The Best HoneyBook Alternative
for Event Planners

CRM is where HoneyBook shines, so let's dig deeper. With HoneyBook, you get customizable stages within your sales pipeline - and that's great. With Ripluo, you get that too, but you can also set how much money you think each deal is going to be worth and what the probability of closing actually is. You can communicate with your team: "Hey, this one is 100% booked even though it's still in this stage." Or you can let Ripluo automatically estimate those probabilities based on your pipeline stages. On top of that, Ripluo lets you log activity - phone calls, meetings, notes - with a click of a button. You can add custom fields to your contacts, like a client's favorite ice cream flavor if you're the kind of planner who remembers the fun facts year in and year out.

Now, let's talk about company management. With HoneyBook, you can log some companies, but can you do it across multiple types? With Ripluo, you can save a company as a vendor, a client, a partner, or a sponsor. Maybe you have three favorite DJ companies - they're not clients, but you want them in your system as vendors. And then there's the BCC email feature: Ripluo gives you a unique email address so that when you send an email to a client, you can blind carbon copy that address and it automatically logs the conversation to the right contact in your system.

Booking the event is just one side of it. HoneyBook absolutely does not compete when it comes to actually planning the event - you've got to bring in somebody else like Aisle Planner for that. And at $69.99 a month for up to 15 projects, that's a real cost. So let's compare what you'd actually get. With Ripluo, you're not just creating a basic timeline - you can add breakout rooms, external links, locations, and detailed team instructions. Need a setup crew with specific instructions? Create the team, assign them, and give them exactly what they need. Budget tracking isn't just per-project either - one budget can be spread across multiple events. If you have one big budget covering three different dinners at three different locations, you're tracking it all in the same place.

And there are things Ripluo does that neither HoneyBook nor Aisle Planner offer. You can have a seven-stage pipeline to book the right venue - useful when you're scouting different venues in different cities with different dates and need to track where each one stands and how much they cost. You can manage all of your volunteers and all of your sponsors, including different sponsorship packages, negotiation status, and likelihood of booking. Aisle Planner is great for weddings, and they've got a couple of wedding-specific tools like seating charts and wedding websites that Ripluo doesn't currently include. But if you're planning anything beyond weddings - 5Ks, birthday parties, conferences, corporate events - Ripluo has the tools built for all of them.

While all three platforms have comparable features for proposals, contracts, and invoices, there are some key differences in how they work. With Ripluo, you can create one contract template or one proposal template, reuse them over and over again, and they live naturally in the digital world - clients can accept your proposal with the click of a button, sign your contract, and then you can convert it into an invoice and get paid faster. The entire flow is connected from quote to invoice to contract, instead of managing separate documents in separate workflows.

In the modern digital era, almost every tool you use has AI - but how are you using it? This is where HoneyBook and Ripluo are two of the bigger comparisons. HoneyBook's AI is going to help you with email drafts, a meeting notetaker, lead enrichment, and things like that. Ripluo's Buildr AI is primarily focused on helping you plan your events. It will actually create checklists for you, actually create event schedules, and log them directly into the system. But you can also chat with it like you would ChatGPT - need email templates? Just ask. And one of the best things about Buildr AI is that because it's built into your event planning system, with a click of a button you can give it your event context and it knows what you're talking about: how many people, what the dates are, what the budget is.

Now that we've looked at all of these different features, let's talk brass tacks and look at the actual math. If you're using both HoneyBook and Aisle Planner - one for booking the event and one for planning the event - you're looking at $59 a month for the Essentials tier plus another $69.99 for Aisle Planner. That comes to $128.99 a month, or over $1,500 a year. Ripluo Pro gives you everything both of those tools offer - and more - for $49.99 a month. Even if you need to upgrade to the Enterprise plan for more events and contacts, that's $89.99 a month, which is still less than the two-tool stack.

Which Should You Choose?