I recently used Evite to send invitations for a party at my house. Overall, I was pleased with the experience. The selection of invitation styles was huge. The invitee tracking tool was informative. But the site's user interface made it too complicated to send an invitation. Worse, Evite hasn't really embraced the social networking space--there's no Evite app on Facebook nor Twitter integration. And the closest it comes to going mobile is sending SMS invites and offering a mobile site.
So I set out to find some alternatives to Evite to see if they could provide a better service.
Crusher provides a ton of options.
(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)CircleUp Though it's not specifically designed to provide invitations and tracking, CircleUp does let you invite others to an event and track their attendance. The page detailing whether or not invitees will be attending the event is especially good. But CircleUp simply isn't as useful as Evite, nor as convenient.
Crusher I like Crusher. It's simple and clean. Creating invitations can take less than a minute. But if you're the type who wants to tweak an invitation to fit your needs, the site also has a CSS editor. You can add video, chat, photos, and much more. It's great for the Web geek and the Web novice alike. And it's better than Evite.
Enclude Unlike Evite, Enclude lets you send e-cards. But its invitation creation tool doesn't provide as many planning options as Evite's. And if you really care about the design of the invite, you'll find fewer cards on Enclude. I also wasn't impressed with its invitee tracking tool. Simply put, it's no Evite.
Facebook Most of the people who I would invite to a party are my friends on Facebook anyway, so creating an event and sending out an invitation through the social network is quite convenient. Creating an invitation in Facebook takes less than a minute. Everyone can see who will be attending the party. Attendance tallies are updated as soon as the invitee responds. If you don't need to invite too many people outside of your Facebook friends list, Facebook is a fine invitation tool. It's much simpler than Evite.
Invitastic Invitastic is ugly, too simple, and unable to compete on any level with Evite. That said, it might come in handy when you want to quickly send out an invite to a couple friends and you don't want all the extras Evite provides. But even in those circumstances, I'm hard-pressed to find a reason to use Invitastic instead of other simple services, like Zoji.
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There's yet another new invitation service emerging: Crusher. In many ways this service is the antithesis of MyPunchBowl, which we've recently covered. Crusher's design is super-clean and simple, and it doesn't have the over-the-top feature set of MyPunchBowl. We like MyPunchBowl. But we also like Crusher.
The site does the things you would expect from an invitation service: You can invite friends and track responses. You can use the service to find a good date for an event, too, if you've got some flexibility. It's clean and light and very Web 2.0.
Crusher has an approachable design. But you can really mess it up if you want to.
(Credit: CNET Networks)What might not be be obvious is that the service was carefully designed for a younger crowd than Evite et al. Crusher design templates are totally open. When you're working on an invitation, you can access an embedded CSS editor to tweak everything about its presentation, from styles and colors to which information is included and where it is on the page. "Fifteen-year-olds are learning HTML in school," co-founder Phillip Bensaid told me. He wants his system to be open and transparent so they can bend it to their will in ways not possible with other systems.
It's also being built to give the music community the most flexibility. If a band creates an event in Crusher, a fan can "crush" (really, clone) the invitation and create a private version of it to wrangle his or her friends to go to the show. That's a neat feature.
The Crusher team is working on a Facebook version, which is key to any social organizing service these days.
I like Crusher because it's light and clean. It appeals to my geriatric design sensibility, and I'd be comfortable recommending it to nongeek Web users. The fact that it's wide open to Web nerds is interesting, and I'll be curious to see if people begin to use it as a platform in the way its developers hope.
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