Choosing between POOK and Partiful for your next gathering

Most people arrive at this comparison with one sentence in mind: I want something like Partiful, but it has to work for my group. That is a fair way to frame it. Partiful is free, widely used in the United States, and organised around a public-feeling RSVP page that guests reply to and a text blast that pushes updates to their phones. It is good at the part of an event that happens before anyone shows up. POOK starts from a different question — what happens during the four hours everyone is actually in the room — and works backwards to the invitation. This page lays the two side by side without pretending either one is a superset of the other.

What each product is actually built around

Partiful, described only in terms anyone can verify from its own public pages, is a free invitation service, US-centric in its defaults, that sends text messages to guests and gives every event a shareable RSVP page with a social, everyone-can-see-who-is-coming feel. That is the whole shape of it, and it is a coherent shape.

POOK publishes an invitation as one link plus a matching QR code. Guests open it in a browser, answer, and then come back to the same address on the day, where the page has turned into a live room. Nobody downloads anything and nobody makes an account. The unit of pricing is a published invitation, not a venue and not a head. You can read the whole model on the pricing page, and the day-of surface is described in more detail under features.

People weighing this decision usually have two other names on the list: Evite and Paperless Post, both long-running United States invitation services organised around designed cards delivered to a guest list. Everything said below about where POOK differs from Partiful applies to them in broad strokes as well, and the dedicated Evite comparison goes through that one in detail.

How a guest experiences each one

This is where the two diverge most visibly. On POOK a guest taps the link and sees the poster, then an RSVP control with three answers: attending, still deciding, or can’t make it. They type a nickname between 2 and 16 characters, pick a gender option (female, male, non-binary, or prefer not to say), and if they are attending they may leave a one-line note to the host of up to 120 characters. That is the entire identity POOK ever asks for. No real name, no phone number, no email, no password. The session lives in an HttpOnly cookie scoped to that one invitation, which is why one browser can hold separate sessions for several gatherings at the same time without them colliding.

A guest can change their answer at any time while the page is open. A “still deciding” answer that is still standing 24 hours before the start time is read as a decline in your numbers and releases the seat it was holding, so your headcount stops being optimistic on the morning of the day. The stored answer itself is never rewritten.

Side-by-side on the things people actually ask about

What Partiful does that POOK does not

Three things, and they are not small:

• It reaches phones for you. POOK never sends a text or an email, because it never collects a phone number or an address from your guests. Distribution is your job: paste the link into the group chat, drop the QR into a story, print it on a card.
• It is free without a ceiling on how many events you run. POOK gives one free published invitation per account; after that it is $1.49 for a single day or a monthly plan.
• It is the familiar default in the US. Your guests may already recognise the page. Familiarity has real value when half the list is not technical.

What POOK does that Partiful does not

The day itself. Once the start time arrives, the invitation link opens live entry for the window you set — a gathering must run between one and 24 hours — and the same page carries a group chat (messages of 1 to 300 characters, deleted 48 hours afterwards), 32 Play Kit activities grouped as quick, with the body, conversation and memory, a Mood Pulse for anonymous mood reactions, a Moment Room of shared prompt cards, a shared photo gallery, and a Memory Capsule where each guest writes one sentence of up to 280 characters that only they can see. The host’s recap shows how many capsules were written, never their contents.

There is also the multilingual side. POOK localises the guest screens themselves, not only the marketing site, which matters if half your list reads Korean and half reads English. Text you type yourself is never machine-translated.

Where the free line falls on POOK

Being precise about this saves disappointment. Free, once per account: publish one invitation for 30 guests, using public templates or a blank canvas, share it by link and QR, collect RSVPs with the 120-character note, let guests save the date to a calendar, and let them browse the Play Kit shelf. A POOK watermark stays on the invitation. Not included in free: AI drafts, the full 450-template library, live realtime games and chat, rooms, the memory and recap tools, the Dress Rehearsal participant-screen preview, and watermark removal. One Day at $1.49 unlocks all of that for one invitation. Extra capacity is $0.90 for each additional block of 30 guests, and self-serve tops out at 450 guests per invitation; larger than that goes through contact.

Who should not switch

If your event lives or dies on text-message reach, if you need a guest list you can export to a spreadsheet, if you sell tickets or collect money from guests, if you need plus-ones, meal choices, seating charts or a gift registry, or if you run many small events a month and want them all free, POOK is the wrong tool and you should stay where you are. POOK has no waitlist when an invitation fills up either — guests past capacity are blocked, not queued.

A reasonable way to decide

1. Write down the hour of your event that you most want to go well. If it is the hour before, the invitation matters most. If it is the middle of the party, the room matters most.
2. Count your list. Under 30 people fits the free tier exactly; between 30 and 450 you can price it in blocks of 30.
3. Check how you will actually reach people. If the answer is “our group chat”, POOK loses nothing by not texting.
4. Try the free invitation before paying anything. Publishing it costs nothing and you keep the link.

If you want the mechanics rather than the comparison, the walkthrough at free online invitation with RSVP covers publishing end to end, and the Evite comparison takes the same honest approach against a different product. The POOK home page is the shortest overview of the whole thing.