Certus AI Alternatives for Restaurants
Certus AI answers in English, Spanish and French on a quote-based price. Six alternatives for restaurants, and the ten-minute demo that separates them.
On this page
Two calls on one Friday line. The first arrives in Spanish, asks whether delivery reaches the east side, and orders for six. The second is in English and wants a table for two at eight.
That pair is Certus AI's argument, and it is fair. Certus treats Spanish and French as part of the product rather than a roadmap item, selling orders, deliveries, reservations, upselling and complaints in all three languages.
The question is what that costs a shop whose calls all sound the same. Pricing is a quote, and the vendor describes setup at around five days, which fits a multi-unit rollout better than one pizzeria that needs the phone covered tonight. The rest of the shortlist is in the alternatives hub.
TL;DR
- Certus AI is quote-priced and answers orders, reservations, upselling and complaints in English, Spanish and French, with setup the vendor puts at around five days.
- Leave if your calls arrive in one language and end in one ticket, because you are paying for coverage and an implementation you will not use.
- Stay if mixed-language callers and multi-unit routing are the real problem, which is the strongest published reason to keep it.
- The alternatives split on what the call ends with: a paid order, a guest request, or a ticket on the line at your POS.
- Kovo is $99 for 750 connected minutes or $299 for 5,000 (plans) and writes the ticket to Toast, Square, Clover, Olo or a printer.
Who should stay on Certus AI
Stay if the language mix is real. Orders, deliveries, reservations, upselling and complaints in three languages is a published scope, not an add-on, and it is the one thing here no other vendor leads with. If a quarter of your Friday calls start in Spanish, that is not a feature you schedule for later.
Stay too if the phone has to behave the same way at four sites. Certus sells to multi-unit groups and drive-thru operations, and setup the vendor describes at around five days is a rollout with a project plan. A shop that wants complaints and upselling on the same line as orders is buying breadth, and the products below are narrower on purpose.
Who should leave, and what to settle first
Leave if a caller's language and a caller's order are both predictable. Certus is priced on a quote, so a single shop pays for a scoping call before it sees a number, and buys coverage it never uses if every call is one language and one pizza.
Settle the price before the trial. Ask for the all-in monthly at your call volume, per location, with implementation, in writing. A quote-structured vendor can be the cheapest or the most expensive option here, and you will not know which until that email arrives.
Leave too if five days is longer than you can leave the phone half-covered. Industry estimates put around 60% of missed restaurant calls in the order-or-book bucket, and the cost of those calls is what you pay while an implementation runs.
The first ten minutes of a replacement demo
Dial the demo number from your own phone while the vendor watches, not the other way round.
- Order two items, one with a modifier and one with a substitution, plus a drink.
- Change one line mid-order and listen to whether the read-back repeats the whole order or only the change.
- Ask something only your menu knows, like whether the lunch portion is smaller.
- Hang up and walk to the kitchen. The ticket should be on the printer or the KDS, with modifiers in the right groups.
- Ask what that call cost on the plan you would buy, and where the meter stops.
What fails is almost always step four. A transcript is not a ticket: unless the order reaches the printer, somebody retypes it mid-service, and that retyping is the labor the subscription was meant to remove.
The alternatives at a glance
Published information, October 2026. Certus publishes no price, so every row asks the same question first: what does a month cost at your volume?
| Option | Best for | Published price | Order on the call | POS path | Card handling | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Certus AI | Mixed-language callers, multi-unit | Quote | Yes, plus upselling and complaints | Not publicly listed — confirm | Not publicly listed — confirm | Around 5 days, per the vendor |
| Loman | Closing the whole call | From $199/mo, no per-minute fees | Yes, with modifiers | Toast, Square, Clover, SpotOn, SkyTab, Aloha, Olo | Card taken during the call, per the vendor | Live in under 24 hours, per the vendor |
| Kovo | Takeout lines, one store | $99/mo or $299/mo | Yes, with modifiers and a read-back | Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, Epson, Star | A card the shop already holds, charged on the line; Stripe link for a first-time caller | Self-serve; test call the same day |
| Hostie | One inbox for guest requests | $199 base; $399 with order taking | On the $399 tier | OpenTable, Resy, Toast, Square documented | Not publicly listed — confirm | Not publicly listed — confirm |
| Kea | A custom quote and build | Quote | Yes, per the vendor | Not publicly listed — confirm | Not publicly listed — confirm | Not publicly listed — confirm |
| Slang.ai | Reservation-first rooms | $450–$600/mo per location | Redirects callers to online ordering | OpenTable for reservations | Not publicly listed — confirm | Not publicly listed — confirm |
One of those rows is ours. We have marked the Kovo row and written its caveat the way we wrote everyone else's, because a table where the house product wins every column is an ad.
Six options, one at a time
Loman
Loman is the closest like-for-like replacement if the goal is a closed call: order with modifiers, card charged during the conversation, ticket written into the POS. It publishes from $199 a month with no per-minute fees, and claims 99.6% order accuracy across a 20M+ call corpus, a vendor figure rather than an audit (published pricing, October 2026).
The caveat is volume and language. A flat fee buys capacity a 250-call shop never uses, and Certus's three-language scope is the thing to test Loman against on a live call. The direct read is Kovo vs Loman.
Kovo
Kovo answers, takes the order the way the caller says it, reads it back, and sends the ticket to Toast, Square, Clover, Olo, or an Epson Server Direct Print or Star CloudPRNT printer. Starter is $99 for 750 connected minutes, Unlimited is $299 for 5,000, one store per subscription, and at the cap calls forward to your own phone rather than billing an overage. The same engine answers a website chat.
Three limits, said plainly. A card the shop already holds is charged off-session while the caller is still on the line, and a first-time caller gets a Stripe link with the line held open; no card number touches the call. Kovo books tables in its own book, built from your hours and holiday exceptions, with one seat per slot and a confirmation text, and a shop whose bookings have to land in OpenTable or Resy gets that page read out and texted instead. Delivery runs on the shop's own drivers, which is the answer a caller gets when they ask about delivery to the east side. If a third of your calls are two-language reservations inside a platform book, this is the wrong product, which is why the Certus comparison says so too.
Hostie
Hostie puts calls, texts and email into one inbox, with reservations woven through. Order taking sits on the $399 tier, not the $199 base (published pricing, October 2026), and it documents OpenTable, Resy, Toast and Square. If your calls are guest requests, that inbox is worth more than the phone bill. The caveat is what an order becomes inside Hostie versus inside your POS, which the Hostie alternatives rundown pushes on.
Kea
Kea is restaurant voice AI with order taking, sold on a quote like Certus. The build is focused, onboarding is usually direct, and the price is invisible until someone sends it. That is a flaw in comparing it, not in the product. Ask for the all-in monthly at your volume in writing, and treat any answer without a number as a no. The Kea alternatives guide covers where it fits.
Maple
Maple is reservation-aware, with OpenTable at the center and basic order handling around it. It publishes a 92% resolution rate for standard call types and coverage across 1,000+ locations, both vendor claims rather than audits. The caveat is payment: no native in-call payment is advertised, so an order that needs a card has a second step outside the call.
Slang.ai
Slang.ai is the polished reservation line, published at $450 to $600 per location monthly for Superhost (published pricing, October 2026). It answers questions and takes reservation requests well, then sends callers who want food to online ordering. The caveat is the redirect: an order that turns into a link to a website is an order you will probably never see.
What the switch is worth, in your numbers
The subscription difference is the small number, so do the arithmetic before the demo.
A line that misses 150 calls a month at $35 to $85 a call is $5,250 to $12,750 a month leaving the building, from the inputs in the missed-call arithmetic. Against that, the gap between a $99 plan and a $450 plan is $351 a month, ten or eleven tickets at $32.
Who should not switch at all
A drive-thru with mixed-language callers, or a group running four sites on one brand standard, should keep Certus and spend the energy on the scoping call. Three languages in one product and a planned rollout is what you are buying.
The reverse is more common. A single shop with a takeout line, one language and a POS that prints tickets does not need multilingual upselling, and paying for it means buying the rollout twice: once in setup, then every month.
FAQ
Why do restaurants leave Certus AI?
Usually because the language coverage was the buying reason and the operation no longer needs it, or because nobody can get a number. Certus is sold on a quote and describes setup at around 5 days, so the first decision most shops make is not about features: it is whether a sales call produces a monthly price at their call volume, per location, before the trial starts.
What should I check in the first ten minutes of a replacement demo?
One call, 4 steps: order two items with a modifier and a substitution, change one line mid-order, ask a question only your menu can answer, then look at the kitchen. 10 minutes is enough to see whether the order reached your POS as a ticket or as a message somebody has to retype. Ask what that specific call cost on the plan you would actually buy.
Is any alternative cheaper than Certus AI?
Possibly, and you cannot know from a website. Certus is quote-based, so there is no published number to compare. The published prices in the category are $99 and $299 a month for Kovo, from $199 a month with no per-minute fees for Loman, $199 base with order taking on a $399 tier for Hostie (published pricing, October 2026), and $450 to $600 per location for Slang.ai.
Do any of these vendors answer in Spanish?
Certus documents English, Spanish and French, which is its clearest published difference in this group. For the others, language coverage is a live-call question, not a website question: ask the vendor to run the same order in the language your callers use before you sign anything, and count how many of your last 100 calls actually needed it.
How long does switching phone systems take?
The software is a day and the phone number is the slow part. Kovo is self-serve, so a shop with a supported POS menu is usually taking test calls the same day, with a 14-day trial and no card. Forwarding or porting an existing line is a separate job, and it belongs on a Monday or a Tuesday, not the Thursday before a holiday weekend.
Final Thoughts
Certus AI is the right product when the language mix is real and the rollout has a plan. If it is neither, the shortlist is Loman if the call should end paid, Hostie if it should end in a guest request, Kovo if it should end as a ticket.
Kovo is the narrow version of that last case: $99 a month, self-serve, ticket on your POS, 14 days free with no card. Take a test call with your own menu and run the ten-minute script on it.