We build Depla, so treat this as a vendor's comparison — but a fair one. Maple is a real, well-funded competitor in restaurant phone AI, and for some restaurants it is the better pick. Below is what actually separates the two, sourced from Maple's published pricing page and our own, both checked on July 20, 2026. Prices and features move; verify both before you sign anything.
The short version
- Pick Maple if you need the widest POS coverage today, want to take payment over the phone, or need reservations handled alongside ordering.
- Pick Depla if you want ordering included rather than tiered up, a demo you can try yourself before talking to anyone, or native Hindi / Hinglish on the line.
Pricing: how the tiers are cut
Both companies publish prices, which already puts them ahead of most of this category. The difference is where ordering sits.
Maple lists three tiers: Maple Voice($85/mo as displayed) covering 24/7 answering, hours & FAQ answers, call transfer, analytics, and multilingual voice — explicitly “not ordering or reservations”; Maple Pro ($220/mo as displayed) adding phone orders into your POS, reservations, upselling, payment over the phone, and confirmation texts; and a custom Enterprisetier for multi-unit groups. One thing to check when you look: the page has a monthly/annual toggle advertising a 43% annual saving, so confirm which number you're reading before you budget.
Depla's ladder is flatter: Host at $80/mo (answering, hours, menu questions, SMS link to order online, 200 minutes), Server at $150/mo (adds live in-call ordering, order confirmation texts, returning-caller recognition, 450 minutes, 2 calls at once), Manager at $250/mo (5 concurrent calls, custom voice, 650 minutes), and a quoted Custom tier from $350/mo. Neither company meters you per-minute or per-order — a genuine point of agreement, and one worth insisting on with any vendor. We wrote up the whole pricing-model question in how much AI phone answering costs.
The practical read: if all you want is a phone that gets answered, Maple Voice and Depla Host land within a few dollars of each other. If you want the AI to actually take the order, compare Maple Pro against Depla Server — that's the comparison most operators are really making.
Where Maple is genuinely stronger
- POS breadth. Maple lists Toast, Square, Clover and SkyTab, and has announced partnerships with POS platforms including Quantic (announced April 2026), Shift4/SkyTab and TRAY. Depla's Clover integrationis still in progress; today orders land in your Depla dashboard with a full transcript, not in your POS. If double-entry at the terminal is your dealbreaker, that's a real gap on our side.
- Payments and reservations. Maple Pro advertises taking payment over the phone and booking, modifying and cancelling reservations, including on OpenTable. Depla does not process card payments in-call.
- Scale and support motion.White-glove onboarding, a dedicated success manager at the Enterprise tier, and a larger deployed footprint. We're smaller and founder-led — an advantage for responsiveness, not for headcount.
Where Depla is different
- Ordering isn't a separate tier of product.Live in-call order taking arrives at our mid plan, and every plan above it keeps it. You're choosing capacity, not re-buying the core feature.
- A demo you drive yourself.Maple's calls-to-action are “Get Free Demo” and “Talk to sales” — a scheduled, human-led demo. Depla's demo is self-serve: paste your website, and within a minute you're having a real conversation with the agent on your menu, in the browser, with nobody watching you try to break it. We think you should break it.
- Hindi and Hinglish, natively.Maple advertises “multilingual voice” on every tier and we won't guess at their language list. What we can say is what we've built for: South-Asian restaurants whose regulars start a call in English and finish it in Hindi mid-sentence. That code-switching case is the one we tuned against, and it's included on every plan rather than sold as an add-on.
- Concurrency stated in plain numbers. How many callers the agent can handle at once during your Friday rush is on our pricing page as a number, not a support conversation.
What to actually test before you choose
Vendor comparison tables — including ours — are a poor substitute for ten minutes of hostile testing. On a trial or demo of either product, try these:
- Order your most-modified item with two substitutions and a size change.
- Change your mind halfway through, then ask for the total.
- Ask an allergen question the agent shouldn't bluff about.
- Call while you're closed and see what the agent says about tomorrow's hours.
- Talk over it. Real callers do.
- Read the transcript afterwards — that's the artifact you'll live with daily.
If a vendor won't let you run those tests before a contract, that itself is the finding.
The honest recommendation
If POS-native order injection, in-call payments, or reservation management are must-haves this quarter, Maple covers ground we don't yet, and we'd rather you buy the right tool than the wrong one from us. If you're an independent or small group who wants the phone answered and orders taken at a flat, visible price — and especially if your callers switch between English and Hindi — that's the restaurant Depla was built for.
Either way, don't decide from a table. See how we stack up against Loman and Slang.ai, look at what in-call order taking actually does, check the plans — then try the live demo on your own menu and judge it yourself.