Short answer: these three are not really competitors — they are three different products people reach for at the same moment. Evite sells recognition: everybody knows what an Evite is, and that lifts reply rates, at the cost of advertising on your guests' screens. Paperless Post sells the card: the best design catalogue in the category, priced per recipient. Partiful sells the vibe: free, funny, mobile-first, with date polling and waitlists, at the cost of asking every guest for a phone number.
If none of those trades appeals, there is a fourth answer at the bottom of this page.
All prices and behaviours below come from each company's own published pricing or help documentation, checked 25 August 2026.
Side by side
| Evite | Paperless Post | Partiful | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free designs free; Premium $17.99 (12) → $99.99 (750) | Coins per recipient; ~$0.50 Basic, $1.05 Premium, $1.44 All Access | Free, no paid tier |
| Free allowance | Free design gallery | First 50 invitations on free designs | Everything |
| Ads shown to guests | Yes, on free designs | None | None |
| Guest must provide | Nothing | Nothing | Name, phone number, texted code |
| Design catalogue | Large; best designs are Premium | Best in category, plus printing | Minimal by design |
| Date polling | No | No | Yes |
| Waitlist / capacity | No | No | Yes |
| Payment collection | No | No | Yes |
| Cost at 150 guests | $99.99 | ~$155 on Premium | $0 |
Evite: recognition, paid for with advertising
Evite has been the default name in American digital invitations since 1998, and for a lot of people the word simply means an online invitation. That is a real asset. When an Evite lands, most American guests already know what it is and trust it, which lifts reply rates on its own, and nearly three decades of scale means the deliverability is mature and a 700-person send does not fall over.
The cost is on your guests' screen. Free Evite invitations display advertising, and Evite lists ad removal and gifting-suggestion removal among the upgrades that convert a free design into a paid Premium send. Premium is banded, so one extra guest can move you up: 13 guests instead of 12 takes a send from $17.99 to $36.99.
Choose Evite if guest familiarity matters more to you than the advertising, or you want a licensed or animated Premium design and are happy to pay the band price.
Paperless Post: the card is the point
The design catalogue is the best in the category by a wide margin, with collaborations with real stationers and artists. The envelope, liner and stamp treatments give a digital card the ceremony of a paper one, and Paperless Post also prints, so one design can carry across paper and screen. No advertising anywhere — it is paid rather than ad-supported. Flyer, its lighter free product, is a genuinely good way to send something casual.
The model is Coins, charged per recipient, so the price of your event scales directly with your guest list. Roughly $0.50 a guest on Basic, $1.05 on Premium and $1.44 on All Access. The design decisions that make a card look expensive — liners, backdrops, stamps — are exactly the ones that move it up a tier.
Choose Paperless Post if the invitation is part of the event: a wedding, a milestone birthday, a formal dinner, anything where guests will notice and remember the card.
Partiful: free, funny, phone-first
Partiful has the best sense of humour in the category, and it matters — event pages that people want to open get answered. It is genuinely free with no advertising and no premium tier, which is rare and worth saying plainly. Date polling, capacity limits with an automatic waitlist and payment collection are all built in, and none of the other three products on this page has any of them.
The trade is the RSVP flow. A guest enters a name and phone number, then types a code texted to that number. Partiful documents using collected numbers for automatic reminders, host text blasts and surfacing events that a guest or their mutuals are invited to. For a young mobile-native list that is invisible. For a mixed list — colleagues, a school class, a grandparent, anyone on a work phone — it is exactly where replies stop.
Choose Partiful if your guests all have phones and will not blink at a code, and especially if you want date polling, a waitlist or to collect money.
The fourth option
The pattern across all three is that you pay in one of three currencies: money, advertising on your guests, or your guests' phone numbers.
RSVora is the version that asks for none of them. One tier, free at any guest count, no advertising anywhere, no watermark, no card on file, and nothing required of a guest beyond opening the link — no account, no app, no phone number, no code. The dashboard counts adults and children separately, shows sent-and-opened per guest, sends an automatic reminder on the RSVP-by date and exports to CSV.
What it does not do, honestly: no date polling, no waitlist, no payment collection, no video invitations, and the design catalogue is not Paperless Post's. If any of those four is the reason you are choosing, choose the product that has it.
Full side-by-side pages with a source link on every claim: vs Evite, vs Paperless Post, vs Partiful.
All trademarks belong to their owners. RSVora is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Evite, Paperless Post or Partiful.