Restaurant website builders compared: your site is a menu and an order button, so start there
The Duckhub team builds QR menu and online ordering software, run through your own AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude), used by cafes, bars, and restaurants. We write practical guides based on what we see working across thousands of published menus.
A restaurant website builder is software that lets you publish a site for your venue without a developer, and for a restaurant that site is mostly two things: a menu guests can read on a phone and a button that turns interest into an order or a booking. Pick the builder by how well it handles those two jobs, then by price, commission and domain.
This guide compares the three kinds of tools restaurants actually use: general website builders (Squarespace, Wix), restaurant marketing platforms (Owner.com, Toast, Square, Popmenu) and menu-first platforms (Duckhub). Every price below was checked on the vendor’s own page in October 2026 and is labelled where we could not verify it. Duckhub is our product, so we say plainly where another option fits better.
What does a restaurant website actually need?
A restaurant website needs six things: a menu published as a web page, opening hours, address with a map link, a way to book or order, a phone number, and fast loading on mobile. Everything else (galleries, about pages, blogs) is optional. A typical visit is short: check the menu, then call, book or order.
The checklist in practice:
- Menu as HTML, not a PDF. Readable on a phone, quick to update, and machine-readable for search engines and AI assistants.
- Hours and holiday exceptions that you can change in a minute.
- Address, map link and phone that match your Google Business Profile exactly.
- Reservations or ordering, ideally on your own site rather than a marketplace link.
- Mobile speed. A heavy theme with autoplay video loses people who only wanted the menu.
- One clear call to action per page: order, book or call.
Discovery has also moved. BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer research found that 45% of US consumers had used AI tools to find local business recommendations in the past year, up from 6% a year earlier. Those tools read text. A menu that exists only as a PDF or a photo gives them very little to quote, which is why the menu format now matters as much as the design.
Three types of restaurant website builders
Restaurant website builders fall into three groups. General builders sell design flexibility and add ordering through integrations. Restaurant platforms bundle site, ordering, app and marketing at a higher monthly price. Menu-first platforms start from the menu and ordering and keep the rest of the site minimal. The right group depends on whether your site is a brand showcase or a sales tool.
| Type | Examples | Strength | Weakness | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| General website builder | Squarespace, Wix | Full design control, any page type, blogs and galleries | Menu is a page you maintain by hand; ordering is an add-on or a separate app | Venues whose brand and story drive bookings |
| Restaurant marketing platform | Owner.com, Toast, Square Online, Popmenu | Site, ordering, app and marketing in one bundle | Higher monthly fees, often per-order fees, sometimes tied to a POS | Busy single sites or groups doing serious takeout volume |
| Menu-first platform | Duckhub | Menu is the site; ordering, QR tables and updates are built in; low price | Minimal brand pages; custom domain only on the top plan | Cafes, small restaurants, bars and food trucks that sell from the menu |
A common setup combines two groups: a Squarespace or Wix brand site with a prominent “Menu & order” link pointing at a menu-first page. You keep design freedom and stop maintaining the menu twice.
Restaurant website builders compared (prices checked October 2026)
The table compares entry prices for a site that can show a menu and take orders. Vendor prices change often, so treat the date as part of the number. Where a vendor’s pricing page blocked our check or does not publish prices, we say so instead of repeating figures from third-party roundups.
| Builder | Entry price for menu + ordering | Fees on orders | Custom domain | Ordering | Price status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duckhub | $0 menu site (Egg); $10/mo or $8/mo billed annually with ordering (Duckling) | 0% commission | $99/mo plan (Golden Duck) | Built in: online, pickup, delivery, QR to table | Verified on duck-hub.com |
| Squarespace | Basic $19/mo ($12/mo annual), Core $27/mo ($17/mo annual) | 2% store fee on Basic, 0% on Core; ordering partner priced separately | Free first year on annual plans | Integration (ChowNow, Tock) | Verified on vendor page |
| Wix | Core $29/mo billed annually, the first plan that accepts payments | Not stated on pricing page | Free first year on paid plans | Wix Restaurants Orders | Verified on Wix’s own pricing article |
| Owner.com | $249/mo + 5% per order, or $499/mo flat | 5% restaurant fee (Flexible) plus a 5% guest fee on both plans | Set up during onboarding | Built in, plus branded app | Verified on vendor page |
| Square Online | Free tier, paid tiers per location | Card processing fees apply | Paid tiers | Built in | Pricing page blocked our check |
| Toast | Requires Toast POS; quoted by sales | Not verified | Not verified | Built in | Pricing page blocked our check |
| Popmenu | Quoted by sales | Not verified | Not verified | Built in | Pricing page blocked our check |
Sources: Squarespace pricing, Wix pricing explained by Wix, Owner.com pricing. Two changes since earlier roundups: BentoBox’s pricing page now says “BentoBox is now Clover” and lists no plans, and Oracle has published an end-of-life FAQ for GloriaFood, its free ordering widget, giving April 30, 2027 as the end date. GloriaFood’s pricing page still lists a free plan with “No commission per order”, but plan for that date before building on it.
General builders: Squarespace and Wix
Squarespace and Wix are the right choice when the website is part of the brand: a chef-led room, a destination bar, a venue that sells events. Both give full design control and a free domain for the first year on annual plans. Neither treats the menu as data, so ordering arrives through an integration and the menu is a page you edit by hand.
On Squarespace every plan can sell online, but the store fee differs: “Online store transaction fee of 2%” on Basic and 0% on Core and Advanced. For restaurants, Squarespace’s restaurant page points to partners: “commission-free online ordering for pickup or delivery” through ChowNow, and reservations, ordering and delivery “with Tock booking”. It also offers a pre-built menu layout, “no PDFs required”, which is the right instinct. The partner subscriptions are billed separately, so the real monthly cost is the plan plus the partner.
Wix’s own pricing explainer lists Light at $17, Core at $29, Business at $39 and Business Elite at $159 per month on yearly subscriptions, and calls Core “the first plan that lets you accept payments”. Restaurants add Wix’s ordering app on top. The trade-off for both builders is the same: beautiful pages, but the menu lives in a design tool rather than a menu system, so price changes, sold-out items and translations are manual work.
Restaurant platforms: Owner.com, Toast, Square, Popmenu
Restaurant marketing platforms bundle the website with ordering, a branded app, loyalty and marketing automation. They suit venues with enough takeout volume that the bundle pays for itself. The cost is higher and often includes per-order fees, so do the arithmetic at your real order volume before signing.
Owner.com’s pricing page is the clearest in this group: a Flexible plan at “$249 /month” plus “5% restaurant fee per order”, or a Flat Rate plan at “$499 /month” with “no additional restaurant fees”. Its FAQ adds that guests pay “a 5% order support fee that covers fulfillment and customer service” on both plans. Both include a website, online ordering, a branded app, SEO pages and loyalty, month to month.
Toast and Square build ordering sites around their point-of-sale systems. Toast’s online ordering requires Toast POS, which makes it a natural choice if you already run Toast and an awkward one if you do not. Square Online has a free tier with paid tiers per location. Popmenu sells through sales calls. Their pricing pages blocked our automated checks this month, so we are not quoting numbers; check the live pages, and ask each vendor about per-order fees, payment processing and contract length in writing.
Menu-first platforms: where Duckhub fits
A menu-first platform makes the menu the website: each dish is structured data with a price, photo, modifiers and translations, and the ordering button sits next to it. It is the fastest route to a working sales site, but it is not a brand-site builder. If you need ten custom pages and a press section, pair it with Squarespace or Wix.
Duckhub’s landing page describes the website feature as “Launch a restaurant website with your menu, photos and an ‘Order now’ button”. The plans, as listed on duck-hub.com in October 2026:
- Egg, $0 forever: menu site at
yourvenue.duck-hub.com, 70 products, 10 categories, 30 QR tables, reservations, multi-language menus and SEO settings. No ordering. - Duckling, $10 a month ($8 a month billed annually): 2,000 products, 500 QR tables, online ordering, QR ordering to the table, delivery and pickup, and staff access.
- Golden Duck, $99 a month ($79 a month billed annually): five venues, a custom domain and white-label branding.
Every plan takes 0% commission. Duckhub does not process card payments itself: guests pay cash or by card on your terminal, and you keep your existing payment provider. There is no AI built into Duckhub; you can connect your own ChatGPT (through the Duckhub QR Menu app) or Claude to write descriptions, translate the menu or update prices, on any plan. For the ordering side in detail, see our guide to a QR code ordering system, and for how Duckhub compares with other menu tools, the digital menu software comparison.
Why your menu should be a web page, not a PDF
A menu should be a web page because that is the format phones, search engines and AI assistants can all read. A PDF forces pinch-and-zoom on mobile, takes a designer to update and hides dish names inside a file. An HTML menu loads fast, updates in seconds and exposes every dish and price as text.
Google’s guidance points the same way. Its local business structured data documentation tells sites to use the most specific type, “for example, Restaurant”, and defines the menu property as “the fully-qualified URL of the menu”. Schema.org’s Menu type goes further: a menu is “a structured representation of food or drink items available from a FoodEstablishment”, built from sections and items. Google does not forbid PDF menus, but every structured format it supports assumes a page.
The AI angle is sharper. In our restaurant marketing statistics we cover Uberall’s 2026 benchmark, a vendor study that found 83% of restaurant locations never appeared in any AI recommendation even though 86% had a Google presence. If your menu is still a PDF, our walkthrough on converting a PDF menu into a QR menu shows the switch in under an hour.
Online ordering on your own site vs marketplaces
Ordering on your own website keeps the margin and the customer relationship; marketplace ordering buys reach at a commission. Most restaurants end up running both, using the marketplace for discovery and the website for regulars who already know them. The website builder decides how cheap that second channel is.
The gap is large. Our breakdown of food delivery commission rates shows marketplace commissions of roughly 15% to 30% per order. On your own site the cost is the plan plus card processing, or a per-order fee on some platforms, so read that column of the comparison table carefully: 0% commission, a 2% store fee and a 5% restaurant fee produce very different bills at the same volume.
A practical pattern: put the order link from your website into your Google Business Profile. Google’s help page on managing online ordering options explains that “You can add custom links to your profile that direct customers to other web pages where they can place orders from your business.” That sends search traffic to your own ordering page instead of a marketplace listing. The online ordering statistics hub has the data on why direct orders tend to carry larger checks.
Custom domain: when you need it
A custom domain matters once your web address goes on signage, print and social profiles, or when you run several locations under one brand. Before that, a subdomain works: guests reach it from QR codes, Google and Instagram links, and rarely type the address by hand.
The options differ by builder. Squarespace includes “one (1) year of free domain registration” on annual plans and Wix includes a free domain for the first year on paid plans; after that you pay the renewal. Owner.com sets the domain up during onboarding. On Duckhub, the Egg and Duckling plans publish at yourvenue.duck-hub.com, and your own domain with Duckhub branding removed comes with the Golden Duck plan.
If you already own a domain with a general builder, you do not have to move it. Keep the brand site on your domain and link “Menu” and “Order” to the menu-first page. Use the same link in your Google Business Profile so every channel points at one menu.
How much does a restaurant website cost?
A restaurant website costs from $0 to a few thousand dollars a year on published plans, before any agency design work. The spread comes from three things: whether ordering is included, whether you pay per order, and whether you need a custom domain or several locations. Annual billing cuts most plan prices noticeably.
Our calculation from the October 2026 list prices above, annual billing, one location:
| Setup | Yearly plan cost | Per-order cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duckhub Egg (menu only) | $0 | None | Subdomain, no ordering |
| Duckhub Duckling (menu + ordering) | $96 | 0% commission, card fees from your own provider | Subdomain |
| Squarespace Core | $204 | 0% store fee | Plus ChowNow or Tock subscription |
| Wix Core | $348 | Not stated | Plus ordering app setup |
| Owner.com Flexible | $2,988 | 5% restaurant fee, plus 5% paid by guests | Website, app, loyalty included |
| Owner.com Flat Rate | $5,988 | No restaurant fee, 5% paid by guests | Website, app, loyalty included |
Agency builds are priced per project and quotes vary widely, so get at least three in writing and ask who updates the menu after launch. A beautiful agency site whose menu needs a designer for every price change will cost more over two years than the build itself.
When another option fits better
A menu-first platform is the wrong primary tool for some venues. If your site is a brand story with many custom pages, a general builder fits better; if you are a busy group that wants an app and loyalty in one contract, a restaurant platform can earn its fee. Choose by the job, not the feature list.
Choose a general builder (Squarespace, Wix) if you run a destination restaurant whose bookings come from story, photography and press, or you sell events, classes and gift cards that need their own pages. Link your menu out to a menu-first page if you want it structured and easy to update.
Choose a restaurant platform (Owner.com, Toast, Square) if you do high takeout volume and want a branded app and loyalty bundled, or you already run that vendor’s POS and want one system. Price it at your real order count, including per-order and guest fees.
Choose a menu-first platform like Duckhub if you are a cafe, bakery, bar, food truck or small restaurant whose customers mostly want the menu and a way to order or book. You can start free on duck-hub.com, add commission-free ordering for $10 a month when you are ready, and keep the menu as one page that your staff, or your own AI assistant, can update in seconds.