ONDC vs Zomato and Swiggy: Cheaper Delivery, but Is It Worth It Yet?

ONDC — the Open Network for Digital Commerce — is a government-backed open protocol that lets buyer apps and seller apps transact without everyone being locked inside one company's walled garden. For food delivery, the promise is structural: instead of a single aggregator owning discovery, ordering and logistics and charging a full-stack 18–30% commission, an open network unbundles those roles, which can pull the total cost to the restaurant down.

The headline appeal is cost. ONDC-based orders typically carry lower commission than the incumbents, which on thin delivery margins can be the difference between a profitable order and a loss. There is a control benefit too: an open network gives restaurants more ownership of the customer relationship and data than a closed platform that treats your customer as its own. For a business fighting the per-order economics of delivery, both matter.

Lower cost is only half the equation — the other half is demand. Today, Zomato and Swiggy still bring the largest, most habituated audience and the smoothest end-to-end experience, built over years. ONDC's food ecosystem is younger, its consumer awareness lower, and the experience across participating apps less uniform. Cheaper delivery is worth little if too few customers order through it. This gap is narrowing, but it is real, and pretending otherwise leads to disappointment.

For almost every restaurant, this is not either/or — it is channel mix. Keep the aggregators for the reach they undeniably provide, and add ONDC as a lower-cost channel to capture the orders you can, improving your blended delivery economics without losing the audience. Steer repeat customers toward the cheaper channel over time, exactly as you would nudge them toward direct ordering. Model the commission difference against realistic ONDC volume before assuming the savings are large — the per-order saving is real, but only on the orders that actually come through.