Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
A tracker that watches the restaurant's calendar instead of queueing you for one date. SnagRes watches 284 rooms across Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms, tells you when any new availability appears rather than only your named date, and publishes what each room releases. Notify is still free and worth keeping on the restaurants you care most about.
Sometimes, within its design. You join a queue for one restaurant, one date and one party size, and Resy decides who is told and when, so a notification does not guarantee the table survives until you tap it. It also only covers Resy, which in San Francisco reaches just 13 of the 62 hard rooms we measure.
Because it is a waitlist rather than a monitor. The request you register is a specific restaurant, date, time range and party size, so covering any Friday next month means joining many separate lists. A tracker inverts that: you star the restaurant once and hear about anything new on any date in the window.
Harder than OpenTable or Tock in our set, and the one where hearing first matters most. Half of the 67 Resy rooms we measure had a bookable two-top on 50 percent or fewer of the dates in their window, and at 16 every date was taken at that moment, against a median above 80 percent for OpenTable rooms and 67 percent for Tock rooms. SevenRooms rooms sit lower again on the median, at 20 percent, from a group of 19.
It varies by restaurant, and it is knowable. Of the Resy rooms with a confirmed modal release hour, 11 release at 10 AM, 7 at 9 AM and 2 at 7 AM, including The Four Horsemen. The full list of hours is published on our release-time table rather than inferred from folklore.
Yes, and that is what we would do. Notify costs nothing and comes from the platform itself, so keep it on your top one or two dates. Use the tracker for the other platforms, the dates you did not name, and the cancellations that land at hours you cannot sit and watch.
Open the restaurant on Resy, pick your date and party size, and when no times show, tap Notify and choose the time range you want. Notify watches that one date at that one party size, on Resy only, and sends a push if a matching table appears. Set one for each date you care about; there is no any-date option.
Because a Notify push goes to everyone who set one at the same moment, and the first tap wins. It is the most common alert complaint in recent App Store reviews of Resy and Tock: by the time the notification arrives, the table is booked. No service can make a table wait. What a tracker can do is check the calendar on a short cycle and text you rather than push, which is why Plus members get a text the moment a table appears and free members get the same text fifteen minutes later.
Try it free alongside Notify, or see what is open right now in New York and San Francisco.
The release hours quoted above are listed room by room on the Resy release hours we have confirmed, and the study behind the platform comparison is at the platform-by-platform availability study. If you are weighing a paid shortcut instead, read alerts, bots and resale compared, or see how SnagRes and TableOne compare.
Notify is Resy's own waitlist. You pick a restaurant, a date, a time range and a party size, and you join a list. If a table matching your request frees up, Resy may notify you through the app or by email. It is free, it is built into the platform you are already booking on, and there is no reason not to use it.
It is worth being precise about the model, because the model is where its limits come from. You are not watching the restaurant. You are joining a queue for one specific request, and Resy decides who gets told and when.
That design is fine for the case it was built for, which is one restaurant, one date, one party size. It falls apart the moment your question is broader than that, and most people's questions are.
Every limitation below follows from the queue model rather than from a missing feature, which is why none of them has been fixed in years of use.
It is per date. If you would take any Friday in the next month, you are joining a lot of separate lists.
You are in a queue. Popular restaurants have long ones, and a notification does not guarantee the table is still there when you tap it.
It only covers Resy. Of the 62 San Francisco rooms we measure, just 13 book through Resy, against 25 on OpenTable and 16 on Tock, so a Resy-only waitlist is blind to most of that city's hard list.
It tells you nothing before you join. You cannot see the hour a restaurant releases, how far ahead its calendar reaches, or whether a four-top does better than a two-top there.
You cannot see the wider picture: which nights are loosening up, which restaurants are worth trying at all this month.
A tracker watches the restaurant's calendar directly rather than joining a queue. Instead of registering interest in one date and waiting, you star a restaurant once and hear about any new availability at it, including dates you never thought to ask for.
The second difference is coverage of platforms rather than of cities. SnagRes tracks 284 rooms across four platforms: 68 on Resy, 34 on OpenTable, 22 on Tock and 20 on SevenRooms. In San Francisco especially, that matters, because the hardest tables there sit on Tock and OpenTable as much as on Resy.
The third is that you can see the whole board. The tracker shows current status for every restaurant it covers, so choosing where to eat on a Thursday is a glance rather than fifteen browser tabs.
The fourth is the one Notify structurally cannot offer, and it is the reason this page is not just a feature list. A queue tells you nothing until it fires. A measurement record tells you what to expect before you commit to waiting.
Across the 169 Resy rooms in our measurement set we have logged 45,843,783 checks of their live booking calendars, part of 61,530,416 across all four platforms as of 19 October 2026. That record is what turns a waitlist into a plan.
Resy rooms are the group where timing matters most. Half of them had a bookable two-top on 50 percent or fewer of the dates in their window, and at 16 of the 67 every date was taken at that moment, a higher share than any other platform in our set, which is why an alert pays off there. For comparison, the median OpenTable room was open on more than 80 percent of its dates and the median Tock room on 67 percent of its own. Only SevenRooms sits lower on the median, at 20 percent, from a much smaller group of 19 rooms.
Release hours are knowable, and they cluster. Of the Resy rooms with a confirmed modal release hour, 11 release at 10 AM, 7 at 9 AM and 2 as early as 7 AM. The Four Horsemen is one of the 7 AM rooms and logged 135 release events over 22 observed days, while still showing no bookable two-top across the 30 dates in its window on the day we measured.
Windows vary more than people expect, and a short one changes the whole strategy. Resy windows in our set run from 10 days to 31, and 14 of those rooms never let you book beyond 14 days out. I Sodi reaches 13 days ahead and released nothing later than 5:15 PM in the window we measured. Joining a queue for a Saturday at eight there is waiting for something the room was not putting out.
67 Resy rooms measured, 54 in New York and 13 in San Francisco, with 4,366 release events recorded across them.
16 of those 67 released no bookable two-top on a single date in their window, which is where a waitlist is all you have.
Monkey Bar releases at 9 AM, reaches 20 days ahead, and ninety-five percent of what came free there was before 6 PM, with 11:45 AM its most frequently open slot.
Carbone logged 300 release events in 22 observed days, yet its most frequently open slot was 11:30 PM and none of its recorded slots fell between 7 and 8:30 PM.
31 rooms across the whole list are easier to book for four than for two, so the party size you type into Notify may be the thing working against you.
Other services watch Resy too. Each line below is what the service publishes about itself, as of 19 October 2026. None of them books the table for you.
TableOne: alerts for Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms, sent as push notifications from its iPhone app, at $18 a month or $129 a year with no free tier published (tableone.app/pricing and tableone.app/platforms, as of 19 October 2026).
ReservationFinder: alerts for Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms in eight cities, by push and email, with texts tied to Pro. Basic is $9.99 a month for four monitors and Pro $19.99 for ten, after a 7-day trial that needs a card (reservationfinder.io, as of 19 October 2026).
TableWatch: alerts for Resy and OpenTable from an iPhone app, by push with email optional. One free watch every 30 days, credits from $2.99, or unlimited at $24.99 a month or $89.99 a year (tablewatch.io, as of 19 October 2026).
Ez Rez: a free iPhone app that alarms you before scheduled releases at 70+ New York restaurants rather than watching for cancellations, then links you to Resy, OpenTable, Tock or SevenRooms to book (apps.apple.com/us/app/id6762331450, as of 19 October 2026).
SnagRes: alerts for Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms in four cities by text and email, free for one restaurant, with a measured record of each room. Our side by side with TableOne is on the SnagRes vs TableOne page.
This is not an either-or. Notify costs nothing, comes from the platform itself, and sometimes lands a table. Keep using it on the restaurants you care most about.
Where a tracker earns its place is everything Notify structurally cannot do: other platforms, restaurants you have not thought to queue for, dates you did not name, and a view of the whole city at once. If you only ever want one specific Saturday at one Resy restaurant, Notify may be all you need.
The practical routine is to use the measurement to pick the fight, then use both tools on it. Know the release hour, set the party size the room is kindest to, and let the alert cover the cancellations that land at hours nobody sits and refreshes through.
The tracker is free to browse without an account. A free account lets you star one restaurant and get emailed the moment it opens. Plus is $14.99 a month and raises the cap to 30 restaurants, shows the exact released time slots rather than just a status, and extends the calendar view from 14 days to 30. The annual price sits on the pricing page rather than here, so this page cannot quote you a number we have stopped charging.
What we never do is book. We hold no Resy login, never place or hold a reservation, and charge nothing per table. The booking stays ordinary and in your own name, which is the same thing Notify gets right and the opposite of what an auto-booker asks of you.
How Resy Notify works, where its waitlist model falls short, and how a reservation tracker differs across Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms.
An honest comparison of Resy Notify and reservation trackers: what each does, where Notify is limited, and when using both makes sense.
Keep reading: How Resy alerts work · All alert services compared · Resy vs the other three platforms
Browse all restaurant reservation guides
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.