Who wrote this: we're The Big Head, an app studio in Edmonton. We make Gathr - Event & Party Manager, which is listed first below. We've flagged it clearly and written its drawbacks the same way we wrote everyone else's — you can judge it against the rest on the details, and the other 10 are here because they're genuinely good.
If you are hosting something with a guest list — a wedding weekend, a milestone birthday, a retreat, a kid's party — you are really juggling three jobs: sending invitations, chasing who is actually coming, and keeping track of what it all costs. Very few apps do all three, which is why this guide is organised by which job each one genuinely does well.
Every app here was checked against its live App Store listing before it made the list. Anything whose listing did not resolve, or resolved to a different app than claimed, was dropped rather than patched with a guessed link. Features described below come from the listings themselves, not from press coverage or marketing claims we could not stand behind.
We have deliberately left out star ratings and review counts. They drift daily, they say more about how long an app has existed than how well it works, and they are the easiest thing in a roundup like this to get quietly wrong. Pricing is given as a model — what you are signing up for — rather than a figure that will be stale by the time you read it.
Disclosure: Gathr is our own app. The Big Head publishes this blog and publishes Gathr, and it is listed first for that reason — not because it beats everything below it. On the App Store the seller shows as the individual developer account behind the studio, Jashandeep Singh. Its real limitations are listed alongside everyone else's.
At a glance
| App | Best for | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Gathr - Event & Party Manager (ours) | Running a multi-function event — a wedding weekend, a sangeet-to-reception, a milestone birthday — where the guest list, the RSVPs and the money all need to live in one native iPhone app instead of three. | Free |
| Partiful: Party Invite Maker | Casual, social parties where the vibe and the group chat matter more than formal stationery. | Free with in-app purchases |
| Evite: Party Invitation Maker | Anyone who wants the widest template library and needs guests of every age group to RSVP without friction. | Free tier plus subscription |
| Paperless Post: Invitations | Design-led hosts who want a genuinely elegant invitation and will pay for the look. | Free with in-app purchases |
| Luma: Events & Invites | Multi-session or semi-public events — a conference weekend, a retreat, a recurring community meetup — that need registration and ticketing rather than a friends-and-family guest list. | Free |
| Punchbowl: Invitations & Cards | Kids' birthday parties, thanks to officially licensed character designs you cannot get elsewhere. | Free tier plus subscription |
| The Knot Wedding Planner | Couples who want vendor discovery and a realistic local budget estimate sitting alongside their guest list. | Free |
| Joy Wedding Planner & Website | Multi-day weddings where different guests are invited to different events and each needs to know where to be. | Free |
| Pro Party Planner | The detail-obsessed host who wants seating charts, shopping lists and budget in the same app as the guest list. | Free with in-app purchases |
| Zola - Wedding Planner | Couples who want a real expense tracker built into the same app as their registry and wedding website. | Free with in-app purchases |
| Splitwise | The one job none of the invitation apps do — settling who owes whom after a multi-day event, a group trip or a shared house party. | Free tier plus subscription |
The apps in detail
Gathr - Event & Party Manager
Our app- Best for
- Running a multi-function event — a wedding weekend, a sangeet-to-reception, a milestone birthday — where the guest list, the RSVPs and the money all need to live in one native iPhone app instead of three.
- Highlights
- Guests RSVP straight from the invite link in any browser, with no app install required, and responses land automatically in your guest list
- Finance dashboard split into Overview, Expenses and People, with spending filterable by individual event function
- Guests tab with status-based grouping, filters and capacity-checked bulk marking
- Home and Calendar views that aggregate upcoming events alongside invitations still awaiting your reply
- Pricing
- Free
- Watch out
- There is no wedding website, no gift registry and no printed-stationery path, so a couple who wants those will still need a second service. It is also a young app with no long track record, it is English-only, it requires iOS 17 or later, and its App Store listing does not yet declare which accessibility features it supports.
Partiful: Party Invite Maker
- Best for
- Casual, social parties where the vibe and the group chat matter more than formal stationery.
- Highlights
- Customisable event pages with themes and visual effects
- Text Blasts that push updates to every guest, plus date polls to settle on a time
- Shared photo album and guest comments attached to the event
- Ticket sales with Apple Pay and QR code check-in
- Pricing
- Free with in-app purchases
- Watch out
- The much-loved "drop your Venmo or Cash App" line is a tip jar, not expense tracking — there is no budget, no per-person split and no ledger anywhere in the app. The listing also carries an 18+ age rating and there is no iPad version.
Evite: Party Invitation Maker
- Best for
- Anyone who wants the widest template library and needs guests of every age group to RSVP without friction.
- Highlights
- Thousands of free and premium digital invitation designs
- Free RSVP tracking with in-app guest messaging
- Sign-up and what-to-bring lists for potlucks, plus guest polls
- Send by email, SMS or a shareable link
- Pricing
- Free tier plus subscription
- Watch out
- The free tier shows ads to your guests, not just to you — the paid tiers explicitly sell a "seamless ad-free experience for guests," which tells you exactly what the free one is. There are no budget or expense tools of any kind.
Paperless Post: Invitations
- Best for
- Design-led hosts who want a genuinely elegant invitation and will pay for the look.
- Highlights
- Large library of designer invitations and cards
- Guest Tags for organising and segmenting the guest list
- Shareable invitation links through messaging apps and social
- On-site check-in, and no advertising shown to guests
- Pricing
- Free with in-app purchases
- Watch out
- Premium designs and embellishments are bought with an in-app currency (Coins) rather than a plain per-item price, which makes it hard to know what a send will actually cost you before you commit. It is an invitation product, not a planner — no budget, no expense splitting, no checklist.
Luma: Events & Invites
- Best for
- Multi-session or semi-public events — a conference weekend, a retreat, a recurring community meetup — that need registration and ticketing rather than a friends-and-family guest list.
- Highlights
- Event pages with cover images, plus SMS and email invites
- Ticket sales paid out to a connected bank account, with QR check-in and Apple Wallet passes
- Guest chat and co-host access
- Subscribable local calendars that followers can subscribe to
- Pricing
- Free
- Watch out
- It is built around discovery and ticketed, semi-public events, which makes it an awkward fit for a private family guest list where you want control over who sees what. There is no budget or shared-expense tooling whatsoever, and there is no iPad version.
Punchbowl: Invitations & Cards
- Best for
- Kids' birthday parties, thanks to officially licensed character designs you cannot get elsewhere.
- Highlights
- Licensed designs including Disney, Frozen, Marvel, Nickelodeon, Sesame Street, Bluey and PAW Patrol
- Photo customisation and guest list import
- Real-time RSVP tracking with 1:1 and broadcast messaging
- Potluck lists, guest polls and co-host access
- Pricing
- Free tier plus subscription
- Watch out
- Six separately named subscription tiers — Plus, Premium, Platinum, Extra, Advanced and Preferred — make it genuinely hard to work out which plan you need, and basics like photo uploads, video messages and ad removal sit behind them. No budget or expense features.
The Knot Wedding Planner
- Best for
- Couples who want vendor discovery and a realistic local budget estimate sitting alongside their guest list.
- Highlights
- Customisable wedding planning checklist
- Vendor Marketplace with reviews and photos
- Free wedding website that collects RSVPs, plus a guest manager for addresses and RSVP status per event
- Budget Advisor based on what couples actually spend in your area, plus a registry
- Pricing
- Free
- Watch out
- It requires iOS 18 or later, a hard cutoff that leaves out plenty of perfectly good older iPhones. The budget tools estimate and track spending but never split a cost between people, and the whole app is wedding-shaped — there is nothing here for a birthday or a reunion.
Joy Wedding Planner & Website
- Best for
- Multi-day weddings where different guests are invited to different events and each needs to know where to be.
- Highlights
- Wedding website with custom colours, fonts and photos
- Connected guest list with RSVP tracking
- Personalised per-guest schedules so guests only see the events they are invited to
- Print and digital save-the-dates and invitations, plus registry, travel and accommodation integrations
- Pricing
- Free
- Watch out
- It is a website-and-guest-list product rather than a full planner: the App Store description never mentions budget tracking or a planning checklist, so you will need something else to manage money and tasks. Printed stationery is ordered and paid for separately, outside the app.
Pro Party Planner
- Best for
- The detail-obsessed host who wants seating charts, shopping lists and budget in the same app as the guest list.
- Highlights
- Drag-and-drop seating charts, plus gift, dietary and menu tracking
- Email invitations with real-time RSVP updates and no guest account required
- Budget tools with shopping lists auto-organised by department
- AI planner that generates a task list and timeline, plus guest check-in on the day
- Pricing
- Free with in-app purchases
- Watch out
- Sync and collaboration is a separate purchase from the Premium unlock, so a couple planning together effectively pays for two different things to work on the same event. Invitations go out by email only — there is no SMS send and no shareable link.
Zola - Wedding Planner
- Best for
- Couples who want a real expense tracker built into the same app as their registry and wedding website.
- Highlights
- Budget tracker that replaces the spreadsheet and keeps all expenses in one place
- RSVP tracker and guest list tied to a free wedding website
- Registry and vendor tools
- Seating chart builder
- Pricing
- Free with in-app purchases
- Watch out
- The seating chart is a paid in-app purchase rather than part of the free app, as are premium SMS sends and website animations — so the feature list you are comparing against is not all included. It also overlaps heavily with The Knot, and like The Knot it is wedding-only.
Splitwise
- Best for
- The one job none of the invitation apps do — settling who owes whom after a multi-day event, a group trip or a shared house party.
- Highlights
- Groups with equal, unequal, percentage, share-based or exact splits
- Support for 100+ currencies, recurring bills and multiple payers on one expense
- Activity feed, push notifications and CSV export
- Payment links via Venmo and PayPal in the US, and Paytm in India
- Pricing
- Free tier plus subscription
- Watch out
- It has no guest list, no invitations and no RSVPs at all — it is a companion to a planning app, not a replacement, so you will be running two apps side by side. Receipt scanning, itemisation, spending charts and full expense-history search all sit behind the Pro subscription.
What's still missing
The real gap in this category is that no single app does both sides of hosting well. The invitation apps (Evite, Partiful, Paperless Post, Punchbowl, Luma) collect RSVPs beautifully and track no money at all; Splitwise settles the money and has no concept of a guest list. Gathr's narrow edge is pairing browser-based RSVP with a per-function expense breakdown — browser RSVP itself is not unique, since Partiful, Paperless Post and Pro Party Planner all offer it, so the claim should stay limited to the combination. Editorial note: 11 of 11 App Store URLs in the research were verified live and none were dropped; Zola was carried over from the verification pass as an eleventh entry because it was confirmed and adds a built-in budget tracker the other wedding apps lack. All star ratings, review counts and price figures present in the source research were deliberately excluded per the publishing rules, along with four claims the verification pass flagged as unsourced (Splitwise's \"aggressive free tier,\" Paperless Post's \"thin free selection,\" The Knot's \"promotional pressure,\" and Partiful being \"wrong for a formal wedding\"), plus all developer-written accolades.
Common questions
Do my guests need to install an app to RSVP?
For most of these, no. Gathr, Partiful, Paperless Post and Pro Party Planner all let guests respond from a link in an ordinary browser without creating an account or downloading anything. Pro Party Planner is the outlier in a different way — it sends invitations by email only, so there is no SMS or shareable link option. If your guest list skews older or is spread across Android and iPhone, browser-based RSVP is the single most important feature to check for.
Which of these actually track money, and which just look like they do?
Real money tools: Gathr (expenses broken down by event function), Zola and Pro Party Planner (budget trackers), The Knot (a budget estimator based on local spending) and Splitwise (splitting costs between people). The pure invitation apps — Evite, Partiful, Paperless Post, Punchbowl and Luma — have no budget features at all. Partiful's Venmo and Cash App line is often mistaken for expense tracking; it is a tip jar for collecting contributions, with no ledger behind it.
Are the free apps really free?
It depends what "free" is paying for. Gathr, Luma, The Knot and Joy list no in-app purchases at all. Evite's free tier is ad-supported, and the ads are shown to your guests — its paid tiers are sold explicitly on removing them. Paperless Post, Partiful and Zola are free to download with individual paid designs or features, and Punchbowl and Splitwise put meaningful functionality behind subscriptions. Joy and The Knot make money elsewhere — printed orders and vendor referrals — rather than through the app.
What is the difference between a wedding planner app and a party invitation app?
Wedding planner apps (The Knot, Joy, Zola) are built around a year-long project: a website, a checklist, a registry, vendors and a guest list that survives multiple events. Invitation apps (Evite, Partiful, Paperless Post, Punchbowl) are built around a single send — make it look good, get it out, collect replies. If your event is one evening, the planner apps are overkill. If it runs across several days with different guest groups, an invitation app will run out of road quickly.
Can one app handle a multi-day event where different guests are invited to different functions?
Three handle it properly. Joy gives each guest a personalised schedule so they only see the events they are actually invited to. Gathr lets you filter both the guest list and the expenses by individual function, so you can see what the rehearsal dinner cost separately from the reception. Luma manages multi-session events well but is oriented toward semi-public, ticketed gatherings rather than private ones.
Will my guests see advertising?
On Evite's free tier, yes — the paid tiers are marketed on delivering an ad-free experience for guests, which is the clearest possible signal about the free one. Paperless Post states plainly that it shows no ads. Gathr and Luma have no in-app purchases and no advertising. If the invitation is going to a wedding list or to colleagues, it is worth checking this before you send, because the ads appear on the page your guests open, not just in your own app.