Planning a wedding from scratch is a time-consuming process that often leads to stress and anxiety. How many people will attend? What’s your total budget? How much money should you spend on each vendor? These are all questions that you’ll need to answer when planning your big day. Thankfully, the right tools can make planning your wedding a breeze.

Wedding Budget Calculator

Struggling to stay within your budget while planning your wedding? TheKnot has a tool that can help. The site’s Wedding Budget Calculator lives up to its namesake by helping couples allocate their budget towards specific expenses. Simply enter your total budget, and it does the rest by providing a breakdown of how much you should spend for each wedding-related cost (e.g. flowers, dress, catering, venue, DJ, etc.). Using this tool should help to keep you within your budget, ensuring that you have enough money for all your desired services. TheKnot’s Wedding Budget Calculator is completely free to use, although you’ll need to create an account to access it.

WeddingHappy App

Available for Apple iPads and iPhones, the WeddingHappy app is another helpful tool that can assist couples with planning their big day. Once downloaded, you can use this app to create a to-do list, share wedding photos and other content on social media, set up payment tracking (know which vendors you’ve paid and which ones you haven’t), monitor your spending, create a wedding day countdown timer, and more.

Our Wedding Planner

If you have an Android smartphone instead of an iPhone, you won’t be able to download the WeddingHappy app. You can, however, download the Our Wedding Planner app instead. It performs many of the same functions as its Apple counterpart, such as managing your to-do list, creating a guest list, managing your invitations, setting a budget, creating a countdown timer, and more. Both Our Wedding Planner and WeddingHappy are free to download but contain optional in-app purchases.

MyWedding Checklist

Another great wedding planning tool is the MyWedding Checklist. It’s a complete checklist that includes all of the essential steps in planning a wedding from scratch. So if you feel lost and don’t know where to start, try using the MyWedding Checklist. You simply mark off each task as you complete it, and the tool reveals what steps remain. MyWeddingChecklist has a default template, but the site encourages couples to create their own custom checklist.

Photo credit: Parekh