The best CRM for wedding and event planners in 2026 depends on what you actually manage. Maroo is the top pick for planners who prioritize payment management, contractor payouts, and low fees. Aisle Planner wins for full-service wedding planners who need timelines, style guides, and seating charts inside their CRM. Planning Pod leads for high-volume or corporate event operations. This guide breaks down seven platforms across the features that matter most to working planners: client management, contracts, invoicing, payment fees, and the ability to pay subcontractors.
A general-purpose CRM like HubSpot is built around sales pipelines and contact records — useful for enterprise teams but misaligned with how planners work. Wedding and event planners need software that handles:
Most general CRMs force you to bolt on separate invoicing, payment, and tax tools. Platforms built for the events industry fold all of this together, which is where the real time savings come from.
Maroo is an all-in-one business management and payments platform built specifically for US wedding and event professionals. It covers leads and CRM, quotes and proposals, e-signature contracts, invoicing, payment collection, contractor payouts, and 1099-NEC e-filing — all in one place (maroo.us).
What makes Maroo stand out among CRMs is the payment model. Maroo lets you pass all processing fees to clients on every plan. Your business pays $0 in card or ACH processing costs. For a planner billing $150,000/year, this can save $2,000–$3,000 compared to absorbing standard Stripe/HoneyBook rates.
Maroo also offers Book Now, Pay Later: clients split their payments over time, but the planner receives the full amount within approximately one business day. For planners whose clients ask about payment plans, this eliminates the cash-flow risk of installment billing.
For contractor management specifically, Maroo is the only platform in this category with all three components in one place: free B2B ACH payouts, W-9 storage, and 1099-NEC e-filing.
Pricing (maroo.us/pricing, as of June 2026):
Processing fees:
Trust signals: 13,000+ businesses; $350M+ in invoices processed (see maroo.us for current figures).
Best for: Any wedding or event planner — from solopreneurs on the free plan to established studios on Business or Pro — who wants to eliminate processing fees and manage contractors without a separate tool.
Honest limitation: Maroo does not have dedicated event logistics features like timeline builders, floorplans, or seating charts. For planners who need those tools, Maroo works best paired with a planning-specific tool or used by vendors (photographers, florists, DJs) rather than full-service planners managing complex event production.
HoneyBook is the most established all-in-one platform in the US wedding industry, with a large template marketplace, AI-assisted workflow automations, and a polished client-facing experience (honeybook.com).
Pricing (honeybook.com/pricing, as of June 2026):
Processing fees:
Best for: Planners who want a large library of pre-built templates and AI-assisted email sequences without manual setup time.
Honest limitation: HoneyBook raised prices by up to 89% in February 2025. It has no contractor payment feature and charges an uncapped 1.5% on all ACH transactions — expensive for large wedding contracts.
Dubsado is a highly customizable client management platform with conditional workflows, public proposals, schedulers, and canned email sequences. It's the tool most often chosen by planners who want to automate every client touchpoint (dubsado.com).
Pricing (dubsado.com/pricing, as of June 2026):
Processing fees (Dubsado Payments, via Stripe):
(Dubsado Help Center – payment processing, as of June 2026)
Best for: Planners who invest time upfront to build complex automation sequences and want to minimize manual follow-up over hundreds of client interactions per year.
Honest limitation: The learning curve is real — Dubsado is one of the more complex platforms to configure. The Starter plan ($35/month) includes no automations and is not suitable for active businesses.
Aisle Planner is purpose-built for wedding planners and coordinators, combining CRM and business management with event production tools: timeline builders, style guides and color palettes, seating charts, guest management, and vendor portals (aisleplanner.com).
Pricing (aisleplanner.com/pricing, as of June 2026):
Annual billing saves approximately 10%.
Processing fees: 3.2% flat rate via WedPay (Fullsteam) for credit/debit; 1% for ACH (Aisle Planner Help Center).
Best for: Full-service wedding planners who manage the entire event production process and want their timelines, seating, and client communication all inside one tool.
Honest limitation: No fee-passing feature, no contractor payments, and pricing scales with event volume — a very busy year costs significantly more than a slow one.
Planning Pod is an event-management platform built for planners managing many concurrent events, with task management, BEOs (Banquet Event Orders), attendee registration, event websites, and venue calendar management (planningpod.com).
Pricing (Capterra – Planning Pod, as of June 2026):
All plans include unlimited users.
Processing fees: Payment processing via integrations (Stripe, PaySimple, Square). No built-in fee-passing.
Best for: Corporate event planners, association managers, and venue operators managing 25+ simultaneous events who need operational depth over client experience aesthetics.
Honest limitation: More expensive than most alternatives in this category, and better suited to operational management than the boutique client-experience focus most wedding planners prioritize.
Plutio is a general-purpose business management platform covering projects, proposals, contracts, invoicing, and time tracking. It's not wedding-specific but is comprehensively featured and competitive on price (plutio.com/pricing, as of June 2026).
Pricing:
Annual billing saves 16–20%.
Processing fees: No native payment processing — integrates with Stripe (2.9% + $0.30 for cards; 0.8% ACH capped at $5 via Stripe's standard rates). No fee-passing.
Best for: Event planners who also operate other service businesses (photography studios, styling, consulting) and want one platform for all of it.
Honest limitation: No wedding-specific features, no contractor payment tools, and no native payment processing means an additional Stripe account and potential per-transaction fees you absorb.
HubSpot's free CRM is a powerful contact and deal pipeline manager used widely in B2B sales. For planners handling high inquiry volume, it offers sophisticated lead scoring, email tracking, and pipeline reporting at no cost (hubspot.com/products/crm).
Pricing: Free CRM (unlimited contacts and deals). Paid hubs (Marketing, Sales, Service) start at $20/month per user and scale significantly upward — Marketing Hub Professional starts at $890/month (HubSpot pricing).
Processing fees: HubSpot Commerce Hub offers payment links, but HubSpot charges a percentage per transaction on top of standard processing rates. Not designed for event industry billing structures.
Best for: Large planning agencies or studios with a dedicated sales/marketing team that needs sophisticated lead tracking and CRM reporting, and uses separate billing software.
Honest limitation: HubSpot is not built for event planners and lacks contracts, e-signatures, payment schedules, or contractor management. The free tier is powerful as a lead CRM but requires significant additional tools to run an event planning business.
Sources: maroo.us/pricing; honeybook.com/pricing; dubsado.com/pricing; aisleplanner.com/pricing; Capterra – Planning Pod; plutio.com/pricing; hubspot.com. As of June 2026.
This table models a planner billing $150,000/year in client revenue, with 70% paid by card and 30% by ACH. Subscription uses annual billing. Processing fees are absorbed by the business (not passed to clients) except for Maroo, where fee-passing is default.
Assumptions: $150K client revenue; 70% card / 30% ACH; average transaction $3,500. Card fees: HoneyBook 2.9% + $0.25; Dubsado/Plutio/HubSpot via Stripe 2.9% + $0.30; Aisle Planner 3.2% flat. ACH fees: HoneyBook 1.5%; Dubsado 0.8% capped $5; Aisle Planner 1%; Stripe 0.8% capped $5. Maroo Business passes all fees to clients; business cost is subscription only. Note: HubSpot free CRM requires additional billing tools; HubSpot Commerce Hub adds transaction fees. Confirm all rates on each platform's current pricing page before switching.
If your biggest pain point is what you're paying in processing fees — or the headache of paying subcontractors and filing 1099s at year-end — Maroo is worth testing before anything else. The Starter plan is free with no expiration date for businesses processing under $10,000/month in client invoices. See current features and pricing at maroo.us.
What is the best CRM for a wedding planner?
For most wedding planners, Maroo is the best overall CRM because it combines client management, contracts, invoicing, payment processing with fee-passing, and contractor payouts in one free-to-start platform. Planners who need dedicated event logistics tools (timelines, floorplans, seating) should add or substitute Aisle Planner. Planners who prioritize workflow automation should evaluate Dubsado.
Do wedding planners need a CRM or just a spreadsheet?
A CRM becomes essential once you're managing more than five active clients at once or billing over $50,000/year. Spreadsheets can't send payment reminders, collect e-signatures, track lead status, or integrate with payment processing. A CRM like Maroo or Dubsado automates the repetitive follow-up that consumes planning time — and the free starting tiers make switching costs essentially zero.
What is the cheapest CRM for event planners?
Maroo's Starter plan is free with no expiration for planners processing under $10,000/month (roughly $120,000/year in client invoicing). HubSpot's free CRM is free for unlimited contacts but lacks event-industry billing features. Harpsen costs $8.33/month (annual billing) and is the cheapest paid option. Dubsado's annual Starter plan runs $16.67/month but includes no automations.
Which CRM handles client payments with no fees?
Maroo is the only CRM in this category where your business pays zero processing fees. On every Maroo plan, you can pass card and ACH fees directly to clients at checkout. B2B ACH transfers to vendors and contractors are free. The other platforms — HoneyBook, Dubsado, Aisle Planner, and Planning Pod — all require the business to absorb some or all processing costs unless you use Dubsado's surcharging feature (available in most, but not all, US states).
Is HubSpot good for wedding planners?
HubSpot's free CRM is excellent for managing large inquiry volumes and tracking deal pipelines, but it's not built for event planning workflows. It lacks e-signature contracts, milestone payment schedules, event logistics tools, and contractor payments. Most wedding planners would need to pair HubSpot with three or four additional paid tools to replicate what Maroo or Dubsado offer out of the box — often at a higher total cost.
