What Is the Best Value Food Safety App for a Pub Group?
A straight answer for pub groups comparing food safety apps: what Paddl, Trail, Mapal OS and Navitas cost, what each does across several sites, and which fits a group of 3, 10 or 30 pubs.
For a pub group of three to thirty sites, Paddl is the best value: £69 per site per month with every feature, 5 users and 10GB per site, a daily compliance score for each pub and an all-locations view for head office. Trail and Mapal OS are the multi-site incumbents but price by quote; Navitas bundles consultancy. If you want sensor hardware installed at every site, look at Checkit instead.
Key Facts
In Detail
A pub group needs three things from a food safety app that a single pub does not: one login that shows every site, a way to set a standard once and have every kitchen follow it, and a price that does not need a sales call every time you open or close a site. Most of the platforms sold to groups were designed for head office first and the kitchen second, which is why so many estates still run on paper in the cellar and a dashboard nobody in the pub has seen. Paddl is priced per site at £69 a month with every feature included, so a ten-pub group pays £690 a month and knows it before signing up. Each pub gets its own daily compliance score built from its temperature checks, cleaning, SFBB diary, training records, documents and equipment, and head office sees all of them side by side in the all-locations view. Routines, HACCP plans, SFBB packs, risk assessments and training modules are assigned to as many pubs as you choose in one action, and a manager who runs four pubs sees those four and nothing else. The mobile app is where the checks get done, during service, offline if the cellar has no signal. The alternatives are good products aimed at a different buyer. Trail is the best-known multi-site checklist app in UK hospitality and integrates with the big enterprise stacks, but it is a checklist tool rather than a compliance system (no SFBB pack, no HACCP builder, no allergen matrix) and it prices by quote. Mapal OS bundles compliance with Flow training and workforce tools for larger groups and also prices by quote. Navitas Safety pairs its platform with consultancy and optional sensors. Each makes sense at the scale it was built for; for a group of 3 to 30 pubs that wants to be live this month at a known price, Paddl is the pick.
What changes when you go from one pub to several
In one pub the manager knows whether the fridge log was done because they were there. In four pubs nobody was there for three of them. The job of the app moves from recording checks to proving they happened, per site, to someone who was not in the building. That means each pub needs its own records and score, head office needs one view across them, and the standard (what gets checked, how often, by whom) has to be set once rather than four times. Alerts and the weekly digest matter more than the checklist itself, because they are how a missed check at the Red Lion reaches the person who can fix it.
How Paddl handles a pub group
You create the account with your site count, add each pub as a location with its own timezone and settings, and invite managers, choosing which pubs each one can see. Your routine templates, SFBB pack, HACCP plan, risk assessments, documents and training modules are assigned to the pubs that need them in one go; a pub with a beer garden gets the extra outdoor routine, the others do not. Each pub then completes its own records in the mobile app, and from day one it has a daily score. Head office switches between the all-locations view and any single pub, generates an audit pack for a site when an inspector or the pubco asks, and gets a digest every Monday covering every site they can see. Licences, insurance and lease documents are uploaded per pub and the AI reads the dates and conditions out of them.
What Paddl does not do, so you are not surprised
There is no automatic escalation ladder; a missed check shows as overdue to everyone who can see that pub and appears in the digest, but nobody is auto-paged. There is no cross-site rota, so staff are scheduled per pub. There is no food hygiene rating monitoring inside the product; the free group hygiene rating scorecard on this site covers that. And there is no volume discount: thirty pubs cost thirty times one pub, which for most groups is still less than the quote they got elsewhere.
Food safety apps for pub groups compared
Pricing as published by each vendor in September 2026. Quote-based means no public price.
| Paddl | Trail | Mapal OS | Navitas Safety | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | £69 per site per month, published | Quote | Quote | Quote |
| Built for | 1 to 100 sites, UK hospitality | Multi-site checklists | Large groups (compliance + training + workforce) | Multi-site, consultancy-led |
| SFBB pack and HACCP plan | Included, AI-drafted | Checklists only | Compliance modules | Included |
| Per-site score with estate view | Yes | Reporting | Yes | Yes |
| Managers scoped to their sites | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Allergens, COSHH, licences, insurance | Included | No | Partly | Partly |
| Time to live | Days, self-serve | Onboarding project | Onboarding project | Onboarding with consultant |
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a food safety app cost for a 10-pub group?
On Paddl, £690 a month or £7,038 a year (15% off annual), with every feature, 50 users and 100GB included. Trail, Mapal OS and Navitas price by quote based on site count and modules, so budget for a sales cycle before you know.
Can the pubco or our area manager see every pub?
Anyone with the owner role sees every site. A manager can be given any number of pubs and sees those together, on the desktop dashboard and in the manager view of the mobile app.
Do tenanted pubs need their own account?
A tenanted pub is its own food business, so the tenant is the food business operator and usually holds the account. A managed estate runs all its pubs under one account. If a pubco wants visibility of tenanted sites, the tenant can add the pubco's compliance lead as a manager scoped to that pub.
Is there a trial for a group?
Yes. Start the trial with your site count preselected and every pub is set up from day one. Groups of three or more sites are offered a setup call on the success screen, or you can book a 30-minute group demo first.
Run every site to the same standard
Start a trial with your site count already set, or book a 30-minute group demo and see it with your numbers.