Chowly vs. Olo

I would not recommend Chowly to any restaurant that is trying to push orders through to their POS from a third party delivery site. Any restaurant would be much better off finding a third party site that integrates directly with their POS. Using Chowly was more of a headache than it needed to be and our company switched to Checkmate (also not great) after a year with Chowly.

Incentivized

After using a previous integrator, I can safely say I would recommend Olo above the competition. Olo successfully consolidates all platforms for order ingestion thus simplifying the entire process of digital ordering. Trying to do it any other way would simply be foolish. The technology works and there is a great support structure behind the scenes to make sure that if there are any questions, feature requests, or advancements that they get added to the development queue.

Incentivized

• Responsive support team
• Their team's knowledge of Toast POS
• Their sales team is aggressive and confident in their product

Incentivized

• Olo makes the guest experience easy and understandable while placing their orders. They can easily customize their order, modifying each item to their liking using the guidelines we at our restaurant have given.
• If there are issues with our equipment, Olo is quick to respond and get us back online.

Incentivized

• Promises of ways to avoid mapping errors were never followed through on
• Many mapping errors which required constant attention
• To use requires multiple hidden modifiers in Toast, clogging up the menu

Incentivized

• hard to set up 3rd parties on Rails - providing access and adding pricing information
• bug in searching orders - have to first deselect all before selecting store
• need to add group ordering - but they said they are working on this
• store hours are too difficult to update. please make them editable all at once

Incentivized

It's quick, responsive, easy to navigate and has all the functions necessary to get the job done

Incentivized

Olo's usability is great. The only area that keeps them from being a 10 is menu management. Menu management is absolutely workable, but it could be better. The rest of the system works well and is very usable and user-friendly. To the extent that their menu management has opportunities, the Olo Expo product helps this out with the people that need it the most, and thus why they score a 9 overall. Without Olo Expo, I'd score it an 8.

Incentivized

No product is ever perfect and support is there to help when that is the case. The vast majority of time the Olo support team is quick, transparent, and resolves the issues. However, I can't say that they are absolutely perfect (but few support teams are). The only thing keeping them from a 10 is the LVL1 support teams will often not read a ticket fully and see that the troubleshooting steps they are about to give have already taken place.

Incentivized

not sure

Incentivized

Chowly was not as good as Checkmate, though I cannot in good faith recommend either. We ended up switching over to Checkmate after a year with Chowly due to our dissatisfaction with the service.

Incentivized

Revel is my POS provider and they want to charge way to much for online integration so I have not tried it. What I have tried is each companies own apps on their tablets. I would rather have 3 or 4 different tablets that are good at what they do for their respective company then use your "all-in-one" solution that honestly is much worse.

Incentivized

• Required a lot of attention from upper management to maintain
• Enabled orders from Caviar to go through to the POS without staff needing to enter the orders manually, saving on time and labor
• Due to frequent changes in our menu, Chowly could not handle these and needed to remap every single time there was a menu change.

Incentivized

• Time savings for employees has been a positive impact.
• Our takeout business has increased from less than 10% to over 30% in the last 2 years, we could not have been as successful with this increase without the help of Olo.

Incentivized