The Best Wedding Planning Software

Friday, May 24th

2024 Wedding Planning Software Reviews

Wedding Planning Assistant

• Free
• Award-winning site
• Global database of vendors
• For both DIYers and Professional Planners
• No sign up required (for you or the guests)
• Modern design

Wedding Planning Assistant is an online website tool that offers free wedding coordination. The interface is easy to use, multi-device friendly, and offers a wide array of tools to help plan your wedding.

Wedding planning tools

Some of the many planning tools provided by Wedding Planning Assistang include

• Checklists which help you visualize all your tasks and check them off.
• Budget breakdowns with their Wedding Budget Calculator tool which calculates suggested costs, and manages your spending all in one place
• Reception and Ceremony layouts with their easy-to-use drag and drop Layout tool
• Design choices with options to create invitations, seating cards, and reception menus
• A vendor database that offers global vendor options that you can discover right from their website with options to limit to city, country, and vendor type (ranging from florists to finding someone to officiate the ceremony)
• RSVP and guest list tracking with real-time updates on who's coming and who's bringing their plus-1.

Online, interactive, and cloud-protected

Wedding Planning Assistant uses safe cloud storage systems to help you and your family keep track of the wedding process. The developers chose security and synchronization, allowing you to make a change to your plan anywhere from any device. With a modern, easy-to-use interface, Wedding Planning Assistant stands out as an online toolkit.

Privacy is perfect

One of the most interesting features of Wedding Planning Assistant is its privacy options. When you start a wedding project with WPA, you don't have to sign up or create a user. You just start a new project and get to work. The same applies to your guests and family: they don't have to sign up to view or collaborate on your wedding project. No stress, and privacy-focused.

Collaboration is key

With a team-focused model, Wedding Planning Assistant uses the online platform to connect you and your loved ones in real-time wedding prep. Your collaborators can use your wedding site with the same free tools that you have access to, allowing for more assistance even for out-of-state or otherwise distant loved ones.

Best in class

For a free app Wedding Planning Assistant seems too good to be true, but users are as excited about this tool package as we are. Wedding Planning Assistant was awarded the Quality Choice Award and Happiest Users Award. According to Crozdesk it ranks 90/100 in user satisfaction. With the ability to use it for yourself or as a professional planner, Wedding Planning Assistant is the best free toolkit we've seen and against paid options, it still stands out as our favorite in the industry.

WedSites

• Free and Paid options ($99 and $199)
• Site builder
• Mobile-friendly
• User-friendly
• Modern design and customizable content
• All-in-one toolkit

WedSites is a DIY wedding website builder, allowing you to keep all of your wedding information in one place. They offer to help make wedding planning a "streamlined experience," through three payment tiers that range from free content to a $200 one-time payment. With each tier you gain access to a collection of organization tools.

Toolkit tiers

WedSites is set up to offer free and paid content for organizing your wedding. There are three separate tiers, each building on the options of the previous tier.

• The Free option, called "Lite," offers a wedding site with free hosting, custom templates, design updates, analytics, the ability to add links to gift registries & charities, email and chat support. However, it's important to note that this free option only lasts for 12 months, so you will need to plan around that timeline. Additional hosting costs $5/month.
• The Second tier costs $99 and is called "Standard," which includes all of the features of Lite, but also offers expanded toolkit options like a guest list database, online RSVP forms and collection, invitations and "save the dates," 2 user accounts and improved customer support. Like the free version, this has a time limit (24 months in this package) included with the payment. Additional hosting again costs $5/month.
• The Third tier costs $199 and is titled "Pro" . This level is mostly for professional wedding planners. It offers all the same options as Lite and Standard, but also includes increased personalization, seating charts, budgeting and vendor reminders and 5 user accounts. If you're not sure which plan you want or need, WedSites provides a 14-day money back guarantee for any of the paid plans to allow you time to test the toolkits.

Wedding website builder

The website builder here is a drag-and-drop style, designed to be user-friendly. It allows you to upload images, videos, or design elements (like calligraphy) to personalize it for your wedding style. The website builder comes with the available features in your chosen package, and integrates easily with the final design.

Gets lots of compliments from users

On top of a clean user interface with a modern design, WedSites also has high marks in customer reviews. On one review site, WedSites only had 5-star reviews with praise for customer service and value for the cost, especially considering how much professional wedding planning can run. With extras like livestreaming, mobile-friendly designs, and digital invitations, WedSites utilizes the helpfulness of the online space to include everyone in your wedding.

Beautiful option for a cohesive wedding

With multiple payment tiers (and one of those being free for a year) WedSites is a standout option for coordinating your wedding. The toolkits are well designed and intuitive to use, allowing you to easily build a wedding website that feels like you. This service comes in second place strictly because of the cost tiers. If you want all of the features you do need to pay for them, but with a 14-day free trial, WedSites is a great place to explore what your needs might be before you commit.

Aisle Planner

• Payment tiers from $40/month - $211/month
• One week free trial
• One-stop shop for professional wedding planners
• Business-oriented, not for DIYers
• Clean interface, lots of options
• Networking opportunities

As wedding planning software made by professional planners, Aisle Planner is a one-stop-shop for all your professional wedding planning needs. Aisle Planner focuses on marketing, sales, project management, and payment processing for professional wedding planners.

One easy to access location

The Aisle Planner features are all bundled into one site. Instead of tracking tasks in something like ClickUp or invoicing through Gusto, which can have you and your clients running in circles, Aisle Planner aims to centralize your entire business model into one easy-to-access location.

The bundle

Aisle Planner offers support to wedding professionals through four key areas as well as a bonus set of tools to help their customers learn how to use the features of Aisle Planner's centralized setup to their best advantage. What you can expect to see with Aisle Planner are the following resources:

• Marketing tools: Aisle Planner helps you make a listing page hosted by their site with an aesthetic-focused landing page, options to grow and geo-target your audience, showcase your portfolio and client reviews.
• Sales: Partnering with CRM tools, Aisle Planner offers lead management, project proposals, workflow organization, and maintaining documents all in one place.
• Project management: One of the few tools that would help you out if you're planning your own wedding, the project management tools allow you to track tasks, expenses, and vendors, build timelines, and even catalog meeting notes.
• Payment processing: Powered using Fullsteam, Aisle Planner's payment system, Wedpay is integrated into their site. However, there is a credit card fee (2.75% + $.20) and a processing fee taken by Aisle Planner (1%).
• Education: the education center is a collection of tutorials on how to use the Aisle Planner features as well as helpful blogs.

Putting together all these features in one place, users describe the all-in-one place model as essential and say that it's never been easier to pin down and categorize all the details that go into planning a wedding. Reviewers also love the business-to-business bonus of in-house communication, noting the benefits of collaborating at a distance with members of their family or the wedding party.

Is it worth putting a ring on it?

Aisle Planner's payment tiers are a little complicated, but they're designed to allow you to utilize all the features of Aisle Planner's centralized process no matter how much business you're doing. Each tier is based on how many active wedding projects you have through Aisle Planner. They're split into the following cost brackets:

• 1-10 projects = $40/month
• 11-25 projects = $70/month
• 26-45 projects = $100/month
• 46-65 projects = $130/month
• 66-100 projects = $170/month

Membership upgrades

There are also two available upgraded memberships: Enhanced Listing and Premium Listing that are available for an additional $20/month and $40/month respectively. These offer upgrades like:

• Additional Vendor Categories
• Additional Markets
• Additional Service Offerings
• Additional Portfolio Galleries
• Additional Portfolio Galleries w/ Video
• Custom Contact Forms
• Competitor Free Listing
• Premium Placement
• Search Optimization

Remember these features are in addition to the monthly fee you're already paying.

Free trial

However, Aisle Planner doesn't expect you to say "I do" without getting to know them first. They offer a free trial (length undisclosed) to get familiar with their systems, software, and options to see if growing your wedding business really is easier when it's all in one place, or if Aisle Planner's MO just isn't for you.

Wedding community

One of the best business features of Aisle Planner is their community events schedule. These are opportunities for you to get to know vendors, take wedding-themed master classes, or attend marketing retreats to get to know more about the wedding business and build your client list.

Great for the wedding business owner

Overall, Aisle Planner is working hard to fill a gap in the market. It's designed for professional wedding planners and focuses on business growth, connecting all of your business tools in one place. However, if you're not a professional (or you have no plans to be) this might not be the tool for you. Its only feature for a DIY wedding planner is the Management Tools, but since you can't get those without everything else, we ranked Aisle Planner lower than services offering a DIY approach as part of the main design.

Joy

• Free
• Guest-focused features
• For you and your wedding, no planner needed
• Customizable
• Connects to any registry

Joy is a free app designed to help you centralize (and digitize) all your wedding planning needs. With a mobile app, integrated invitations, RSVPs, and guest list, Joy brings all the moving human parts of wedding planning right to your fingertips.

Your own wedding website

The way that Joy helps you pull your wedding together is by building your own wedding site hosted by Joy. The site can be built with templates but remains completely customizable to create an online space that reflects your wedding and your style. Joy offers most of the key parts of wedding planning right on your site:

• Registry
• Guest list
• Dates and calendars
• Invitations
• "Smart RSVP"

These all integrate during the customization, and help you manage different areas of your wedding all together. Along with the mobile app, which helps you manage wedding worries on the go, Joy seems almost too good to be true for a free app.

Integrating guests

One of the strengths of Joy is that it's guest-focused. Not only does Joy offer a guest list, but it makes it easy to search for wedding pages with the "Find a Couple" feature. It allows you to send invitations directly from your site and manage RSVPs, so you can track who's coming, who's not, and who has a plus-one.

How do they make their money?

For a free website that looks this good, they have to pay their staff somehow, right? While they're not charging you for membership or design, they do take a cut of your registry. They make an undisclosed percentage on the products sold.

For the customer, but no support

While everything on this aesthetically-pleasing, streamlined site seems perfect, there are some concerns from reviewers who note that the customer service and user interface are "difficult to deal with." Though it may not be surprising that a free website doesn't have top-tier support, many couples gave up on Joy and managed their wedding elsewhere. Users also noted slow loading times and complained that the photo/memory interface was clunky and hard to use. So, while Joy has rich feature options, not all of them are working at top performance.

Does it spark Joy?

For a free tool, Joy is better than we expected. Despite complaints on loading times, bad customer service, and difficulty with the user interface, Joy is about as good as it gets for a free wedding planning resource. But for the best wedding tools with more features, you might want to look at our higher-rated services.

Planning Pod

• Priced from $50/month to $119/month
• Built for professionals
• Not just wedding-focused
• All-in-one toolkit

Planning Pod is a tool package for the professional wedding planner. They offer a hyper-modernized app-based workspace for a wedding business.

Product sets based on need

Planning Pod has different rates for Event Management and Planning, Venues and Facilities, and Floorplan Design. Each product offers a set of tools that come with the monthly fee to support your particular needs. The Event Management and Planning tool set is recommended for planning a wedding.

The right tools for the job

Sifting through available products may leave you feeling like there's too much going on with Planning Pod, but they do explore what tools you can expect in each. The wedding planning package (Event Management and Planning) offers tools that help with task tracking, budgeting, booking, file management, as well as access to some of the Floorplan Design tools including seating charts, venue layouts, and vision boards. The package also offers tools for RSVP tracking, and a webpage builder for your event. Planning Pod also offers a host of business-focused tools for professional wedding planners.

For the right price

Planning Pod offers Event Managing and Planning tools on a tiered payment system based on how many projects you have going at one time. The payments range from $50 a month (with 10 ongoing events) up to $119 a month (for up to 50 events). The fourth tier of pricing is only provided during a consultation and is meant for businesses intending to manage over 75 events at the same time. It is important to note that the file sharing tool does not come free with the $50 a month tier. So, for complete access to Planning Pod's tools, you'll have to start at tier 2, which is $70 a month.

Building a business

With its hyper-modern design and bubble-like toolkit, Planning Pod has a very corporate feel to it. It's not designed to be a wedding-only site, but rather a site which offers tools for facilitating all kinds of events. The users who enjoy Planning Pod the most are business owners who appreciate the billing and organization tools for managing costs and dates. However, users with more specific needs tend to find that there are extra apps they don't use that "get in the way." And, most pertinent to our review, those who use it for wedding planning feel that this service is outdated.

Decent, but not enough for weddings

Planning Pod offers a lot of tools for a decent price. However, it is a product built for a variety of businesses, not just weddings. If you just want tools to get the job done, Planning Pod might work for you. But, if you want something wedding-specific, there are better options out there.

The Knot

• Free
• Wedding Website
• DIY friendly
• Great for design ideas
• Mobile-friendly
• Reservation services are outsourced

The Knot is a free wedding planning site that helps you pull off everything you want from your special day. From wedding quizzes to help you start planning your theme or style to helping you pick your dress or ring, The Knot has collected everything for you. The stuff they don't do (like hotel bookings) are offered through linked partnerships they have with services like HotelPlanner.

Wedding updates on the web

A designer's dream: the wedding website hosted by The Knot offers a fun chance to put together a space to help you and your guests track the wedding. As one of the highlights of The Knot, this creative website starts with template designs and lets you match up everything: not just invitations but also the design of your wedding as a whole. The aesthetics are really where The Knot shines. If you're looking for a free place to explore what your wedding might look like, The Knot is a great first stop to get ideas.

Happy couples?

Unfortunately, outside of the reviews on The Knot's website, most site users seem pretty unhappy. Both couples and wedding professionals complain about the professionalism of The Knot (or the lack thereof) and high costs (higher than going direct to the company) for venues and hotels. The Knot tends to average just 2-3 stars out of 5 no matter where you look, with couples calling their professional wedding planner site (Wedding Wire) a "scam" and saying that wedding vendors offered by The Knot are providing false reviews to seem more legitimate.

Too good to be true

While free sounds great, sometimes you get what you (don't) pay for. The Knot looks well-designed and has lots of fun features to help with the little details of design This wedding planning resource may be great for idea generation, but when it comes to spending money on venues and hotels, clients come away dissatisfied with reservations, prices, and customer service here.

Wedding Planner Professional

• $24 on Mac App store
• $25 on Windows
• Download-only app
• Apple- and Windows-friendly

Wedding Planner Professional is an app designed to help track every aspect of your wedding. It offers task tracking, guest list organization, vendor tracking, budgeting, seating arrangements, ideas, notes, and a full wedding itinerary. However, the app is extremely outdated, and according to reviewers, it doesn't even work.

Windows vs Mac

The Windows version is designed to resemble the Microsoft Outlook user interface, so it will be familiar to some, but it feels clunky and outdated in practice. The Mac interface is reminiscent of interfaces used back in the iPhone 4 days, and feels outdated to use too. However, reviewers on Apple liked the interface with other Apple features like their contacts to make it easier to send out invitations. Further, since it is an app, you may have difficulty switching over to using a PC instead of a phone or iPad. If you like a large screen and switching devices regularly, this might not be the best option.

Piece of cake... or not

According to the reviews on both Microsoft and Apple app stores, this wedding planner app is not a winner for your big day. Rated one star by Microsoft users and 3 stars by Apple users, it is described as "buggy" because the features didn't load, didn't work, or didn't update. Since this app only works as an app download, there's no way to test it before buying.

What works?

The Apple reviewers that liked the app commended it for being user-friendly and self-explanatory. Other users liked the task list feature, and the developer's (Sockii) customer support.

Not worth the money

With so many mixed reviews for Wedding Planner Professional, we fall back on value for price. With some free software out there to help plan your wedding, it might be worth it to check some of those out first before buying this app. The concerns about buggy app design and difficulty with interfacing the budgets would make this app not only difficult to use but unhelpful in planning your wedding (or someone else's).

Zola

• Free
• In-house registry gifts (buy through Zola)
• Fun quizzes

Another free site in our list, Zola looks good at first glance. Although some of the user interface is fun, there are also some serious concerns from users about how their money is handled with purchases and gifts to the wedding couple.

Personalization quiz

One of the things Zola does really well is the gamified approach to personalization. In order to register, Zola has you complete a quiz to help narrow down your needs. It asks questions about your engagement, wedding dates (and if you don't have one, they don't mind), the year and seasons you'd like to get married in, whether you've booked a venue, and you and your intended's names, all before registration.

Wedding fund and gifts

Zola offers the ability to buy gifts through them for your gift registry, allowing wedding and shower guests to have one place to look and shop. Once something is purchased, it disappears from the list. Along the same lines, Zola offers an option for cash gifts, where Zola holds the money for the couple to be released later. However, these are the two areas that users are most concerned about. A series of one-star reviews referenced difficulties with purchased items including late shipment, cancellations, and problems with repeat purchases when items weren't taken off the registry. Users also complained about cash gifts being withheld from the wedding couple.

Customer dissatisfaction

Pretty much everywhere you look, Zola is a one-star service, with numerous complaints about customer service, scams for purchases, and turning money into "Zola credits" so that purchases must be made through the website. Despite being pretty to look at and having a fun quiz-focused interface, Zola is leaving brides, grooms, bridal parties, and families frustrated with their registry and gifting process.

Don't say "I do" to Zola

With so many outstanding options for planning your wedding, both free and paid, there's no reason to risk your money with Zola. While some of the quizzes are fun, you can find those on plenty of other sites. If you're looking for an all-in-one wedding planning resource but you can't use Zola's registry because you're worried about losing your money or your gifts, it's not really an all-in-one experience. You'll get more value from nearly any other wedding planning service, so avoid Zola.