This is the part that matters to a diner, and it is measurable rather than a matter of opinion. A rolling window means one new day appears at the far edge of the calendar every day, so there is something to catch every morning. A calendar release means the restaurant opens a whole month at once, on a fixed date, and nothing happens in between.
The two platforms inherited those habits from what they were built to sell. Tock started as a prepaid ticketing system for tasting menus, where a seating is an event with a date on it. Resy started as a nightly booking system for dining rooms that turn tables. Every restaurant sets its own schedule on either platform, but the defaults show, and they show in our data.
That is the whole story in one line: 60% of the Tock restaurants we measure release on a calendar date , against 16% on Resy. Tock grew up as a prepaid ticketing platform for tasting menus, and it still behaves like one. Resy grew up as a nightly booking system, and it still behaves like that. The most common Resy drop is midnight; the most common Tock drop is 10:00 AM.
If Tock venues move onto Resy's rolling model, these are the ones whose booking behaviour would visibly change, because they currently drop on a calendar date rather than daily. If you book any of them, this is the list to watch.
A move to rolling would make these rooms easier to reach, not harder. A monthly drop gives you twelve attempts a year at a fixed minute against everyone else who read the same announcement. A rolling window gives you one every day, plus every table that comes back in between, which on the rolling rooms we measure is where most reachable availability actually lives.
These shapes come from restaurants where we have a confirmed release schedule, not from every restaurant on either platform, and a schedule we have not yet pinned is simply absent rather than assumed. We also measure four cities, so this is fine dining in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago, not the whole of either platform. How we measure this.
The bigger caveat is about drop times, and it favours Resy for a boring reason. We can also measure the hour a release happens, and on Resy that measurement matches the hour the restaurant publishes at 33 of the 47 rooms where we hold both. On Tock it matches 1 of 14, because we cannot check Tock often enough for the timestamp to be about the restaurant rather than about our own schedule. So every Tock time on this page is the restaurant's stated time, not ours.
The same limit applies to the opening counts above. They are comparable within a platform and shaky across platforms, because a room we check more often gives us more chances to catch a table that appeared and vanished. Treat 300 openings at Carbone against 10 at Lazy Bear as evidence of two different release shapes, which it is, rather than as a precise ratio.
And the coverage limit, which is the honest one. We watch 284 restaurants, while Table Alert advertises 62,198. If your room is not one of ours we have nothing to tell you. What the small number buys is the ability to say what one room actually did: that Z & Y opens for a party of four but not for two, or that Carbone has never once left a slot open between 7 and 8:30 PM. Nobody watching 62,198 restaurants can say that about any of them.
The shape of a release decides how many chances you get, and our own event counts show the two shapes clearly. At the Tock rooms that open on a fixed calendar date, we record roughly one opening per day we observe: 10 at Lazy Bear across 10 days, 15 at Ju-ni across 15, 8 at Enclos across 8, 8 at Naides across 8, and 21 at Per Se across 21. That is what a monthly calendar looks like from outside. Almost nothing happens between drops.
Now the rolling comparison. At Carbone, on Resy, we recorded 300 separate openings across 22 days, and at Umeko 302 across 22. Roughly thirteen moments a day when something became bookable that had not been a minute earlier. Only one of those can be the scheduled release, so on a rolling room most of your chances are tables coming back rather than tables being created.
Read together, that is the practical difference between the platforms. A rolling room rewards continuous watching, because the next chance is always minutes away. A calendar room rewards a diary entry, because the next chance is a fixed morning and the days in between are genuinely empty.
It also cuts against the assumption that Tock means impossible. Among the Tock rooms we track, Per Se and César were bookable on 100% of the days we checked, Cafe Zoetrope and Jungsik on 80%, ICCA on 77%, Ju-ni on 70%, Kiln and Tsukimi on 63%, and Lazy Bear on 33%. The hardest Tock room we measure is Atomix (0%). The platform is not the difficulty. The room is.
Lazy Bear, Tock, the 15th of the month at 10:00 AM: 10 openings recorded across 10 days, open on 33% of days checked.
Ju-ni, Tock, the 1st of the previous month at 10:00 AM: 15 openings across 15 days, open on 70% of days.
Per Se, Tock, the 1st of the previous month at 10:00 AM: 21 openings across 21 days, open on 40% of days.
Carbone, Resy, 10:00 AM daily, 30 days out: 300 openings across 22 days, open on 0% of 588,600 checks.
Umeko, Resy, midnight daily, 29 days out: 302 openings across 22 days, the most of any room we watch.
Your existing bookings are safe, and that is the question most people actually have. A reservation is held by the restaurant, not by the software the restaurant happens to use, and a platform migration does not cancel one. If you hold a Tock ticket for a tasting menu in six weeks, the restaurant still owes you that seat.
Prepaid tickets and deposits are also the restaurant's policy rather than Tock's invention, so moving the booking layer does not automatically make a prepaid room refundable or a free room prepaid. Tock normalised ticketing, but each room sets its own terms and will keep setting them.
Nothing changes on our side either, and it is worth saying why. SnagRes only ever watches and tells you. We do not book a table, hold one or resell one, on any of the four platforms, so there is no account of ours sitting between you and a migrating reservation system.
Nothing yet, if you are holding a booking. The practical risk in a migration is not losing a reservation, it is that a restaurant quietly changes when it opens its calendar and you keep turning up at the old hour.
If the room you want is one of the calendar-date Tock venues listed above, the thing to diarise is the calendar date, not the daily calendar, and the thing to notice is the day that date stops working. A venue moving onto a rolling model would show up as openings on many days instead of one, which is exactly what our event counts measure.
That is the one part of this we can genuinely watch for you. We re-measure every restaurant's release behaviour continuously, so a Tock room switching from a monthly drop to a nightly one shows up in our release table without anyone having to announce it, and a room whose stated time stops matching what we observe shows up as a disagreement rather than as silence.
Resy bought Tock. Here is what changes about actually booking a table.
American Express is folding Tock into Resy. The business coverage is everywhere; what nobody has published is how differently the two platforms release tables, measured across the restaurants we track continuously.
Keep reading: Every measured release schedule · How Tock works · Booking a hard table on Resy · When SF restaurants release tables · When NYC restaurants release tables · The four platforms compared · How we measure this
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Existing reservations continue to work through the platform they were booked on, and each platform still has its own account, its own listings and its own release behaviour. Nothing about a booking you already hold changes.
Yes. They remain separate booking systems with separate inventory, which is the practical thing that matters when you are trying to book: a table listed on one does not appear on the other.
Release times are set by each restaurant rather than by the platform, so they have not moved. SnagRes tracks the confirmed drop time per restaurant for exactly this reason, because platform-level generalisations do not hold.
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: watch a table free in New York City, or last-minute tables in NYC tonight, or see the hardest tables right now.