JoyReviews of withjoy.com

Overall the website was fairly functional, the themes were aesthetically pleasing and the wedding invitations looked very nice. The RSVP system worked quite well and being able to send emails to guests was good. I did feel, however, that Joy would greatly benefit by allowing greater flexibility in design - as there were very rigid templates that caused a lot of frustration for me. For example, when choosing pictures to put at the top of each page, Joy didn't allow the user to adjust the size or crop the image, which meant a lot of back and forth between editing the photos outside of the website and reuploading. I also felt a bit limited with how I could format the the font sizes and alignment. Joy also regularly changed settings after I had already set up my website and carefully formatted everything the way I wanted, and had it viewable by guests. Then, an update would happen and all my careful formatting would be disrupted and I'd have to redo a bunch of things. Another issue I had was that Joy advertised itself as being able to design invitations to match your website theme. While the borders of the invitations matched the website, the font selection was different, and I wasn't able to choose matching fonts for the ones available on the website design, which was extremely odd and frustrating. Finally, I had hoped to be able to send digital invites to my 5 or so guests that were coming from overseas, and mail physical invites to those in the country. I thought the digital invites were a great option and looked really nice but the minimum order I could make was 50, which would have cost me over $80 for the 5 invites I needed. This felt like bordering on a scam.

The site has a lot of cool features, but from the time we set it up to the date of our actual wedding, the UI had changed and more things seemed to cost money to use. Also, the registry feature for money gifts isn’t great. We had several guests confused with it because they didn’t think their gift went through (it didn’t - it just reserves it). In the end, we didn’t get some of those gifts because we weren’t going to ask our guests to formally send them and not just reserve them.

We really wanted to support a newer, smaller wedding website that is also LGBTQIA+ supportive. The website was hard to navigate and the app was even worse. Sending emails was very challenging until I got the hang of it. Importing contacts was a miserable experience because we hadn’t found the site until after collecting all our contact information. We had to manually input everyone and because of that, missed 3 people. The concept of people “reserving” a Venmo and then going to Venmo to actually pay and then going BACK to Joy meant that we also had several gifts from guests that we never received. I am NOT asking guests to give me money directly. So we lost out on those gifts which was around $1000. The website doesn’t allow you to make a seating chart - what a nightmare trying to match the theme that we had for Joy for everything else! And then trying to get that printed with the same finish and size as well. Took weeks for us to figure out. Overall would recommend sticking to more established websites like Zola or TheKnot.

The app was free which is great but is not very user friendly in the free version at least. So many things that would be nice to change but is locked in. Also do many things could only be done on the desktop version not on mobile.

I really love all of the functionality of Joy.com my biggest frustration is that there isn’t a template for non-wedding events. I recently held an event that had all of the same components as a wedding, and needed all the functionality of Joy.com but I wished there had been an option to choose the layout I wanted. I really disliked that all the templates were “WE” or “Both of us” and that was frustrating to have to change that all the time. It should be easy to have an option that has all the same functionality without that being the only option.

They sent emails to my guests without my knowledge. I only used the rsvp portion and not the website portion, so the emails really didn’t make sense when it tried to link to my Joy website that didn’t exist. You also can’t group people on the app the way you can on a desktop, and on a desktop only. Which is not that convenient when you’re on the go. The rsvp feature otherwise was helpful especially the messaging.

Your site is not as intuitive as I would have expected. Guest list usability: I haven't figured out how to add a+1 for someone if I didn't put it in originally. The guest edit screen is meh. There are questions in the question section that I don't want. It's not obvious how to just delete one. Another meh experience.

The website offers lots of options for personalization, which can be overwhelming, but that offers greater opportunity for your perfect look! The guest list has been so far, so good; it's easy to organize and track answers. Online save-the-dates were a great (and free) option! The registry has been a bit of a hit or a miss. It doesn't track sale prices, and it seems like way too many withjoy items go out of stock! The checklist it offers can be helpful, though. And gift tracking is going well, except for a mystery email about a gift (with a message) that never marked as purchased. Hm. Also, the phone app is really slow. And the registry page in general. Overall, though, withjoy seems to be serving its purpose! Has a nice name, too. :)