Group dinner apps, compared

Last updated 27 August 2026

There are five ways a group of friends actually settles on a restaurant, and they are good at different things. This page describes each one, says which kind of group it suits, and is honest about where the last of them, Booth, is the wrong choice. It is written by Booth, so read the last section first if you would rather start with the losses.

The five ways groups decide where to eat

The group chat

Somebody asks where everyone wants to go and forty messages happen. This is what most groups use and it is not irrational: the people are already there, nobody installs anything, and for two or three friends it settles in a minute.

It fails on structure rather than on effort. A chat is a single stream with no memory, so suggestions scroll away, votes land in different messages than the options they refer to, and anything anyone said last time is gone. Nobody is doing anything wrong, and the decision still does not get made until somebody gives up and books something.

A poll

A WhatsApp poll, a Doodle, a Google Form. This fixes the counting problem cleanly: the options sit in one place and the tally is unambiguous.

What a poll does not know is anything about the options. Someone has to find the restaurants first, check that they are open, and check them against whatever people can and cannot eat, before the poll is worth running. A poll counts a decision. It does not help you make one.

A swipe or shuffle app

A deck of nearby restaurants that people swipe through until something matches, or a random picker that just chooses. Apps in this category describe themselves as Tinder-style voting or a decision maker for when nobody can choose, and several of them are genuinely fast and pleasant.

The trade is that speed comes from ignoring constraints. A shuffle is at its best when the group is easy to please and the answer barely matters. It is at its worst when one person at the table cannot eat at four of the six places in the deck, because nothing in the mechanic knows that.

A booking app

OpenTable, Resy and the rest. These are not competitors to the others so much as the step after them: they answer “can we get a table at this place at this time”, which is a different question from “which place”.

If your group already knows where it is going, start here and skip everything above. If it does not, a booking app will show you availability at somewhere nobody has agreed on yet.

A decision room

One page per night that holds the options, the reasons and the tally together, and that you can leave and come back to. This is what Booth is. The group chat still exists and still carries the conversation, but the decision lives somewhere it cannot scroll away.

Which one suits which group

Named examples, checked on 27 August 2026 and described from each product’s own public wording: the swipe and shuffle category includes SwipeEats, Hangrily, Restaurant Roulette and Where the Fork; SupperSquad works inside iMessage and filters by dietary needs; WAWE combines group dining with bill splitting. These change, so treat the list as examples of the approach rather than a ranking.

What Booth does that the others do not

Three mechanisms, and it is the combination rather than any one of them.

• Dietary needs are structured, not remembered. Each person sets their tags once on their own profile, and those tags travel into every plan they join. Every suggestion is checked against the whole table without anyone having to ask, which is the job that otherwise has no owner. There is a longer guide to the terms themselves.
• The AI is a participant. Nomi posts into the same stream as everyone else, puts places forward under her own name, pulls real restaurant details, and works out how long each place takes from where each person is coming from.
• A veto costs a sentence. Approve as many places as genuinely work for you. Vetoing requires a written reason and carries your name, so it is an argument the group can answer rather than an anonymous number that quietly kills an option.

Where Booth is the wrong choice

Read this before the rest. A comparison written by one of the things being compared is only worth anything if it is specific about its own losses.

• It asks you to sign in. Booth needs a Google or Apple account before you can join a plan, so somebody can be shown your name and your tags can follow you between plans. If you want a link that four people can use in ten seconds without accounts, a shuffle app or a poll beats Booth and it is not close.
• It does not book anything. Booth decides where you are going. Getting the table is still on you, and a booking app does that better.
• It is a web app with no notifications. Nothing pings you when the plan moves. That is deliberate, and it means Booth is worse than a chat at creating urgency when a decision needs to happen in the next fifteen minutes.
• It is built for a specific group. Three to eight friends picking dinner or drinks. It is not designed for work teams, families, or parties of twenty, and it will feel like the wrong shape for those.
• Nomi can be wrong. She reads restaurant data that is sometimes out of date or incomplete. She is a first pass that catches the obvious problems, not an authority. If somebody at the table has a medical restriction, the restaurant is the only thing worth trusting.

The short version

If your group is small and nobody has a restriction, the group chat is fine and you do not need any of this. If the group is bigger, spread out, and at least one person cannot eat at half the places somebody will suggest, the chat will keep failing in the same way every time, and something that remembers is worth the sign-in.