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The days of a big ol' binder for planning a wedding are long gone. The reign of the wedding planning app has taken over. It's time for an update to see what new and fancified wedding planning apps there are now to help you plan your wedding.
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For Part I of this series, we're starting with apps that help with gathering notes, collaborating on ideas, and overall wedding planning. We'll be tackling apps for budgeting, RSVPs, registries, and more later on.
Let's check out the first round. Blanket warning: While Offbeat Bride is committed to gender-neutral language, you'll need to watch out for gendered language and more “traditional” options with many of these apps.
Evernote
iOS | Android
Gather up ideas, clip web posts, write handwritten notes, and take photos. Share them with your partner, planner, family, etc. with this notes app. Just note that the premium version is required to edit shared notebooks with two different accounts and to view files offline.
Skitch
Skitch is from the makers of Evernote. It allows you to annotate any photo and then share it with others, like your planner or partner. This can be super useful with ideas for vendors.
Hitched Wedding Planner
iOS | Android
This UK-based app does a lot of high-level planning with inspiration, ideas, guest lists, seating, schedules, and budgets.
Pronovias
iOS
You'll find dress shopping help, appointment bookings, to-do lists, budget calculators, guest and table seating charts, and a contact sheet for vendors.
The Knot Ultimate Wedding Planner
The Knot's popular app provides inspiration, venue searches, checklists, budget managers, and guests lists.
WeddingHappy
iOS
This pragmatic app mostly focuses on great to-do lists that can be shared and a few vendors within their search function.
Google Drive
iOS | Android
We've talked extensively about using Google Drive for guest lists, RSVPs, and other functions, but it's pretty limitless overall. You can share documents for catering, vendors, addresses, photos, etc.
Dropbox
iOS | Android
Similar to Google Drive, Dropbox is super flexible, but not wedding-specific, so you'll have to create all the documents yourself and use Dropbox for sharing and storing.
Wunderlist
iOS | Android
Wunderlist focuses on collaborative lists and does a pretty good job with it. It's another non-wedding-specific app, though, so it'll take more customizing than others.
iWedding
iWedding is a general wedding planning app that allows you to manage guest lists, gift trackers, iTunes integration, and to-do lists.
Wedding Planning Complete
iOS | Android
Wedding Planning Complete has a wedding countdown with options for checklists, guest lists, and budget management.
Awesome Note
iOS | Android
Like similar note apps, Awesome Note is a general planner with options for to-do lists, shopping lists, tags, and great sorting options. You can also include photos, and locations for to-do items.
Pinterest Mobile
iOS | Android
With custom boards, private boards, and collaborative boards, Pinterest is a great way to manage image collection. Just watch out for Pinterest fatigue and idea overload!
What apps are YOU using to collect ideas and share to-do lists? Share them in the comments! Then look out for Part II of this series, coming later this week.
: Pink Light Images
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About the Author: Catherine Clark
Catherine Clark loiters at her local library, makes art, watches movies en masse, plays video and tabletop games, poorly cooks healthy things, cuddles with her feline fur babies, and blogs at BijouxandBits.com.
We made extensive use of G-drive to plan our wedding, along with a traditional “wedding binder,” and the best little list-making program EVER called WorkFlowy: http://www.workflowy.com We tried out a few other planning apps, ranging from wedding-specific to robust to-do list sorts of things, and most of it was much too rigid in terms of functionality. It’s true that we pretty much built everything from the ground up in G-Drive (and that both of us are Excel/Google sheets wizards), but for our quite non-traditional wedding, it was exactly what we needed. The other plug I’m making here is for a web and mobile-based app called WorkFlowy, which is basically a dynamic list-making app. It’s really, really simple, and also quite powerful. I use it to manage my projects at work, my personal projects at home, and yep, wedding planning! Seriously, go check it out. It’s my favorite. 🙂
Strangely enough, the program that I’ve found most helpful is Microsoft’s OneNote. It’s very user friendly and comes on all the Windows devices. Computers, tablets, phones. You can download it to any device (see above) and its used with an account system so you can log into one or multiple devices from which you can access any notebook someone has shared with you. You can share to any account in near-real time so it make collaboration a snap. The notebooks update each time they’re opened and each page updates individually for accuracy. It really is a virtual notebook and can take the place of a bulky RL wedding binder I’ve found. Still looking for the ideal scheduling program, but not sure I’ll find one better than my good old fashion calendar >.<