GuestlistOnline vs Joy

The core of it is, and unusually so: the wedding website, the registry, unlimited guests, online RSVP, hundreds of digital invitations and multiple editors cost $0 forever. Joy earns its money from registry commissions and a short list of upgrades. Those upgrades are scheduled sends, Messaging Plus for SMS, a custom domain at about $19.99 a year, premium card designs, and printing from $1.39 a card. Joy does not publish what Messaging Plus or the premium card bundles cost, so budget for them only after you have seen the price in your own account.

It depends on how the guest pays. Through Venmo, PayPal or Cash App, nothing, those routes are zero-fee. On a card, Joy passes a 3.5% Stripe fee to the guest, and card contributions are supported from the US, UK, Canada and the eurozone in USD, CAD, GBP or EUR. Moving the balance to a bank account costs $1.70 per transfer. The GuestlistOnline gift fund is dearer on card gifts, 5% + 0.25 in the currency of the event, payment processing included, and cheaper in a different way: it runs through your own Stripe Connect account with iDEAL and the local methods European guests expect, and it needs no US bank account.

No. Joy has no check-in feature, no QR pass per guest and no scanner; the QR codes it produces are printed on cards so guests can open the website. On the day you are reading a list. GuestlistOnline gives every guest a QR code and checks them in either in the browser or in a PWA scanner installed straight from the browser on iOS or Android, with no app store involved. That scanner downloads the list in advance, scans and validates while completely offline, and syncs the results back afterwards, and several phones can work the same list at once with door-staff tokens, which is what a 200-guest reception with one entrance actually needs.

It does not. Joy offers six interface languages, English in US, UK and Australian variants, plus German, Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese, and there is no automatic translation, so a bilingual wedding is handled by duplicating pages and targeting them with tags. GuestlistOnline runs in seven languages including Dutch, across both the dashboard and the pages your guests see, so a Dutch family and a German family read the same invitation in their own language without you maintaining two versions of it.

Export it as a CSV from Joy, everything or a selection, with the RSVP answers included, and import that file into GuestlistOnline, mapping the columns you want to keep. Names, envelope names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, parties, tags and RSVP answers all come across; parties and tags map onto our tags, and meal and dietary answers land in registration fields you can filter and export. What stays behind is the Joy-specific layer: the wedding website and its design, the registry and any cash fund balance, and the card designs and scheduled sends.