In this article, we’ll compare these two digital menu-creating websites—Menuzen and MustHaveMenus—in the scales and see which lifts the other. By scales, we mean the collection of features that restaurants need in a digital menu, including even the less important or unnecessary ones. To not confuse ourselves in this comparison, we’ll pick on all critical features of a digital menu one after the other and see how the two contenders stack up against each other.
Before we compare these two great digital menu providers, let’s briefly narrate what each entails.
Menuzen is an Australia-based company that creates software solutions for food service businesses worldwide. They have everything a restaurant needs to design a website, create and share menus, manage orders and sales, and much more. It’s one of the best MustHaveMenus alternatives for those looking for a change.
MustHaveMenus is a company based in Tennessee, USA. Like Menuzen, it provides digital menu solutions for the hospitality industry. Although it’s one of the best options for digitizing a restaurant’s menu, it has certain limitations that make it less desirable to certain restaurateurs, as we’ll see in this article
You can enjoy all the benefits of a digital menu from both providers, such as reduced cost, flexibility, and speed. However, there are several features that one has and the other doesn’t, as we’ll see in the table below. For a more detailed analysis, we’d suggest you visit each platform’s website to view the full range of Menuzen’s features or MustHaveMenus features
Cost
Limited free features or $13 monthly for the “Grow” package; pay $5 monthly forever for the “Grow” package when you opt for the early access offer.
Limited free features or $16/month for pro.
Item Manager
Update items on the go: alter your photos, add new items, update pricing, establish subcategories, and add information without having to completely redesign your menu.
Ease of Menu Creation
Simplified creation with unique zone editing.
Slightly more complex with limited zone editing.
Website Builder Feature
Free restaurant website builder.
Language Translation Feature
Under development.
Market Analytics Feature
Has an analytics feature.
Has a market analytics feature for customer insights.
Extra Graphic Design Tools
Has additional graphic design tools for creating flyers, logos, stickers, etc.
Business Manager feature
Set up and manage multiple menus in one account, h with individual items, sections and settings
Organizations can design for multiple locations in one account.
Now, let’s examine in detail how these two excellent digital menu-designing websites compare on several grounds.
Let’s start with the features without which a restaurant wouldn’t need a digital menu. First, you need a menu that displays all your dishes and beverages in the most attractive way possible. Any dish you add to the menu should look aesthetically pleasing; apart from the picture- or video-quality of your dishes, the way they’re displayed on screen matters if it must appeal to customers. When you display your menu through social media posts, you want it to be beautiful and appealing to potential customers.
Every digital menu ought to offer a lot of creative freedom. It should support image and video content, text, fonts, colours, layouts, and designs.
Of the many MustHaveMenus alternatives, Menuzen stands out as a restaurant menu maker in that it provides everything you need to design an attractive and professional menu. If you feel like exercising your artistic skills, it has all you need to get going. In the same vein, if you struggle with design, there are free templates that don’t need tweaking to look great. The design experience has never been easier.
It’s not only about having many templates, though. Their number is of little or no value if they aren’t super attractive. A template should draw the eyes.
We like the simple yet comprehensive restaurant menu design of most of Menuzen’s templates. They’re so clean and straightforward that customers won’t feel overwhelmed by distracting graphics, fonts, or colours while choosing a dish. In our guide on how to design a menu, we saw that fonts, colours, and images could undermine readability if misused.
Simplicity is so crucial that some restaurant menus don’t use graphics or fancy fonts. For customers to appreciate the beautiful design of a menu, it mustn’t stand in the way of readability — just what Menuzen offers.
Despite MustHaveMenus having more menu templates than Menuzen, most of their designs use complex fonts and are heavily coloured. If you have great design skills or plan to contract a professional designer, the templates can be modified to simpler and clearer designs. However, this would take some time and may be more challenging than you had anticipated.
You’d still find several simple designs at MustHaveMenus, but they may be fewer than the 24 (and counting) templates Menuzen has rolled out.
Our guide on whether restaurants need a website outlined the importance of this digital tool to the hospitality industry. Namely, we saw that restaurants without a website are at a disadvantage since websites can greatly support marketing efforts. For example, you can make it easier for potential customers to find reviews about your restaurant by gathering all your restaurant’s review pages on the internet in one place.
Menuzen provides a free website builder for restaurants—Menuzen.site—and has many ready-made templates that need only slight tweaking to publish a brand-new, attractive, fast, and responsive hotel/restaurant website.
Having your menu and website hosted on the same platform is a great advantage. For one, there won’t be any compatibility issues since both features are designed to support each other. This is a crucial point to note when making a website for your restaurant, considering that there are many instances where menus don’t integrate well into a website hosted on a different platform.
An analysis of MustHaveMenus vs Menuzen regarding website building inevitably concludes with Menuzen winning the show — its competitor lacks website builder tools.
However, using MustHaveMenus doesn’t mean your restaurant can’t have a website. Instead, it does mean you’ll need to look towards another platform for this. Not only will this require you to pay more, but there’s also the possibility of compatibility issues between the website and your menu.
No matter how valuable a product or service is, there must be an acceptable upper limit to its cost. Otherwise, most people who can’t afford it will ditch it for another option.
If you’re using Menuzen as a single restaurant owner, you may never have to worry about the cost because there’s a plan that allows you to use it free forever. In addition to complete access to the analytics, QR code, and support feature, this free plan grants you access to some menu templates and design tools as well as a few site builder features.
This allows you to run a digitised restaurant on Menuzen for life without paying a penny — particularly beneficial if you’re a potential restaurant owner or small business considering starting a restaurant business at a low cost.
However, you may need to opt for the “Grow” paid plan if you run a chain of restaurants to make the most of Menuzen’s features. Priced at $13 monthly, this plan offers unlimited features when it comes to number of users, menu items, images, etc. The icing on the cake is that you can pay $5 monthly forever if you opt for the early access feature — since this offer is likely to end soon, we’d suggest you take advantage of it while it lasts.
While some features similar to Menuzen’s are free at MustHaveMenus, most have usage limits. For example, the QR code is restricted to only 300 scans, link pages & online views are limited to 300, and there’s a 5 GB cloud storage cap. To eliminate these restrictions, you’ll need to go pro, i.e., purchase a subscription plan priced at $16 monthly.
Imagine a situation where customers scan your barcode, but the menu page doesn’t load or loads slowly. That means they can’t place orders digitally or may only manage to do so after much frustration. If you don’t happen to have traditional print menus on standby, you can only imagine your annoyance towards that menu-designing platform.
Disappoint a customer two or three times like this, and they’ll take a long time to show up again, if ever. You must thoroughly research a digital menu provider before throwing in your lot. Suffice it to say, having a reliable digital menu platform is one of the critical means of improving customer experience and, by extension, boosting your restaurant sales.
Both Menuzen and MustHaveMenus are incredibly reliable in serving your customers and for making changes. But again, we find Menuzen to be more reliable and load faster.
The more stable and faster your menu takes to load, the better for your business and customers. Neither MustHaveMenus nor Menuzen will disappoint you regarding platform stability.
These functions give you extra graphic outputs other than your menu. You can use them to design your logo, packaging label, flyers, gift certificates, business cards, and so on.
While these features aren’t necessarily part of a digital menu service, they save you the money you’d otherwise spend on designing extra marketing materials. You can create them with free software online or offline.
There’s no extra graphic design option at Menuzen. The feature might be added later, but you can only design menus and websites, not banners, flyers, or logos, at the moment.
However, this isn’t a big deal as you can use free software like Hatchful by Shopify, Logaster by ZenBusiness, Zyro, etc., to design logos and flyers — that is, if you can do it personally. Chances are you’d need expert designers for these graphics.
This is one area where the MustHaveMenus vs Menuzen comparison tilts towards the former. You can design all kinds of restaurant graphics with MustHaveMenus. They offer tools for designing flyers, logos, stickers, food labels, and many others.
Just like every other SaaS (Software as a Service), Menuzen and MustHaveMenus aren’t 100% perfect, with both still having plenty of room for improvement.
Easy to use
Easy to manage items on the go
Menu analytics feature (coming soon)
Embeddable menus
No extra graphic design features
Multi-restaurant owners may need to opt for the paid “Grow” plan
Extra design features
Lots of templates
Additional promotional products
Expensive
No business manager feature
Just like every other SaaS (Software as a Service), Menuzen and MustHaveMenus aren’t 100% perfect, with both still having plenty of room for improvement.
Great value for money.
Specialised in menu design.
World-class templates.
A host of extra features.
Relatively new.
General purpose design platform.
A wide range of design tools.
Been around for a long time.
Steeper learning curve.
Less optimised menu templates.
Just like every other SaaS (Software as a Service), Menuzen and MustHaveMenus aren’t 100% perfect, with both still having plenty of room for improvement.
Great value for money.
Specialised in menu design.
World-class templates.
A host of extra features.
Relatively new.
General purpose design platform.
A wide range of design tools.
Been around for a while.
Steeper learning curve.
Less optimised menu templates.
So far, this guide has provided an analysis of MustHaveMenus vs Menuzen. One thing to remember is that the list of advantages discussed isn’t exhaustive. We only focused on the functions at which either Menuzen or its counterpart is better.
You can make the most of Menuzen’s excellent features by designing your dream digital menu when you sign up on Menuzen today. The platform’s various menu design templates are a great starting point if you’re not so tech-savvy.
