Colara vs Zola Wedding Planner

Colara is a shared wedding workspace for planners, photographers, vendors, and couples, organized around a live timeline. Its planner workspace brings together timelines, vendors, contracts, couples, and floor plans. A free CRM includes a lead and client pipeline, proposals, e-signature contracts, invoices, payment reminders, scheduling, questionnaires, an inbox, email templates, finances, a calendar, and a task board. The free CRM allows unlimited clients, leads, jobs, proposals, contracts, and invoices, but vendors do not receive an owned wedding workspace. Free-plan online payments carry a 1% platform fee on cards or 1.5% total on bank payments, capped at $30 per payment including Stripe’s fee; manual payments have no platform or Stripe fee. Colara offers an AI timeline builder and assistant, and connects with QuickBooks Online, Google Calendar, Zapier, Make, and webhooks. Its free iPhone and iPad app is available on the App Store. Paid plans start at $29 a month.

Zola Wedding Planner combines tools for venues, vendors, wedding websites, registries, invitations, guest lists, and budgets. Its marketplace helps couples discover, contact, and book vendors, with recommendations personalized to the wedding. Guest management tracks RSVPs, meal selections, and plus ones, and accepts spreadsheet imports. A seating chart supports drag-and-drop assignments plus customizable table names and seat counts. Registry features include gifts, experiences, zero-fee cash funds, group gifting, and virtual exchanges for credit before shipping. The iOS app manages a website, checklist, invitations, registry, gift notifications, and Gift Tracker; Zola says the free wedding app is currently iOS-only, while planning tools are listed for web and iOS. Couples can password-protect their wedding website, but registries cannot currently be password-protected. Zola says uploaded planning-tool information is not encrypted or otherwise secured. Its free plan is free for personal, non-commercial use with a registered account. Paid offerings are listed from 17.99 USD. Team-Z advisors provide chat or email support.