Zola - Wedding Planner

Zola is INCREDIBLE, do not get me wrong. I love almost everything about it: it’s easy, convenient, beautiful, and offers A LOT when it comes to planning a wedding. But, there are a few things missing. 1. Zola, please please please, regarding the registry options, there needs to be a way to “favorite” items- an option to save products we potentially want to add to our registry. Also the fact that new items are added so often. I want my registry public, but there a few items I’m not 100% set on because better options may be available at a later date. 2. “Groups” or “Categories”- There are many people who have multiple wedding events, for example, a bridal shower. Bridal Showers tend to have a specific theme for gifts, or, it’s common for a bride to want items for her shower, but she may not want these items to be obviously known to the entire guest list.

I like that this app keeps track of a bunch of important issues at once, but am frustrated by a few key issues. First, I can no longer sort my registry into categories on the app, which means earlier items are sorted and newer items I’ve added more recently are all just jumbled together. The other is that you can input guests into your guest list as couples or families, but only by having a single primary guest and adding the second (and any children) as a plus 1. That also means you can only use one person’s contact info per “family”—which is pretty absurd today, considering that most of our friends consist of couples who have their own phones and email addresses. Some of our wedding party is even composed of couples. So for digital invites or communication, this leaves us with the option of only sending a joint invitation or message to one half of a couple, or listing couples as separate guests with their own contact info—which solves the problem for digital communications but makes the guest list useless for organizing paper invitations where we’d want them to go to one address. Why not just allow individual phone and emails for each person in a family?? If I find an app/website that allows for that, I’d switch from Zola over this alone.

It’s that easy. I was so stressed with everything that I had to do for my up coming wedding. I knew I really didn’t want to write out all the invitations again like I did for my engagement party. Zola’s web service has everything! Their registry is the best and they don’t discriminate, if you have an existing registry though a different provider like I do, they have a spot on their site where you can add your existing registry to your wedding website. Yes I realize this is a review for the app and I’m mostly talking about what you can find on their website but the app is super helpful too. You can edit your guest list, make changes to you website, add things to your Zola registry, and create events. This platform is completely seamless from app to website and back again. Wonderfully design and completely user friendly!

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I expected more from this app and certainly better performance. The app and desktop either don’t align timely or at all. The filter on the Guest List doesn’t function logically. When you select what you want to filter on in the app, it initially applies the criteria, then reverts back to what it was before you can view the results. The other experience is you filter, the results show numerous guests for that criteria. But when you make a selection the filter removes the criteria and you have to start ALL OVER AGAIN. Other things like re-ordering events functions differently on desktop vs app. It’s kind of annoying. Also, the jpeg images sizing is terrible. Can’t fit images to scale, and pics uploaded to the photo page are cut off. Everybody knows what I look like but my fiancé is a mystery. Update: the guest list filter is below even basic. Why have a child guest option but not provide the ability to filter on children?! Zola didn’t think couples would want to know the difference for menu/drink costs?? Duh

I love that Zola is a completely inclusive platform for weddings but there are frustrating issues! In order to allow our single friends to bring a guest, we added an unknown guest option to their RSVP. All of those people ended up having issues RSVPing. The form will not allow them to just decline for a guest without adding a name. They all had to end up typing “no guest” or “no one” into the name field if they weren’t bringing anyone. It’s pretty awkward. Another very frustrating issue is the registry. I was not happy with the layout of the Zola registry for our honeymoon so I made a travelers joy registry. When I tried to incorporate that into our Zola registry it’s basically hidden. There is a small button that says “other registries” and guests have to click on that to see it. They set it up assuming you will use Zola registry which is annoying. I don’t like the lack of flexibility.