Comparison hub · verified July 2026
Restaurant food cost software, compared
Six ways to answer the same question: what is a plate actually costing you this week. Three of them are platforms, one is us, and two are not software at all. We only publish a comparison where the vendor publishes enough for us to check, which is why this list is short rather than a directory of forty logos.
| Option | What it is for | Published price |
|---|---|---|
| MarjiusPricing → | Menu margin protection, from a photograph of your menu | $0 QR menu · $59 and $149 per location/mo |
| MarginEdgeHead-to-head → | Back-office automation: invoice processing, accounts payable and reporting for restaurants with a bookkeeper. | $350 per location/month (published pricing, July 2026) |
| MarketManHead-to-head → | Inventory and purchasing management — ordering, receiving, stock counts and COGS reporting. | $199/mo Starter, $249/mo Growth, custom Enterprise (published pricing, July 2026), plus a setup fee listed at $1,500 |
| Restaurant365Head-to-head → | An all-in-one restaurant ERP: accounting, inventory, scheduling and payroll in one platform. | Custom-quoted; pricing not published (July 2026) |
| A spreadsheet | A recipe-costing sheet you build yourself, updated by hand when prices change. | Free |
| Your POS's built-in reporting | The recipe and cost features included with Toast, Square, Lightspeed and similar. | Included with your POS |
Prices as published by each vendor in July 2026, re-checked quarterly. Where a vendor does not publish a price we say so rather than guess. Ours are on the pricing page in full, including what the free tier keeps.
Two kinds of comparison page, on purpose
Every vendor here has two pages, because searching “Marji vs MarginEdge” and searching “MarginEdge alternatives” are two different moments in the same decision. The duel is for a reader down to two products who wants the rows side by side. The shortlist is for a reader who has decided to leave and does not yet know what replaces it.
Head-to-head
Price, setup, core job, POS write-back and what we do not do, in one table.
Shortlists
Five options each, ordered for what that product leaves undone, with what cancelling it actually costs you.
The category splits four ways
“Restaurant food cost software” is one search phrase covering four different jobs. Almost every bad purchase in this category is a product bought for one job and judged on another, so start here rather than with a feature matrix.
Pay and code the invoices
MarginEdge, Restaurant365
Accounts payable, invoice coding, sync into the books. Worth real money when a bookkeeper is on the other end of it, and close to worthless when nobody is.
Know what is in the building
MarketMan, Restaurant365
Counts, purchase orders, receiving, waste. Everything it produces depends on someone counting every week, which is the assumption to test before you buy.
Run the whole back office in one system
Restaurant365
General ledger, AP, inventory, scheduling and payroll together. Built and priced for groups with a finance function, and sold by quote rather than published price.
Stop dishes quietly losing margin
Marji
Cost every dish from a menu photograph, recost it the day an invoice moves, name the price that restores the target margin. It is the narrowest job on this list and the only one we do.
One question sorts it faster than any feature list: what do you want to happen the week a supplier raises a price? If the answer is “it lands in my accounting”, you want a back office. If it is “I want to know my stock is right”, you want inventory. If it is “tell me which price to change”, that is the job we built the product in this demo to do. If it is “honestly, nothing, I will check”, keep your money and use a spreadsheet.
Cheapest way to compare: run your own menu through one.
Photograph your menu and see every dish costed in about a minute. Free tier, no card, nothing to migrate if you pick someone else.
Cost my menu free →Every competitor fact on these pages is taken from the vendor's own public pages, dated, and re-verified quarterly. Products whose pricing or capabilities we cannot verify publicly do not get a page at all, which is the rule set out in our editorial policy. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it.