What Zola does well
Zola is a wedding planning company, and it says its planning tools are free. You build a wedding website from a large choice of designs, with the ceremony and reception details, the schedule of events, travel tips and hotel blocks. Guests search for their name on the site and reply for their whole party, for every event they are invited to, with meal choices and the questions you add. A budget planner with due-date reminders and a checklist sit in the same account, and invitations and paper that match the website can be ordered there too.
The registry is at the heart of Zola. Couples add gifts from the Zola store, from partner brands or from any online store, and set up cash funds, all connected to the website the guests already visit. Couples run the planning from the web and from Zola’s app for iPhone; on Android, Zola points to its mobile website.
For the day itself, Zola offers a Disposable Camera. The couple sets it up in the iPhone app, chooses how many shots each guest gets, and shares a link or a QR code. Guests open it from the link or the code, enter their name and take photos, which the couple sees first: you can hide any of them before you reveal the gallery, right away, after the event or whenever you choose. A classic film filter is optional, and the originals stay available. A free tier lets you try it with a handful of guests; beyond that, each camera is priced by the number of guests you expect, as the table above shows. The seating chart works in a similar way: free for a few guests, with the full version as a paid upgrade.
What EventAssets offers
EventAssets covers the page before the day as well. The event page shows the schedule, the location on a map, cover photos and an about text, and lets guests add the date to their calendar. Guests find their name, answer for their whole party, plus-ones and children included, and fill in your own questions before your deadline; the statistics update as the answers come in, and the guest list exports as a CSV file. From that list you build the seating chart, with tables on a canvas and parties seated together, and guests look up their table on the event page. Beside it, budgets hold the line items of the day with planned and actual amounts, due and paid dates. All of this is part of the free plan, for every guest on the list.
Around the day itself, EventAssets puts the gallery and the guestbook on the same page. Guests open the same link or scan a QR code and upload photos and videos in the browser, in original quality, without an app or an account, including the ones they took earlier in the day. You sort them into albums, approve uploads before others see them if you wish, and download everything as a ZIP. A full-screen slideshow picks up new uploads while it runs, so it works on a screen at the venue. The guestbook takes written messages and voice recordings made in the browser, and you can review entries before they appear. The event page follows each guest’s browser language, and hosts run all of it from the web or from the apps for iPhone and Android.
A disposable camera, or a gallery for the whole event
The core difference is what guests do with their photos. Zola’s camera is built around a limited number of shots, taken live in the camera and revealed when you choose; its pages describe photos, not videos. EventAssets is built around the gallery of the event page: guests share the photos and videos they already have, see each other’s uploads as they arrive or once you approve them, and react to them and comment on them.
If the registry and the surprise of a reveal are what you want most, Zola covers both, and EventAssets offers neither. If you want videos and voice messages from your guests, a seating chart for every guest without an extra purchase, or apps for hosts on both platforms, compare the rows for photos, the guestbook and planning in the table above. Where Zola’s own pages state nothing on a point, the table says so instead of guessing.
What to check before you decide
List what the wedding needs: a website for the invitation, replies with meal choices, a registry, a seating chart, a place for the photos and videos, and a guestbook. Then see which of these each one includes for free, which are paid extras, and how many guests each price covers. Check which phones you and your guests use, since Zola’s camera is set up in its iPhone app and names the iOS version that guests’ iPhones need. With EventAssets, the event page, the guest list, the seating chart, the budget and the guestbook are yours to set up before you pay anything; one payment per event lifts the caps on photos, videos, storage and voice recordings.
