SevenRooms is built for restaurant groups. Covered is built for indies.

Honestly — some operators will. If you're running complex multi-step guest journeys (birthday → 3-month lapsed → reactivation offer), segmenting by lifetime spend bands, or doing personalised email campaigns from inside the booking platform, SevenRooms does this better than we do today. Covered covers the core CRM — profile history, notes, tags, VIP flags, allergy alerts, automations for birthdays and lapsed guests — but if you live inside an elaborate automation journey, you'd feel the downgrade. Worth an honest conversation before switching.

UK independents doing 60–250 covers a service. One venue, maybe two. Owner-operators who take reservations directly through their website rather than chasing marketplace diners. If you're in that profile, Covered is built for how you actually run service. If you're a 15-venue group with a central marketing team and a dedicated analytics lead, SevenRooms or a tier-1 enterprise platform is still the right tool.

The catch is we don't have a £800 cost structure to cover — no enterprise sales team, no dedicated CSM bench, no multi-region customer success org. That's the trade. You get the product at indie-cost; you don't get the white-glove onboarding programme. For operators who'd rather self-serve and own their setup, this is a feature; for operators who want a consultant on speed-dial, SevenRooms is worth its price.

Depends which POS. Covered supports Square today; Toast, Lightspeed and Aloha are on the roadmap but not live. If your POS integration is a daily-use tool — you auto-post cover counts back into Toast every night — wait until we've shipped your provider. We'd rather tell you that than over-promise and cost you the integration.

Yes. Many operators switch this way — point new reservations to Covered while legacy ones wind down on the old system. Your reports get slightly fragmented for a few months but no bookings drop, and you don't pay cancellation penalties. When the SevenRooms contract ends, switch off at the source.

Group-booking workflow is on the roadmap but not parity with SevenRooms today. If private dining + events is a meaningful revenue line — say 20 %+ of your covers — keep SevenRooms. If it's the occasional 12-top, Covered's standard booking flow with special-requests capture handles it well.

SevenRooms is the best product in its tier at what it does. We're not going to pretend otherwise. Covered's argument isn't 'we're better' — it's 'we're 80 % of the feature depth at 8 % of the price, and for a lot of UK indies, that's the right trade.' If you're paying £600/month and using 30 % of what you're paying for, we can save you £5,000 a year. If you're using 80 %, stay put.