Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
Prices and coverage were checked in August 2026 against each service's own published pages (the ReservationFinder, TableOne, TableWatch, Table Watch and Ez Rez rows as of 19 October 2026), and the availability figures come from our own measurement record. The full study behind them is at the availability study behind these figures, and the release hours are listed restaurant by restaurant on the measured release hour for every room we watch.
If you are weighing an alert against a bot or a resale, read alerts, bots and resale compared and whether reservation bots are legal. For the paid alternatives, we cover buying a resold reservation and Dorsia's minimum-spend model. Or see what is open in NYC and San Francisco right now.
The table above lists every service we are aware of in this category, what it monitors, what it costs and whether it books for you. We include the ones that beat us, because a comparison that only flatters its author is worth nothing to the person reading it.
Read the rows for two things. The first is what the service does when a table appears: tell you, book it, or sell it to you. The second is what it can tell you about a restaurant before anything appears at all, which is where most of this category is silent and where our own answer lives.
Every service on this page is selling one of two things, and none of them sells both. One group sells breadth, meaning the longest possible list of restaurants you could be alerted about. The other sells knowledge of specific rooms. We are firmly in the second group, and we lose the first comparison outright.
Table Alert advertises 62,198 restaurants. We watch 284, in four cities, which is about one room for every 219 on their list. If the restaurant you want is in Austin or Copenhagen, a wide service is your answer and we are not.
What the short list buys is measurement. As of 19 October 2026 we have logged 61,530,416 checks of live booking calendars and recorded 465,235,816 individual open time slots across those rooms. That is why we can tell you what a particular dining room does rather than that we are watching it.
Breadth: Table Alert advertises 62,198 restaurants, and table.watch lists 38 cities worldwide. Those are real advantages and we cannot match either.
Depth: 284 of our 284 rooms carry an open rate for a two-top and 284 for a four-top, 87 have a release rule on record, and 266 have the individual time slots that came free.
The gap this exposes: no service watching tens of thousands of restaurants publishes what any single one of them does. Ask any of them what time Monkey Bar releases and how much of what opens there lands before 6 PM.
Our answer to that question: 21 days ahead at 9 AM, and 100% of what opens there is before 6 PM, with 7:00 AM the single most frequently open slot. That comes from 550,180 checks of that one room.
Every option above is one of three things. A platform waitlist, run by the booking platform itself. A monitoring service, which watches restaurant calendars and alerts you. Or an auto-booker, which tries to complete the booking for you. They fail and succeed in different ways, and the right answer depends on how much you care about one specific table.
The line that matters most legally and practically runs between the first two and the third. A waitlist and a monitor both leave the booking in your hands and your name. An auto-booker needs to act as you, which is why it needs your credentials.
Platform waitlists (Resy Notify, OpenTable's notify): free, official, one restaurant and date at a time, single platform only.
Monitoring services (SnagRes, ReservationFinder, TableOne, TableWatch, Table Alert, table.watch): watch calendars across platforms and tell you what opened. You book it yourself.
Auto-bookers (TablePass, TableTurn, Snatchd, AutoRes): attempt to book on your behalf, usually by holding your account credentials. Faster in principle, and the category most likely to fall foul of platform terms.
Resale marketplaces (AppointmentTrader) are a fourth thing entirely, because you are not being alerted to a free table, you are buying a booked one from a stranger.
Free, built into Resy, and the obvious first thing to try. You join a waitlist for a specific restaurant, date and party size, and Resy tells you if something matching frees up.
Its constraints are structural rather than accidental: one date at a time, a queue you share with everyone else who joined, and Resy restaurants only. If the table you want is on Tock or OpenTable, it does not apply at all. Use it; just do not expect it to cover a whole month or a whole city.
How much that single-platform limit costs you depends on your city. Of the 84 New York rooms we measure, 56 book through Resy, so Notify reaches most of the hard list there. Of the 60 San Francisco rooms, only 10 are on Resy, against 27 on OpenTable and 15 on Tock. In San Francisco, Notify is blind to most of the problem.
A monitoring service covering Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms in the eight cities it lists: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Austin, Palm Beach and Las Vegas. It publishes two tiers after a 7-day trial that needs a payment method: Basic at $9.99 a month for up to four restaurants, and Pro at $19.99 a month for up to ten plus City Alerts across a whole city (reservationfinder.io, as of 19 October 2026). It is the most direct comparison to what we do, and it has genuine advantages: more cities, and a substantially larger library of written guides and coverage pages.
Where the two differ most is pricing shape, free access and evidence. ReservationFinder's monitoring starts as a paid product. SnagRes lets you browse live availability for every restaurant without an account, and watches two restaurants free.
The evidence difference is the one we would actually argue about. We publish per-room numbers that can be checked against the restaurant's own booking page today: open rate for two and for four, modal release hour, how far the calendar reaches, and the slots that come free. A reader can falsify any of it in a minute, which is the point of publishing it.
We watch 284 rooms in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago on Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms, and we keep the record of what each one did. The live tracker is free to browse with no account. A free account watches one restaurant and emails you when it opens. Plus is $14.99 a month, watches 30, shows the exact time slots that opened, and extends the calendar from 14 days to 30.
The measurements are the part no competitor here publishes. They also produce the most useful sentence we can give a reader about a hard restaurant, which is not that it is hard but how it is hard: at what hour, how far out, for which party size, and at what time of night.
Two examples of how specific that gets. Carbone logged 581 separate release events over 63 observed days, yet at the latest reading 0 of the 30 dates in its window had a bookable two-top, its most frequently open slot was 11:30 AM, and 0% of its recorded open slots fell in the 7 to 8:30 PM prime window. Minetta Tavern had a two-top open on 13 of 31 dates and a four-top on 24, and still put 0% of its open slots in that 7 to 8:30 PM window.
61,530,416 checks of live booking calendars as of 19 October 2026, and 465,235,816 recorded open time slots.
39 of the 284 measured rooms had no bookable two-top on a single date in their window. 10 of those 39 did have a four-top open somewhere in the same window.
45 rooms are easier to book for four than for two, and 53 are easier for two than for four, which is why party size is a filter and not a footnote.
Of the 87 rooms with a release rule on record, 22 release at 10 AM and 25 at 9 AM. The rest advance their calendars on a different clock entirely.
The median published booking window is 21 days, and the short ones quietly make a room harder than its open rate suggests.
Five services in the table will complete a booking for you: TablePass, TableTurn, Snatchd, AutoRes, and DinnerElite on its top tier. TablePass runs from $29 a month with three bookings included up to $499, TableTurn publishes roughly $50 a month, and Snatchd lists itself as free on the App Store. A sixth, TableSwap, does not book for you but charges $75 per completed booking on top of $25 a month.
We do not do this and will not. Charging for a reservation, or completing one as you, is the practice New York's 2024 reservation law was written to address, and every one of the major platforms prohibits automated booking in its terms. An auto-booker needs your login to act as you, which means the account that gets banned is yours rather than theirs.
SnagRes never logs into a booking account, never holds a table, and never charges for a reservation. We tell you a table exists and you book it yourself, in your own name, on the restaurant's own platform. That is a real limitation: you do the last step. It is also the whole reason there is nothing of yours at risk.
Four cases, stated plainly. If you want a service that books the table for you rather than telling you it exists, we do not do that and do not plan to.
If you eat in a city we do not cover, we are useless to you. We cover New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago only, and a service advertising tens of thousands of restaurants will serve you better.
If the restaurant you want is not on our list of 284, we have nothing to say about it, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise. Our list is short on purpose, and short lists have edges.
And if you want one specific Saturday at one Resy restaurant and nothing else, Resy Notify is free and may be all you need.
On 16 September 2026 we pulled the 500 most recent App Store reviews of Resy and of OpenTable, and every review of Tock, Dorsia, TableOne and ResX, and read the one- and two-star ones: 171 for Resy, 128 for Tock, 78 for Dorsia, 57 for OpenTable, 22 for TableOne. Four complaints repeat across every app that sends alerts, and each one is a question to ask any service before you pay.
The notification arrived after the table was gone. The most common alert complaint at Resy and Tock. No service can make a table wait, so ask how often the calendar is checked and whether the alert is a text or a push. SnagRes re-checks on a short cycle and texts Plus members the moment a table appears; free members get the same text fifteen minutes later.
No way to filter alerts by time, day or party size. Reviewers of Tock, Resy and ResX ask for it. Every SnagRes alert takes a date range, a party size of two or four, and a time window: before 2 PM, 2 to 6 PM, 6 to 8 PM, or after 8 PM.
A subscription that keeps charging after you cancel. The dominant TableOne complaint. SnagRes bills through Stripe, cancelling is one click from your account page, and it takes effect at the end of the period you paid for.
Bots taking the tables. Resy reviewers say prime-time tables vanish to bots the second they appear. We do not book, so we add nothing to that race; we tell you when a seat comes back, and the seat that comes back is the one a person gave up.
Work from the restaurant rather than from the service. Which platform does it use, how far ahead does it book, what hour does it release, and are you flexible about the date? Those four answers eliminate most of this page for you.
Only ever booking Resy, one date at a time: start with Resy Notify. It costs nothing.
Hunting across platforms, especially in San Francisco: you need a monitor, because only 10 of the 60 hard SF rooms we measure sit on Resy.
Chasing a restaurant outside New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago: pick on coverage, and pick one of the wide services rather than us.
Chasing one of the 284 rooms we do watch: pick on evidence, and ask what each service can tell you about that room before you pay.
Watching more than a handful of restaurants: compare monitored-restaurant caps, which is where the pricing differences actually bite.
Wanting to try before paying: check whether the service lets you see live availability without an account.
The coverage leader by its own published number, roughly 430 times the size of our list. If breadth is what you need, this is the case for it.
The closest comparison to us. Says "We are not a booking service." Lists New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Austin, Palm Beach and Las Vegas. Push and email from its iPhone app, texts tied to Pro, a 7-day free trial that needs a card; annual price not published. Source: reservationfinder.io and apps.apple.com/us/app/id6767201437, as of 19 October 2026.
Push notifications from a released iPhone and iPad app. No free tier published, and its Fulfillment Policy says fees are non-refundable once charged. Source: tableone.app/pricing, tableone.app/platforms and tableone.app/fulfillment, as of 19 October 2026.
Free (1 watch per 30 days); credits from $2.99; unlimited $24.99/mo or $89.99/yr
Push by default, email optional. You tap the time and finish on Resy or OpenTable. iPhone only; Android "not yet". Source: tablewatch.io and apps.apple.com/us/app/id6761446213, as of 19 October 2026.
A separate web service with a similar name. Alerts by text, a 30-day window, and the first watch free in the first month. Source: table-watch.onrender.com, as of 19 October 2026.
Alarms before a scheduled release rather than a cancellation watch: push at 10 minutes, 2 minutes and live, stackable alarms, and priority alarms through Focus. Tracks 70+ New York restaurants; iPhone only (iOS 26 or later). Source: apps.apple.com/us/app/id6762331450, as of 19 October 2026.
Michelin-focused and genuinely international. 62 NYC restaurants; checks every five minutes.
The $75 per completed booking is the thing to notice, because charging per reservation is the practice New York wrote a law about.
An iPhone app for New York that says it secures cancelled tables for free. It does not publish which platforms it covers.
Texts you shortly BEFORE a known drop window rather than after a table appears, which is a different and complementary idea.
Books on your behalf. Worth understanding that automated booking breaches the major platforms’ terms, which is the risk you are accepting.
An honest comparison of reservation alert services: Resy Notify, ReservationFinder and SnagRes. What each covers, what it costs, where it falls short.
Platform waitlists, monitoring services and auto-bookers compared for hard-to-book restaurants in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago, including where each option is the wrong one.
Keep reading: Resy Notify in detail · Alerts, bots and resale · SnagRes vs TableOne · SnagRes vs TablePass · NYC RSVPs vs SnagRes · What Plus includes
Browse all restaurant reservation guides
Platform coverage first, because a service watching one platform cannot see a table on the other three. Then check speed of the recheck, whether it books on your behalf (which carries account risk), and whether alerts tell you the exact times that opened or only the dates.
Some attempt to, and that is the category with account risk attached. SnagRes deliberately does not: it texts you the moment a table opens and links you to the restaurant's own booking page, so the reservation is made by you under your own account.
SnagRes rechecks continuously, the busiest rooms every 10 to 30 seconds, and texts or pushes the opening the moment it sees it, with an email summary on the cadence you choose. The timestamp on each tracker is the source of truth for freshness.
SnagRes checks 284 hard-to-book restaurants across four cities and alerts you when one opens. Watching one is free and no card is needed: last-minute tables in NYC tonight, or see the hardest tables right now.