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The Best Wedding Planning Guides

Which Wedding Planning Guide is the Best?

After the question has been popped, and YES is the answer, it's time to start the next step in your wedding journey: planning. Whether you're imagining a small, romantic wedding, or a huge church ceremony with every friend and family member in the address book, there's a lot that goes into planning a wedding.

Maybe you want an exotic getaway destination or a quiet ceremony in a meaningful location for your relationship. Either way, you've got to plan it out, and that can feel overwhelming, no matter the size of your wedding day. Thankfully, there is a wide range of websites offering to take the stress out of that process.

Tuesday, March 19th

2024 Wedding Planning Guide Reviews

Zola Review Top Consumer Reviews Best-In-Class Blue Ribbon Award 5 Star Rating

Zola

5 Star Rating Top Consumer Reviews Best-In-Class Blue Ribbon Award

Zola is a free wedding website builder that has a gamified approach to personalization. It's an amazing resource as a wedding guide, and you don't have to pay a dime. The site focuses on building the best wedding options for you by letting you fill out quizzes for the steps you want to complete. It offers all-in-one wedding planning; however, it does have low customer reviews on the registry and purchases. Despite the registry problems, there's still so much good happening on Zola that the personalization and balance of guidance and tools make it our top option for a wedding guide.

Wedding Wire Review 4.5 Star Rating

Wedding Wire

4.5 Star Rating

Wedding Wire is an online toolkit and database for all your wedding needs. The site offers both technology tools to manage wedding planning as well as forums and idea blogs to help you through the details. However, if you need a service to book venues or vendors, it might be better to look somewhere else: the reviews aren't positive for Wedding Wire's vetting system. But, while the site doesn't have quizzes or trustworthy vendors, it does have a full range of tools and a full site and app to support your wedding planning needs. For that reason, Wedding Wire holds a solid second place in our review.

One Fab Day Review 4 Star Rating

One Fab Day

4 Star Rating

The blog-style design of One Fab Day leans into the guide aspect of a wedding guide website. The guides, ideas, and lists of wedding rings, venues, and options are extremely comprehensive. However, the site doesn't offer technology or tools to help you manage all the inspiration and turn it into a dream day to say "I do." Based on this, we have to rate One Fab Day a little lower than our highest-ranked services. But the site is completely free and worth checking out as a resource for all your wedding ideas.

Here Comes the Guide Review 4 Star Rating

Here Comes the Guide

4 Star Rating

Woman-created and female-run, Here Comes the Guide is a solid resource to start planning your wedding. However, it has very few customer reviews and doesn't provide any wedding management technology or tools to simplify the process from point-a to point-b. However, Here Comes the Guide is still a great free resource to start your plans. It is a comprehensive guide that offers support, inspiration, and ideas for all aspects of wedding planning, and we're impressed with the tight focus on wedding guides, even if it does leave tools by the wayside.

Wedding Planning Assistant Review 3.5 Star Rating

Wedding Planning Assistant

3.5 Star Rating

The award-winning toolkit Wedding Planning Assistant is a free service for wedding planning that offers cloud storage and multi-device integration. Focused on giving you all the tools you need to prepare for your big day, Wedding Planning Assistant is simple to use, easy to learn, and focuses on connecting everyone involved in your wedding through technology. But, it's really light on inspiration and guidance, which could have you looking at the higher-rated wedding planning guides in our review first.

The Knot Review 3 Star Rating

The Knot

3 Star Rating

As a wedding guide, The Knot is a great database for all the information you'll need to start planning your wedding from the ground up. Offering fun gamified wedding quizzes and engagement ring look-books, it seems like a dream come true. However, some users ended up unsatisfied with the final cost of their wedding when working with The Knot to tie up all the details for them. These low user ratings are the main reason why this option comes in as "just average" in our evaluation of wedding planning guides.

Joy Review 2.5 Star Rating

Joy

2.5 Star Rating

Joy is a free online wedding planning tool that offers a personalized website builder to help you keep all your wedding needs in one place. Rather than just a guide, Joy centers around their wedding website tool. This seems like a great tool for the DIY wedding planner. However, if you're looking for something easy to use, Joy may not be the best for a stress-free wedding experience. Thankfully, if you're looking for more basic wedding guide material, Joy does offer a blog page with the typical content and idea generation that a wedding guide usually provides.

LadyMarry Review 2 Star Rating

LadyMarry

2 Star Rating

LadyMarry is a great stop for a wedding planning and management tool, but it just isn't a wedding guide. It's got some great technology and tool options along with a mobile app, but for ideas and forum support, there just isn't anything there. While there is a blog on the site, it wasn't working at the time of this review. For those reasons, this option is ranked fairly low, as it just doesn't support the needs of an online wedding guide completely.

Compare the Best Reviews

Continued from above...

Online wedding planning guides can recommend vendors like photographers and caterers in your area as well as help you keep track of the event in calendar software. The best wedding planning guides include an array of tools for managing guest lists, RSVPs, budgets, and to-do lists - usually through a convenient app that you can access anytime, anywhere.

The best thing about online wedding planning guides is that the good ones will also give you access to advice and feedback from couples who've already tied the knot. Whether you're thinking of an on-the-beach wedding or a woodland experience to live out your childhood wedding dreams, you can get practical tips from people who've already tried those Pinterest-perfect weddings.

From ideas for keeping your guests from getting sunburned during the ceremony to setting up heating units to keep the wedding party warm at a winter reception, you can see how other couples made it work. You can even get tips on those tricky family members: who to invite, whether to allow kids and the best way to word wedding invitations. Most of these wedding planning guides have in-depth advice and answers to guide you.

You've got a lot of work to do, and a lot to decide on. So, how can you pick the best wedding planning guide on top of everything else you've got going on? Here are several factors to keep in mind as you and your significant other consider how to find the best support for planning your big day:

  • Cost. Many online wedding planning guides don't cost a dime. However, if you're looking for specific services, do you feel comfortable paying for a service? Will you get the best value for your money compared to a free guide?
  • Services offered. What kind of help or advice are you looking for? Do you need an all-in-one site that provides details on every aspect of your wedding? Do you want ideas for flowers as well as venues and invitations? Or maybe you're all set except for food vendors and photographers, so you only need one or two services. Keep in mind what you're looking for as you evaluate wedding planning guides.
  • Personalization. Are you looking to create a ceremony that's more out-of-the-box? Do you feel that your special requirements are reflected by the service? Are there couples and stories that you can identify with that are featured in the photos and articles?
  • Use of technology. What kind of online tools are you looking to use? Do you want a full-fledged planner with app access? Do you want a site that allows family and friends to access or buy from registries? Is tech connectivity important or are you just looking for a place to keep track of your wedding process?

To help you make your special day a little easier, Top Consumer Reviews has reviewed and ranked the best Wedding Planning Guides available today. We hope this information helps you simplify your planning process and bring your dream wedding to life!

The Best Wedding Planning Guides Compare Wedding Planning Guides Compare Wedding Planning Guide Reviews What are the best Wedding Planning Guides Best Wedding Planning Guide Reviews

Wedding Planning Guide FAQ

Congratulations! Your head is probably spinning with thoughts of "What do I wear?" and "Where do we want to get married?" Using a wedding planning website should be the first thing you do!
A wedding planning guide is any service that helps you, well, plan your wedding! Some are really robust, offering an all-in-one location for sending out invites, creating a gift registry, and even sharing day-of event photos! Others are more static: you may find some downloadable checklists and shopping guides, but not much more. Whichever type you choose, it's a great way to sort through all of the possibilities and start narrowing down the choices until you've got your dream wedding ready to become a reality.
The best ones are actually free! (And since there isn't much else about your wedding that will be, enjoy that!) Many couples are pleasantly surprised at how much they can do with an online wedding planning guide, all at no cost.
Popular features that many wedding planning services offer include a website (that can be used as an online invitation as well as a place to manage RSVPs, share photos, etc.), seamless integration with gift registries, question-and-answer tools for deciding on everything from budget to catering, and an easy way to create and send paper invites. Some wedding planning guides also provide vendor recommendations for venues, florists, and so on.
That's totally up to you. If you decide to go all-digital, don't forget to consider if your great-aunt Agatha will be able to access your online invite, mark the date in her paper calendar, and find the address to get to your wedding on the right day and time. On the other hand, if you've got a small group of close friends that you're inviting and they're all as tech-savvy as you are, there may be no need to spend the time, money, or paper on printed invitations.
Not necessarily, but there's a way to finesse it so that it's not seen as gauche or presumptuous: choose a wedding planning service that has a "Cash" , "Experiences" , or "Honeymoon" registry option! Especially with so many weddings where couples are combining fully-equipped households or have already established a home together, many guests welcome the idea of not adding more stuff to the mix - and instead, being able to help fund a dream destination honeymoon or something fun like cooking lessons for two.
That varies by provider. Some give you lifetime access at no cost, while others let you keep the site active for a year and then charge a fee to keep it up thereafter.
Most services let you set whether your website is publicly visible, searchable on search engines, and so on. You may also be able to make your wedding website password-protected; just make sure that the way you give guests the password is also secure!
The Best Reviews of Wedding Planning Guides