Obee is Australian, it charges a flat monthly fee, it does not run a diner marketplace taking a cut of your covers, it sets you up for nothing and it does not tie you into a contract. Kitchens with real reputations use it, Brae and Hardware Societe among them. For a chef owner who wants the booking page to look like the restaurant and nothing else, that offer is close to ideal, and no honest comparison starts anywhere other than there.
Where Obee is ahead of us
Obee is a reservations specialist and it shows in the diary. Set menus attached to a booking, a visual floor plan, a guest facing waiting list, deposits held against a card: that is its daily work and it does it with more polish than we do. Allvio takes deposits at booking and runs a waitlist too, but our room is tables, sections, capacity and status rather than a drag and drop floor plan you redraw for a function, and Allvio does not yet charge a no show or a late cancellation fee automatically. On a Saturday with twelve prepaid seats that matters, so weigh it before you decide anything.
Thursday afternoon: Sunday's set menu goes up eight dollars
Beef costs more than it did in June, so the Sunday menu moves from sixty five to seventy three. In Obee you change the set menu on the booking page, which is the easy part. Then it has to be changed in the till, so the register charges the new figure. Then on your own ordering page, if takeaway shares any of those dishes. Then on the website. Then on the two printed sheets, and on the blackboard someone chalked last week. Then you go back through the bookings already taken for Sunday and work out who was quoted the old price and whether you are going to wear the difference.
Six places, and the only one that matters to a guest is whichever one you missed. In Allvio the menu behind the till and the menu on your ordering page are the same menu, so the price moves once and the diary is quoting from the same list. The printed sheet is still on you. Everything on a screen is not.
The guestbook, and the email you have to send from somewhere else
Obee keeps a guestbook you can search by name or mobile and add past visits to. What it does not publish is what she has spent, and preferences and allergies against her name are not part of it, so those live on paper by the phone or in somebody's head. A combined customer record and the ability to group regulars and lapsed guests sit outside the base subscription on Obee's own terms, one of them in a separate product entirely.
Email campaigns are not in Obee at all. So to tell four hundred regulars that Sunday lunch has changed, you export a list, upload it to a mailing tool, and now you run a third product with a third bill and a list that goes stale the day after. Allvio sends email and SMS campaigns from the same guest record the diary and the till already use, and can tell you what the people who opened it went on to spend.
Free setup covers one of the four things you are setting up
Obee's free setup is a genuinely good offer and it applies to the diary. The till is still a separate purchase with its own hardware, its own settings and its own night of training. So is the ordering page. So is the roster. Four screens, four support numbers, and not one of those companies is responsible for making its product agree with the others. That job is yours, after close, for free.
Two flat fees are still two flat fees
Obee's rates are not published, so working out your own monthly cost starts with a conversation. Allvio's are on our site in Australian dollars: Complete is $399 per month ex GST for one location with every app on, plus $299 per month for each extra location, with no per user or per app charge. If you want only a couple of apps, Build your own starts at $20 per month per app. Hardware is bought outright at $1,499 ex GST for the single station, $1,869 for the retail station or $2,499 for the restaurant station. The trial is 30 days with no card. Invoicing, payroll and the books ride along in the same subscription, which is worth one line and no more.
Obee | Allvio | |
|---|---|---|
What you are actually buying | An Australian bookings diary with set menus, deposits and a guestbook, flat fee, no marketplace cut, no lock in | One Australian subscription: diary, till, ordering page, guest record, campaigns and roster |
Changing a price or a menu item | The set menu changes on the booking page. The till, the ordering page and the website each need the same change typed again | One menu behind the till, the ordering page and the diary, changed once |
Getting it running | Setup of the diary is free and quick. The till, ordering and rostering are separate products to choose and learn | One setup and one screen for staff to learn |
Keeping a customer's details right | A guestbook you can search and edit. Preferences and allergies are not part of it, and a combined customer record sits outside the base product | One record with preferences, allergies, tags and visit history, shared by the diary and the till |
Telling regulars something changed | Email campaigns are not in the product, so the guest list is exported to a separate mailing tool | Email and SMS campaigns from the same guest record, with results tied back to what they spent |
What you pay before your first sale | Free diary setup, then a till, hardware and any ordering page bought and paid for separately | One hardware purchase bought outright, one setup, one monthly bill |
Working out what it will cost you | Flat fee with no lock in, but the figure comes from a conversation rather than a price page | Published in Australian dollars, so you can work out your own bill tonight |
When it breaks mid service | Obee for the diary, someone else for the till, someone else again for ordering | One number, whichever part is misbehaving |
Best fit | A destination restaurant with a settled till that wants a beautiful booking page and no commission | An owner-operator who would rather run one thing than four |
Sunday at one, from her chair
A couple who have been coming twice a year since you opened book Sunday lunch. They pay the new price without blinking. Nobody at the door knows it is near their anniversary, that he cannot eat shellfish, or that last time you sent out something extra because a course was slow. So they are treated well, correctly and anonymously, which is exactly how every other restaurant in the street treats them.
Obee earns the destination restaurant
If your till works, your team is small and stable, and what you want is an Australian booking page that looks like your restaurant, takes a deposit and never charges commission, Obee is a genuinely good buy, and no lock in means the risk of trying it is close to nothing. That is a fair recommendation and we will stand behind it.
The choice is not really Obee against Allvio. It is whether the price of your Sunday menu, your trading hours and your regulars' details deserve to be typed once, or six times, every time they change.
This comparison reflects each product's general positioning as published by each vendor in August 2026. Features and pricing change: always check directly with each vendor before deciding.