Fishbowl

What Fishbowl is

Fishbowl is a web-based Guest Relationship Management platform built for restaurants. It combines customer data and CRM capabilities, bringing guest transactions, engagement, and behavior into profiles that restaurants can use to understand and reach their audiences. Smart segmentation groups guests by purchase patterns, dining frequency, and loyalty tier. Marketing automation supports targeted email, SMS, and online ordering campaigns, while rewards and promotions can be tailored to guest behavior and location. The Connections Marketplace brings data into the platform from point-of-sale, reservation, delivery, and online ordering systems. Fishbowl says its machine learning can recommend audience segments, help streamline workflows, suggest subject lines, and support data analysis. Plans are billed per location: Essential is $125 a month, Complete is $250 a month, and Premium is $400 a month. Complete adds signup pages and email, SMS, and push campaigns; Premium adds Guest WiFi, online ordering, offers, and loyalty. Fishbowl began as a restaurant email marketing service in 2000 and introduced its restaurant-only GRM in 2023.

Who it suits

Fishbowl suits restaurants that want to combine guest data with CRM and use that information for segmentation and marketing. Restaurants seeking email, SMS, push, loyalty, offers, or online ordering can compare the plan tiers to find the included capabilities they need.

Limits

Essential is $125 a month per location and includes the GRM, data connections, guest profiles, segmentation, and reporting. Online ordering is only included with Premium at $400 a month per location; transaction and card processing fees apply. SMS packages have fixed monthly message volumes, and each message above the limit costs $0.025.

Getting started

1. Visit https://www.fishbowl.com/.
2. Use the web platform.
3. Choose a plan billed per location: Essential, Complete, or Premium.
4. Contact Fishbowl for Enterprise pricing if operating 10 or more restaurants.

Verdict

Restaurants that want guest profiles, audience segmentation, and marketing automation in one platform should consider Fishbowl. Look elsewhere if a free plan is essential, or if online ordering is needed without the Premium subscription and its per-location fee.