Naya Grill (Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, FL) is the only restaurant live and taking orders on it today. Storefronts are built for Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke across 13 locations, Yalla Market and Tap That Ash, each opening ordering at its own launch.
Zayos pricing in full →Olo and its alternatives, one table.
Three of the seven rows say "not published" in the price column. In enterprise restaurant software that is the norm, not an oversight, and it is the reason the diligence checklist below matters more than the feature grid.
| Platform | Published entry price | Stated scale | What is in the box | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Olo | Not published, demo required | 800+ brands, 90,000+ locations | Ordering, delivery dispatch, catering, loyalty, payments, guest data, reputation, listings | Large brands that need modular enterprise infrastructure |
| Lunchbox | Not published, demo required | Over 5,000 locations claimed | Web and native app ordering, loyalty, marketing, third-party aggregation | Chains that want an app-first first-party stack |
| PAR Ordering | Not published, enterprise quote only | 140,000+ locations run on PAR | Unified menu across web, mobile, kiosk, catering and marketplaces, real-time POS sync | Brands that want ordering and POS from one vendor |
| Toast | $0 Starter Kit or $69/mo Point of Sale | Single site to large groups | POS, payments, kitchen screens, payroll, ordering as a paid add-on | Consolidating the register and the digital channel |
| Flipdish | $149 / $249 / $99 per month per site | Independents and small groups | Website, mobile app, self-service kiosk | Small groups that want a published-price kiosk |
| ChowNow | $249 / $349 / $449 per month plus $119 to $499 setup | Independents and small groups | Branded ordering site, branded app on higher tiers, marketing with tiered limits | Flat fee with no cut of food revenue |
| Zayos | $499 / $599 / $699 per location per month, no setup fee | Independents and small groups | Branded ordering site with SEO schema, owned customer list, kitchen tablet, Otter ingestion on the $599 tier | Direct orders and marketplace tablets in one kitchen flow |
What should I put in the renewal after an ownership change?
When a vendor goes private you lose the public filings you used to read before signing a multi-year term. The fix is not suspicion, it is paperwork. Six clauses to ask for, none of them unusual, all of them easier to get before you sign than after.
- 01
Ask for a multi-year price schedule with a capped annual escalator, in the contract, not in an email. A vendor that just changed owners is the most common moment for list prices to move.
- 02
Ask which modules are in your current bundle by name, and which are being re-quoted as separate line items at renewal. Bundles get unbundled quietly.
- 03
Ask for a data-portability clause: menu, guest records, order history, in a named machine-readable format, delivered within a stated number of days of termination.
- 04
Ask for named support coverage and response times as a service level with a remedy, since a private company will no longer publish headcount or churn for you to read.
- 05
Ask what happens to your integrations if a module is sunset, and require notice in months rather than a right to change the service at will.
- 06
Get one competing quote you actually intend to consider. Without it you are negotiating against yourself, and in a category where nobody publishes prices that is the whole game.
I run one to ten restaurants. What should I actually be shopping?
Not Olo, and not because it is bad. Olo is enterprise infrastructure sold through a demo to brands averaging roughly 112 locations each, on their own published figures. Nothing about the pricing model, the integration work or the contract length is designed for a restaurant with two locations and no IT department.
What you are really shopping for is much simpler to describe. A branded ordering site that ranks above your own DoorDash listing when somebody searches your name. A customer list you own, with real email addresses and order history. One screen in the kitchen instead of four tablets. And a per-order cost that does not scale with your average ticket, because a percentage fee punishes exactly the large family orders you want more of.
Three vendors publish a price for that job and you can read all three today without a sales call: Flipdish from $149 per month per site, ChowNow from $249 per month, and Zayos at $499, $599 or $699 per location per month with no setup fee. Get all three numbers, put your own order volume and average ticket through each one, and pick on arithmetic rather than on which brand you recognised first.
One number worth holding on to while you compare: a marketplace taking a 25% blended cut on 650 orders a month at a $24 to $28 average ticket costs a single location more than $48,000 a year. Every platform on this page costs a fraction of that. The expensive mistake is almost never picking the wrong vendor, it is leaving the direct channel unbuilt for another year.
Sources
- Olo homepage: "Trusted by 800+ top restaurant brands", "90,000+ locations", the module list quoted above, demo request only and no published pricing (accessed July 2026).
- Olo, Thoma Bravo completes acquisition of Olo: completed September 12, 2025, $10.25 per share in cash, approximately $2.0 billion in equity value, "The Company’s common stock has ceased trading and will be delisted from NYSE" (accessed July 2026).
- Lunchbox homepage: enterprise positioning quoted above, no published pricing (accessed July 2026). Company history from Restaurant Dive, July 2022 (60 employees, a 33% reduction) and the March 10, 2025 leadership and funding announcement (James Walker as chief executive, round led by Shift4, over 5,000 locations including Firehouse Subs, Torchy’s Tacos and Taco Bueno).
- PAR Ordering product page: "more than 140,000 restaurant locations run on PAR", "Built for stability, extensibility, and integration across large restaurant brands", no published pricing (accessed July 2026).
- NerdWallet, Toast POS review: $0 Starter Kit, $69/month Point of Sale, 2.49% to 3.50% + $0.15 by plan and card entry, hardware $149 to $1,454, two year contract with early termination fees, online ordering costs extra (accessed July 2026).
- Flipdish US pricing page: Website $149/month ($119 annual), Website and Mobile App $249/month ($199 annual), Self-Service Kiosk $99/month ($79 annual), "Billed annually, per site", upfront hardware and implementation costs vary (accessed July 2026). Term and notice from the Flipdish Terms and Conditions.
- ChowNow official pricing page: Launch $249, Grow $349, Elevate $449 per month ($229/$319/$409 annual), $119 to $499 setup fee, 2.95% + $0.29 per transaction, $7.98/order Flex Delivery, $99 annual Apple developer fee (accessed July 2026).
- Zayos pricing: the $499, $599 and $699 per location tiers, no setup fee, and the flat diner-paid service fee quoted above. The $48,000 marketplace figure is modelled at roughly 650 orders a month on a $24 to $28 average ticket at a 25% blended take, and is explained on the savings calculator.
The average of roughly 112 locations per brand is arithmetic on Olo’s own published 800+ brands and 90,000+ locations. It is not a claim about any individual Olo customer.
Olo alternatives, answered.
How much does Olo cost?
Who bought Olo, and when?
What is the best alternative to Olo?
Is Olo a good fit for a single restaurant?
Does Zayos replace Olo?
Should a brand leave Olo just because it was taken private?
Keep reading
Also: Zayos pricing, what Zayos is, Flipdish alternatives, commission benchmarks
Walk in with your own number.
The free AI report runs your real order volume and average ticket and shows what the marketplaces and stacked fees cost you last month. In a category where nobody publishes prices, having your own baseline is the whole negotiation. About 60 seconds, no card.