Online guest list,
free for every kind of event.

A spreadsheet is a copy. The moment the first invitation goes out, the replies start arriving somewhere else: a text, an email, a voice note, a word at a christening. The spreadsheet is out of date until somebody sits down and types them in, and a fortnight later there are two versions of it that disagree about the aunt.

An online guest list is the place the replies write themselves into. A guest answers from their own link and the row changes: coming or not, how many of them, whose names, what they eat. Nobody retypes anything, and the number at the top of the list is the number of people coming today, not on the evening you last updated it.

It is also the list everything else reads. The seating plan seats the people who said yes, with their party sizes and their companions’ names. The menu counts dishes from the replies. When someone changes their answer, all of it changes with them, because there is no second copy to keep in step.

A spreadsheet is still the right tool for the first draft, when two families are typing names at the same time and nothing has been sent yet. It stops being the right tool on the day the invitations go out. That is the point to move the list online, and the import exists so you do not have to start again.

The list itself, and all the planning around it, is free for as long as you need it, with unlimited events and no cap on guests. What is paid is the side your guests see: the published invitation, the emails, and the replies with their details. Premium is €7.99 a month or €39.99 a year, one subscription covers every event you own with no price per guest, and every new account can try the paid side for 14 days; the export, team invites, QR code download and a custom link address are not part of the trial.

That line is drawn on purpose, and we would rather you read it here than discover it after typing in two hundred people. Everything the free plan covers is set out on one page.

Typed: add a guest with a name, contact details, party size and a note, on your phone or on the web, one row at a time. Only the name is needed. In the iPhone and Android apps you can also tick people in your phone’s contacts, and if you planned an earlier event, its guest list can be copied across while the new list is still empty. Adding someone sends them nothing.

Imported: on the web app, upload the spreadsheet you already have, as .xlsx or .csv with up to 500 rows and 2 MB. The app recognises the usual columns (name and surname, email, phone, company, party size, notes, group and postal address) in nine languages, shows you how it has read each column before anything is written, and then adds the rows. A row that matches a guest already on the list is updated or skipped, as you choose. Starting from nothing? The guest list template has the columns the import reads.

Self-registered: once the invitation is published, a guest who opens the shared link or scans the QR code and replies becomes a row of their own, marked as having come in through the link or the code. An open invitation still ends in a clean list, and you can always see which rows you invited and which arrived by themselves. For a corporate event where only named people may reply, the invited-guests-only setting closes the shared link to replies, and each person answers from their own.

Every figure on the list counts people and says so: 120 invited people across 70 rows, 84 coming across 46 replies. The venue, the caterer and the budget all work in people, and a list that counts replies is wrong by the size of every family on it.

The analytics view adds the reply rate and the acceptance rate, the average party size, how many people came in by invitation, link or QR code, how many days the oldest unanswered invitation has waited, the meal counts per dish, the high chairs, and the share of your capacity used if you set one. Filters narrow the list to the guests you have not invited yet, the ones who have not opened their link, or the ones invited by email who have not had a reminder yet.

Once the reply-by date is close, the not-replied filter is your chasing list. Reminders are never sent automatically: when you choose, one button emails a reminder, with their own link, to every invited guest with an email address who has not answered. For the few who still say nothing, a personal message works better than a third email, and our guide to chasing RSVPs has the wording.

A British wedding often has two guest lists: the day guests, who see the ceremony and sit down to the wedding breakfast, and the evening guests, who arrive for the party. Keeping them in two spreadsheets is how an evening guest ends up paid for at dinner. Programme parts keep them in one list instead: the ceremony and the meal become one part, the evening reception another, each with its own time, place, capacity and reply-by date.

Set the day part to invited guests only and tick the people who belong in it. They see both parts through their personal link and reply to each; your evening guests see only the evening and never learn there was anything before it. The counts follow each part, so the caterer gets the dinner number and the bar gets the evening one. Programme parts are part of Premium and included in the trial; while they are on, companions’ names and the waiting list are not used. Who to invite covers the harder question of who goes on which list.

Nothing about the list is specific to weddings. Vowly Event plans ten kinds of event, from a wedding or an engagement to a birthday, a baby shower, a graduation, a corporate event, a party, a dinner or a housewarming, and every one of them has the same guest list, the same import and the same counts.

What changes is the size and the questions. A wedding list starts wide and is cut with rules; the wedding guest list guide takes that from the first draft to the final count. A company event needs a firm number and every attendee answering for themselves, so a corporate event starts with one person per reply and shows each guest’s company; corporate event RSVPs covers getting a headcount you can trust. A thirtieth mostly needs to know who is bringing whom. Each list lives in its own event, and one account can plan as many events as you like.

It does not send text messages or WhatsApp messages on your behalf: the WhatsApp option opens a message on your own phone with the guest’s personal link in it, ready for you to send. Invitations go one guest at a time from their row; there is no button that sends the invitation to everyone at once. It does not send reminders automatically. It does not print labels or envelopes. And it does not check people in at the door: a reply is a count, not a ticket.

The event’s data is stored in the European Union: the database in Google Cloud’s eur3 region (Belgium and the Netherlands), files in EU storage, the backend in Frankfurt. Some providers work from the United States under EU-approved safeguards, among them sign-in, which runs on Google’s US servers, and the service that sends invitation emails. Guests never create an account: they open their link, reply and close the page. Your notes and groups are never shown to them, and they cannot see who else is coming.