Stellanza vs The Knot

The marketplace is not a close contest. The Knot lists hundreds of thousands of wedding businesses with a very large body of couple reviews behind them, and for an American couple that is the single most valuable thing any of these products offers. Stellanza has no vendor directory whatsoever; it lets you attach a supplier's name and phone number to the expense or the task they belong to, and that is all.

The Knot also has a gift registry, a free wedding website with hundreds of templates, printed stationery, and native apps for both iPhone and Android with hundreds of thousands of ratings between them. Stellanza has no registry, no printed stationery and no mobile app — it runs in the browser.

The seating chart is the plainest difference on this page, because The Knot's help centre answers the question itself: it does not offer a digital seating chart. Stellanza's is a drag-and-drop floor plan with round and rectangular tables, the dance floor, the bar and the head table, seat-level assignment, and rules that keep families together and guests you have marked as a conflict apart. It exports as a booklet with a page per table, as fold-out tent cards, and as an A1 poster for the entrance.

Digital invitations are the second. The Knot offers digital save-the-dates and printed invitations; Stellanza gives every guest a personalised link that collects their answer, meal choice, dietary notes and plus-ones, and feeds the reply straight back into the guest list and the seating plan.

Language is the third. The Knot is English only and its parent company's other brands cover the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Mexico, Brazil, Canada and India — nothing in Central or Eastern Europe. Stellanza's interface, guest-facing pages and printed exports exist in twelve languages, including Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Serbian, Macedonian and Albanian.

The Knot's help centre tells couples to download the app on both devices and "log in using the same email address and password", and notes that a multi-user access feature giving each partner their own login is being worked on. That is worth knowing before you start, because it means a shared password and no record of who changed what.

In fairness: Stellanza works the same way today. One account holds one wedding, and if both of you want in, you share the login. If separate accounts for each partner matter to you, Joy is the app in this category that already has them.

There is no reason to choose only one. A common and sensible arrangement is The Knot for finding vendors and reading reviews, and Stellanza for the guest list, the invitations, the RSVPs and the seating plan. The Knot exports its guest list, Stellanza imports CSV with a column-mapping step, and the move takes a few minutes. The one rule is to decide which of the two holds the real guest list, and export from it rather than editing both.