Stellanza vs Zola

Zola's gift registry is the reason the company exists and it shows. You can add items from Zola's own shop and from other stores, take cash funds with no fee on Venmo transfers, and manage the whole thing beside your guest list. Stellanza has no registry at all — you can record what each guest gave so it counts as income against the budget, and that is the extent of it.

Zola also has a US vendor marketplace with reviews, hundreds of free wedding website designs, and a printed stationery range that runs from save-the-dates to menus. Stellanza has none of those things and is not building them. If you are marrying in the United States, this list is most of what you need and Zola gives it to you free.

The seating plan is the sharpest difference. Stellanza's is a drag-and-drop floor plan in any browser, with round and rectangular tables, the dance floor, the bar and the head table, seat-level assignment, and an export that produces a printed booklet with one page per table, fold-out tent cards for the tables themselves, and an A1 poster for the entrance. Zola's seating chart is only in the iPhone app, and free only for the first fifteen guests.

Digital invitations are the second. Zola's help centre says plainly: "At this time we do not offer digital invitations." Stellanza gives each guest a personalised link that greets them by name and collects their answer, their meal choice, their dietary notes and their plus-ones, and the replies land straight back on the guest list and on the seating chart.

The third is language. Stellanza's interface, guest-facing RSVP pages and PDF exports are all available in twelve languages, and it handles seven currencies including the Romanian leu. Zola is English, in dollars, and its help centre states that its wedding websites cannot support special characters.

On the fundamentals there is little between them. Both keep a guest list with plus-ones, meal choices and dietary notes; both collect RSVPs online and update the headcount as replies arrive; both track a budget by category; both work without installing anything on a laptop. Both are free to start, and neither asks for a card to try.

Zola lets you export your guest list to CSV or Excel from a desktop browser, and Stellanza imports CSV with a column-mapping step that recognises common headings in several languages. In practice that means the move takes a few minutes: export from Zola, import into Stellanza, check the mapping, and the seating chart can be built from the list immediately.

What does not move is the registry and anything you bought as printed paper. Plenty of couples run both — Zola for the registry and the website, Stellanza for the invitations, the RSVPs and the seating — and that is a perfectly sensible arrangement as long as you decide which of the two holds the real guest list.