A Foodie's Dilemma: Swiggy vs. Zomato

I decided to order dinner today and pulled out my phone, and there it was. The eternal dilemma: Swiggy or Zomato?

Although I'll never be able to decide what to order for dinner and where to order from, Here's a breakdown of the Swiggy and Zomato apps for you and let's see who wins today's dinner game!

The Indian Food Delivery Industry

Source: https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/online-food-delivery/india

The Indian food delivery industry has been divided into two here - Grocery delivery & Meal Delivery. Let's focus on the meal delivery for now. In 2019, the Meal Delivery Industry was valued to be approx. $4Bn, which has now grown to $11Bn in 2023, with the covid-19 pandemic lockdown being a major contributor to this growth. Mind-blowing figures right? wait till you hear this- according to projections with a CAGR of 16.95% (acc. to Statista) it is believed to go up to almost $18Bn!

The Sweet & Sour tales of Swiggy & Zomato

Time for a little flashback! Swiggy was founded in 2014 in Bangalore as an online food delivery app and were succesfully able to onboard several restaurants to join their delivering system. Their massive growth attracted huge investments upto $2Mn from Accel, SAIF Partners and several others. with a few up & downs, Swiggy became the fastest growing unicorn and received several more fundings from Naspers etc. it launched Swiggy Go or Genie (renamed later) and also the Swiggy Instamart in 2020 which successfully enabled its penetration into the grocery delivery services market as well. It now operates in more than 500 cities of India, with a valuation of nearly $8Bn and is partnered with over 200,000 restaurants across these cities.

Zomato was started as "FoodieBay" in 2008 mainly as a restaurant listing & recommendations portal in Gurugram. It was able to expand globally into Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK and many other countries. In 2015, it began expanding into the food delivery market space, initially only for restaurants which could not have their own delivery system however after running in losses, they shifted their focus to the table reservation services. In 2017, it launched Zomato Gold which provided certain benefits to its buyers. In a turn around of events in 2020, it was able to achieve a notable 225% increase in revenue and it 2021, it was valued at around $5Bn with 350,000 active restaurant listings.

Dissecting the interface & features

Diving into the applications itself, it can be noted that both the application offer similar features and UI. however, they're both completely different in their own ways. PS. UI really does decide which app a user might want to use to order that they like. Imagine, on a busy monday afternoon, you're extremely pissed want to order lunch. You open and see an unorganized and messy app - you'd close it immediately right?

Swiggy

The pros:

• organized homepage, doesn't feel cluttered. I personally like how visible each feature is made which makes it easier to choose. They also keep up with the trend and we can see attractive 3D illustrations.

• offers features such as under 30 min delivery for food and a notable 10 min delivery ( tried & tested ;) ) for grocery delivery through instamart which make it more attractive to try.

• The "Surprise Me!" feature gives randomly generated recommendations to (indecisive) users to help them decide what they would like to eat. For someone who has random cravings throughout the day and can't decide what to eat, this feature seems like a creative solution, although it could be made better by offering tailored recommendations based on the users previous order and what the user likes to explore.

• Swiggy One allows users to opt for free delivery and also certain other benefits and also, We're able to go through the offers at the beginning of the food page itself.

• Swiggy Genie is a a smart solution to get your items delivered in short distances where services like Delhivery can't be used. For example, I could get medicines delivered from a local pharmacy in the matter of minutes!

• "Foodie Stories" is a recent addition to the app which engages its users in "user made short vidoes" which are kind of like reels - but only about food ordering. This again is a smart way of engaging users as it nudges them to open specific restaurants or types or food, reducing the time spent in just scrolling mindlessly trying to decide what to eat.

• Free cancellation within 60secs of ordering, which means i get all my money back if i cancel the order within 60 secs of placing it. So if thanks to my mood swings, I can cancel the guilt with it XD.

• Swiggy also recently acquired dineout, introducing the "Swiggy Dinout", which you can get around 10% off while paying the bill post reservation through the app, This is disappointingly low compared to Zomato's 20%. However, some restaurants did have a paid pre booking (with a minimal charge of Rs.10 per guest) with upto 20%

The Cons:

• I'm bombarded with offer banners as soon as I open any section. Most of the time, these offers are only for specific user base- having a particular card or mode of payment which most people might not have. This generally makes me skip past these banners and sometimes, I might end up missing out of offers that are applicable to me because of this. Also, apart from the homepage, the food and instamart pages seem to be quite cluttered.

• Too many features to nudge users and recommend to opt a specific item may disrupt their existing habits.

• The food options lack information - mostly the descriptions about the food, ingredients and calories are seen for only premium restaurants,

Zomato

The Pros:

• Simple homepage, as soon as I open the app, I land on the food delivery page. Doesn't show too many banners or cards and is well organised. Has a seperate offers section when you tap on the offers card. They've also got attractive offers like free dishes.

• Cards are quite big for restaurant listing, which is both a good and bad thing. the good thing is that it has higher visibility and can provide information about the restaurant. Lets talk about the bad thing in cons!

• Most restaurants, have a proper description and also image of the item. this makes it easier to choose, sometimes you just need to see what the food looks like to decide what you're craving!

• Zomato has the largest list of restaurant listings and also, the cards on the Dining page allow me to choose from many different categories depending on what place I'm looking for.

• Zomato Gold provides users with attractive offers like up to 25% off on restaurant bill by reservation through Zomato, which too can be be combined with bank offers which could go up to 40%.

• Zomato also has something called "Vibes" which are interactive reel-type videos which provide an intro & insight into the restaurant - its ambience, food and other things that it offers. I find it quite helpful since, shows me all the aesthetic places in the restaurant I can take pictures in XD.

• Apart from all this, They also show us "customer reviews" which are reviews posted by the people who've visited the place themselves. These reviews seem genuine are often helpful to decide whether I want to visit the place or not, unlike apps where people post fake reviews to get the restaurant ratings up. It also has a "highlights" section which shows the key takeaways from these reviews.

The cons:

• The disadvantages about large cards for restaurant listing is that I can see fewer options in a particular screen which equals more scrolling. I might end up endlessly scrolling to look for more restaurants and end up not choosing anything at all because it is overwhelming.

• The navigation bar at the bottom when you open a restaurant disappears and is replaced by a menu navigation bar. however, it overlaps with the "menu" option which shows a vertical list of the categories, which simply looks like a design error.

• 100% cancellation fee application, which means I wouldn't be getting any money back which honestly is a pretty big setback because of the options that swiggy provides.

Coming to the app ratings, on android, Swiggy has a 4.4 star from 7.82Mn reviews rating while Zomato has a 4.5 star rating from 8.99Mn reviews - quite close.

Loyalty Lingo

Let's look at the main attractive points of Swiggy One and Zomato Gold, even though I'll not be able to afford either of them, since my income = 0. :p

Both of them offer the same features at a competitive price of Rs.149 for 3 months however Zomato has a higher free delivery minimum order bar of Rs.199 where its just Rs.149 for Swiggy. Even though this difference doesn't look like much, if I ever decide to order 4 Naans worth Rs.40, I won't be able to get free delivery on zomato, even though i have gold, which means I'll have to pay an extra of around Rs.40-50, which is kind of spoilsport.

Conclusion:

Overall, each of these apps has its own pros and cons. Swiggy focuses more on logistics whereas zomato focuses more on the the restaurants, so if I was in the mood to explore and try something new, I would go for Zomato, however i want to order a usual and get it delivered super quick, i would go for Swiggy. Let me know you think in the poll! That's all for now folks, I'll see you in my next post!

~ Riddi Senapati

(Funding Momo stalls since 2003 :p )

Which app is your go-to when you're hungry?

• Swiggy
• Zomato