The Common Ninja alternative for restaurants, bars and pubs
Common Ninja is a widget marketplace for every kind of website. Foldout builds widgets for one kind: opening hours that understand a split kitchen service, menus built from the file you already have, and no monthly page view cap on any plan.
Free plan · No card required · No view caps
A widget that stops working when you get busy is not a widget
Common Ninja publishes monthly pageviews as one of the dimensions its plans are built around, and its free opening hours widget carries the plainest possible warning about what that means in practice: after a certain number of views, the widget may no longer be visible or functional on your website.
For a marketing site that is an inconvenience. For a venue it is the exact wrong failure mode. The night your traffic spikes is a bank holiday, a fixture, a festival or a review in the local paper, which is precisely the night a stranger needs to know whether your kitchen is still serving.
Foldout meters venues, widgets and features. It has never metered views and the rule is written into the billing code rather than the marketing copy. Your busiest night costs you nothing extra and breaks nothing.
Narrow and deep, against broad and general
| Feature | Foldout | Common Ninja |
|---|---|---|
| Built for hospitality only(Common Ninja is a general widget marketplace) | ||
| Metered on page views(Monthly pageviews is a published plan dimension) | ||
| Widget keeps working at high traffic | See their limits | |
| Menu built from an existing PDF or photo(Their menu widget is filled in dish by dish) | ||
| Opening hours with split kitchen and bar services | Not stated | |
| UK bank holidays handled automatically | Not stated | |
| Private dining enquiries | Generic forms | |
| Dynamic QR codes for tables | Not stated | |
| EU data hosting | Not stated | |
| Widget breadth across every industry(Their range is far wider than ours) |
Checked 28 July 2026 against Common Ninja's own widget pages and help centre. Where a row says “Not stated”, they publish no commitment either way and we are not asserting one for them. We do not quote their prices here. Their pricing page blocks automated retrieval, and repeating a competitor's price from memory is how comparison pages end up being wrong about people. Check their pricing and ours yourself before deciding.
Four widgets that work, not a hundred that nearly do
EU data hosting
Core application and enquiry data is stored in Supabase's Ireland region, with subprocessors disclosed in our DPA.
GDPR-first by design
Built for UK hospitality from day one. Consent, retention and data rights handled properly.
Encrypted end to end
Encrypted in transit and at rest. The widget adds no tracking pixels to your site, and we never sell your data.
Works with any builder
WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, Elementor, Shopify, GoDaddy or custom HTML.
Switching from Common Ninja
Why would a restaurant choose Foldout over Common Ninja?
Because a venue needs four or five widgets done properly, not a marketplace of a hundred done generically. Foldout's hours widget understands split kitchen and bar service and UK bank holidays. Its menu widget takes the PDF you already send to the printer. Common Ninja is a broad, capable, general-purpose widget platform, and breadth is exactly the wrong shape for a pub that wants its Sunday roast times to be correct.
What is the difference in how the menu works?
Common Ninja's restaurant menu widget is built inside their editor: you organise dishes into sections and add a description and price to each one, which means your website menu and your printed menu are two separate pieces of work that drift apart. Foldout takes the menu file you already have, a PDF, a photo or a Word document, and turns it into a structured web menu. Change the file, change the website. Checked 28 July 2026.
Does Foldout cap page views?
No, and it never will. Plans meter venues, widgets and features. A menu or an enquiry form never stops working because a venue got busy, which is the whole point: the night your widget hits its view cap is by definition the night it mattered most. Common Ninja publishes monthly pageviews as a plan dimension, and their free opening hours widget states that after a certain number of views the widget may no longer be visible or functional. Checked 28 July 2026.
What do I give up by switching?
Range. Common Ninja covers social feeds, galleries, calculators, chat, countdowns and a great deal more across every industry going. If you need those, they are the better toolbox and we would say so. If you run a restaurant, bar or pub, the widgets you actually keep are the ones Foldout builds.
How hard is the switch?
Not very. Remove the Common Ninja embed, paste Foldout's single script tag into your header, and set up your hours, menu and enquiry form in the dashboard. For one venue that is an afternoon, and the free plan means you can rebuild it alongside the old one before you swap anything over.
The widgets a venue actually keeps
The other comparison, and the guides
Build it free, then swap the tag
Set up your hours, menu and enquiry form alongside what you already have, check it, then change one line on your site. No view caps waiting for you at the busy end.
Sign up free