In today’s day and age, there is a mobile app for just about everything under the sun. From finance and banking, games and entertainment, to recipes and cooking. It’s all right there at the tip of our fingers, on our mobile devices.
It’s no surprise that there is a plethora of choices to help couples plan and budget for their big day. To help you choose, we’ve downloaded a couple of the many choices available and looked into what they offer to help you get and stay organized in today’s wired wedding world.
Feature Rich: The Knot
The first app we downloaded to put through the “ring”er was The Knot. If you’re planning a wedding, you’ve probably heard of The Knot. Their website has plenty of helpful stories, tools and resources to help inspire the wedding of your dreams. Their app is no different.
The Knot is the most thorough and feature-rich app we found. You can easily love (heart) favorite vendors, ideas, and more within the app itself, so you can come back to them later.
For planning and budgeting, there’s a designated planning section and to-do/checklist. The app also suggests various vendors and venues within range of your planned wedding location. Photos of these wedding specialists and their offerings provide visual aids to help you to find the right match for your style or theme, making planning go that much quicker and more smoothly.
The checklist is set up with preferred due dates for each item, so you can keep up to task on the things that are most important to you and your family. Whether it’s finding a DJ or reception venue, planning the bachelorette party, or start working on your guest list, The Knot does its best to help you stay on schedule.
The registry section offers products from major retailers such as Bed, Bath & Beyond, Amazon.com, Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma. Naturally, the Knot provides their own collections to choose from as well. Some of these collections include: Kitchen Must-Haves, Keep It Clean and Most-Wanted Gifts. Additionally, you can create a cash registry which people can donate to, such as a new home fund or a honeymoon fund.
The guest list feature keeps track of who brought gifts and whether you’ve sent them a thank-you yet, making it super-easy to keep tabs on who to thank. It also tracks who has responded with RSVPs. You can also pick and choose invites—inviting different people to different parts of your wedding event, such as the rehearsal, ceremony and/or the reception. All in all, it’s a pretty versatile and useful guest list.
Last, but not least, the app will help you create a basic, but useful, website for your wedding, displaying all kinds of information about your wedding and yourselves. This feature allows you to find a design you and your significant other both like and post useful things for your guests and wedding party—such as links to hotel room blocks or things to do in the area. Posting photos and stories is pretty straightforward as well. Additionally, your guests can RSVP right from the website.
No Frills: Bridebook
While it may not be as feature laden as The Knot, Bridebook is user-friendly and offers enough features to be helpful in planning nearly every aspect of your wedding. The two features we found to be the most fleshed-out were the checklists and budgeting sections.
The Bridebook checklist’s primary goal is to keep you on track to planning a successful wedding. Suggestions are made based on your wedding date and when you ideally should have tasks started and/or completed. Each task on the checklist can add sub-items, so you can categorize and easily track related details that need to get done.
Examples of the suggested items on the checklist include:
- Start your guest list
- A recommendation to start one of their tools, which will guide you through the guest list setup
- Discuss whether or not to invite children, colleagues, evening guests or plus-ones
- Start adding guests in each of the groups, which you can setup yourself
- Take advantage of features such as “waitlisting guests” and linking guests to their plus-ones
- Calculate your estimated final guest count so you know what size venue you should be looking for
- The Bridebook budgeting feature is quite thorough and will auto-suggest budgeting for different items on your list. Items you don’t need are easily removed. This allows you to estimate the cost of various specifics and tallies up your estimated budget, while giving you a place to put actual costs as well.
The guest list feature allows you to import from contacts, as well as manually enter them. When manually entering names, you can pick which guest list you’re adding to, and you can bulk-add them all at once. Additionally, you can enter other information, such as RSVP status, adult/child, male/female, table number, notes and plus-one information.
Bridebook also includes a wedding planning advice page—keeping you up to date on relevant information in the world of weddings. Examples include, “Post-Quarantine Wedding Trends” and “Choosing Wedding Food in 5 Simple Steps”.
The final mention-worthy feature of this app is the scrapbook. You can keep notes, add photographs or screenshots, and organize details that inspire you. From table-toppers and cake ideas to wedding party gifts, this is a place to store all the great ideas you see while planning your wedding.
Of the many apps we found on the app store, these are but two. Both offer plenty of options to help keep you organized and on track while planning your wedding.
So, what are you waiting for? Pick one and get started on your magical journey!
