Open-source restaurant & table reservation systems in 2026

Search for open-source restaurant reservation software and GitHub will happily return two hundred results. Almost all of them are somebody's final-year project: a MERN stack app, a Laravel demo, a PHP script last touched in 2019. The number of maintained, production-grade open-source reservation systems for restaurants is small enough to count on one hand, and that's worth saying up front rather than burying under a listicle.

I build booking software for a living, so I have a professional interest in why this particular niche is so thin. The short answer is that a restaurant reservation system is only about a fifth reservations. The rest is covers management, turn times, walk-ins, the waitlist, the POS it has to talk to, and the no-show problem — and the companies that solved those built marketplaces instead of open-sourcing them, because the money in this category was never in the software.

Why this category is thin

Worth understanding before you evaluate anything, because it explains what's missing from every option below.

Reservation software for restaurants has never been sold as software. OpenTable charges per cover and makes its money as a demand marketplace — diners find restaurants through it. Resy and SevenRooms sell guest data and CRM. The booking widget is close to a loss leader. So the commercial incentive to build a great standalone reservation product, open source or otherwise, is weak: whoever built it would be giving away the cheap part and keeping none of the valuable part.

Meanwhile the actual scheduling problem is harder than it looks:

• A restaurant books covers, not slots. Two people and six people are different bookings against the same table inventory, and a good system will combine two four-tops or refuse to seat two people at one.
• Turn times vary by party size, day and service. A 7pm two-top might be a 90-minute turn on Tuesday and a 105-minute turn on Saturday.
• Walk-ins and the waitlist are half the floor on a Friday, and they compete with reservations for the same tables in real time.
• No-shows run high in this industry, which is why deposits and card holds became standard.
• It has to be usable on a podium tablet at speed, by staff mid-service.

Most open-source projects handle the first line — a form that records a booking — and stop. That's fine for a small restaurant that just wants to stop taking bookings by phone. It's not a floor-management system, and you should know which one you're buying.

TastyIgniter — the only large, maintained option

TastyIgniter is MIT-licensed, sits around 3,700 stars, and had commits within the last couple of weeks as I write this. It's PHP, built on Laravel, and it's the one project in this space with a real community, a plugin marketplace and documentation that resembles a product rather than a README.

The honest framing: TastyIgniter is an online ordering platform — menus, delivery and collection, payments, kitchen workflow — that also does table reservations. Reservations are a genuine module, not an afterthought, with tables and dining areas, capacity, time slots, lead times and a booking widget you can put on your own site. But the centre of gravity is ordering.

That makes it a good fit if you want one self-hosted system for takeaway and tables, and an odd fit if you only want reservations, because you'll be running and maintaining a whole ordering platform to use a fraction of it.

openresto — small, focused, new

openresto (MIT, roughly 90 stars, actively committed to through 2026) is the opposite bet: a booking management system for restaurants, bars and cafés that does bookings and nothing else. Self-hosted, modern stack, deliberately narrow.

At this size you are early-adopting. The community is small, the feature set is young, and a project this age can go quiet without warning. What you get in exchange is code you can actually read in an afternoon and a scope that matches what a lot of independent restaurants genuinely need — take a booking, see tonight's book, stop double-booking the same table.

If you have a developer on staff or on retainer, this is the most promising starting point for something custom. If you don't, the maintenance risk is real and I'd point you elsewhere.

Kitchenasty and Satisfecho — the self-hosted POS route

Two smaller projects worth knowing about, both active in 2026:

Kitchenasty (MIT, ~50 stars) is a self-hosted restaurant system covering online ordering, table reservation and management. Same shape as TastyIgniter at a fraction of the maturity.

Satisfecho POS (AGPL-3.0, ~35 stars) is a restaurant point-of-sale — menu, tables, orders, real-time, multi-tenant — with reservations in scope. The AGPL matters here: if you run a modified version as a network service, you owe your users the source. For internal restaurant use that's usually irrelevant, but if you're an agency planning to host it for clients, read the licence properly first.

The reason to consider a POS-first project at all is that in a restaurant, the reservation and the table state are the same data. Systems that keep them separate create the classic failure where the podium says table 12 is free and the POS says there's an open cheque on it.

The WordPress route — fastest for one restaurant

If you run a single independent restaurant on WordPress, the pragmatic answer is a plugin, not a self-hosted platform. Five Star Restaurant Reservations (the successor to the long-running restaurant-reservations plugin) and similar table-booking plugins are GPL, install in ten minutes, and give you a booking form, an admin list of tonight's covers and email confirmations.

What you're accepting: no floor plan, no waitlist, no POS link, and a plugin whose paid tier holds the features you'll want in six months. What you're getting: bookings stop arriving by phone this afternoon, on infrastructure you already run.

For a lot of the people searching this term, that is the correct answer and everything else in this article is over-engineering.

Generic schedulers — technically possible, structurally wrong

LibreBooking, MRBS, Cal.com and similar open-source schedulers will let you create "Table 1" through "Table 14" as resources and book time against them. People do this. It mostly doesn't survive contact with a real service.

The mismatch is that these tools schedule a resource for a duration, and a restaurant schedules a party against flexible table inventory. A generic scheduler cannot tell you that a party of six can have the two adjacent four-tops if nobody has taken either, cannot vary turn time by party size, and has no concept of a waitlist. You'll spend more time fighting the model than you would have spent on a plugin.

They're a reasonable fit for the adjacent cases — a private dining room, a chef's table, a cookery class, a wine tasting with fixed seats. Those are genuinely slot-based and a scheduler handles them well. I compared those tools properly in open-source booking systems.

Side by side

Look at the waitlist row. Not one open-source option handles the single busiest mechanic on a Friday night. That is the honest state of this category in 2026.

What a reservation system actually has to do

If you're evaluating options — or deciding to build — this is the checklist that separates a booking form from a reservation system.

The no-show playbook covers step four in detail — the confirmation timing and deposit thresholds transfer directly from appointments to covers.

When building on an API beats forking a project

A specific case, because I get asked it: you're an agency or a developer building a restaurant's website, or a product for restaurants, and you need reservations inside it.

Forking TastyIgniter to get its reservation module is a bad trade — you inherit an ordering platform, its release cycle and its data model, to use a tenth of it. Running a separate open-source reservation system alongside your site means two deployments and an iframe your client will hate.

The better shape is scheduling as a service you call: availability computed server-side against your table rules, bookings created over HTTP, payments and deposits handled, and a front end you build to look like the restaurant. That's what Opencals is — a hosted booking API with a typed SDK, priced at $0.99 per booking rather than per seat per month, which for a restaurant doing 300 covers a week is worth actually running the numbers on.

I should be equally clear about the limits: Opencals models availability, staff, resources, capacity and payments well, and it does not ship a restaurant floor plan or a waitlist mechanic. For a fixed-seating concept, a private dining room, a tasting menu or a supper club, it fits directly. For a 120-cover brasserie that needs table-combining and a live waitlist, a dedicated hospitality product will serve you better and I'd rather say that than sell you something that fights your service.

If you want to see the API shape before deciding, the developers page has it, and what's open source at Opencals sets out exactly which parts are MIT-licensed.

The short version

The open-source restaurant reservation category is real but shallow. TastyIgniter is the only project with genuine scale behind it, and reservations are not its main job. openresto and Kitchenasty are small and promising. A WordPress plugin solves the single-restaurant case faster than anything else here. Generic schedulers work for fixed-seating formats and fight you everywhere else.

What nobody has open-sourced is the hard part: covers, turn times, table combining and the waitlist. If those are your problem, pay for a hospitality product and don't feel bad about it. If your problem is simply "take bookings online, on our own site, without a marketplace taking a cut per cover," you have workable options — including an API you can build your own front end on, priced per booking rather than per month. The pricing is public, and you can get in touch if you want to sanity-check whether it fits your format.