Carlos Bastarache: party-apps-uproxx.jpg

Monday, 30 October 2017

party-apps-uproxx.jpg

do you like going to work? Me neither! See how I got around that and got paid too!

Unsplash/UPROXX

From the end of October, we’re thick in party planning season. Thanksgiving meetups, holiday parties at work, New Year’s Eve bashes, New Year’s Day brunches… Really between now and the end of 2017, everybody’s going to be wildly social.

If you want to join the fun, these five apps could help.

Pro Party Planner

Available for iOS, Pro Party Planner does what it says; gives you a suite of professional party planning tools, letting you lay out seating charts and decoration plans, send and track invitations, bring on friends to manage aspects, and budget the whole thing for everyone. Yes, this may be a little bit industrial power for your intimate get-together, but if you’ve got a big bash coming, either for work or for fun, it’s perfect.

Wunderlist

For smaller scale gatherings, Wunderlist is an organizing app that lets you coordinate pretty much anything, including a party. It’s especially impressive due to its cross-platform nature; you can get it not just for iOS and Android, but on the web, the Apple Watch, even your Kindle. It’ll help you set up a timeline, hit you with reminders, and generally help you keep on track for your party so you don’t wake up to remember that you didn’t get decorations.

BigNight

What about a dinner party? If you’re done with the keggers and the parties where everybody stands in the kitchen for some reason, BigNight, currently only on iOS, will help you choose the right menu, sourced from the recipes you’ve tracked online, create shopping lists, generate reminders, and basically do everything but the cooking. It’s focused more on fancy dinner parties, and it’d be nice if there were a “potluck” function or a way to share features with others, but if you’ve been dreaming of a nice dinner with friends, this will help you make it happen.

Eventbrite Organizer

You’ve probably bought a ticket through Eventbrite at some point. Eventbrite Organizer is the flip side of this particular coin. If you’re setting up a fundraiser, or just are throwing a party costly enough you need a cover charge, you can sell “tickets” via the app, accept payment, track exactly how many of those tickets have been sold, and otherwise coordinate the cash end of things easily. Especially for fundraisers, this is one of the easier tools you have handy.

Evite

Normally we’d tell you to use Facebook here, but Facebook has people sick of politics or just their relatives jumping ship. Evite makes sending out invitations to your party easy and has more robust features since the time you had to hunt through your email folder to find the party. Definitely use Facebook as a backup, but in a world where everybody has an email, it’s a better tool to use.

What apps do you use to plan parties? Let us know in the comments!