Hobnob: Invitation Maker Reviews

I was notified by my good friend on Wednesday that his last day to meet with friends before taking a new job would be the upcoming Friday. With just two days notice Hob Nob allowed us to not just create an invitation but allow invitees to share memorable photos of their friend and colleague. Hob Nob gave us a great avenue to track head count of who was coming which also helped us prepare for how much food we would need and adequate space for the attendees. The great selection of options for invitation design made it quick and simple for this "non tech old guy" I highly recommend Hobnob. The thing I most appreciated was being able to post photos from the actual party for all those who attended or could attend to enjoy! Thank you for helping us send off our good friend with style.

Kevin and Jennifer Keyes

Hobnob is great! It sends invitations, and automatically sends reminders to the guests 24 hours before the event and again 1 hour before. It really takes the follow-up on getting RSVP's to the next level too by making it simple for people to reply. In today's world, where almost everyone has a smart phone and uses texting to communicate, it's the ideal way to plan a party! I literally had guests RSVPing the same day I sent the invitation out!! The reason it gets 4 stars instead of five is because it wouldn't let me add contact information directly to Hobnob (it had to be imported from my phone's contacts or a linked list), and it also has a handy chat feature BUT it required guests to download Hobnob in order to correspond with me (which several guests didn't want to do). I ended up ammending the invitation with my personal contact info for those who needed to connect and did not want to install Hobnob . Overall, a great app well worth the small fee if your guest list is large enough to outgrow the free number of invites!

Had the worst experience. It was confusing to alooot of my guest. Nobody read the text notification correctly. I couldn’t resend the invite for folks who lost the invite text msg in their text. So I had delete and resend again. There was no link where I could ask for guest to only bring one guest with them. I had to type that specific instructions in the details which nobody new was below the actual invite. They didn’t know that they had to scroll down to see the details. When I sent updates, the updated text msg only allowed people who downloaded Hobnob to view it. Nobody wants to HAVE to download Hobnob . I couldn’t message specific guest through Hobnob like I can using Evite. It was just not all worth using for me. The only thing that drew me to Hobnob was the motion invites. Hobnob had a very nice selection but not functional at all to me and pretty much allll of my guest. I had to do a lot more of texting people individual updates or just the invite itself because Hobnob wasn’t helpful with that AT ALL. Made my wedding planning extremely hard! Then I tried to leave my review on Hobnob to why I didn’t like Hobnob and the send feedback button wouldn’t work

this app does a lot of things well, and my favorite part is the fact that you can send invites through text message because it’s faster and more interesting than sending them via email. BUT there are some bugs that I’m hoping get addressed soon. Picture management is a challenge. After I upload photos, they display in “random order” and definitely not in the order I selected. That’s confusing to invitees. Also, it’s not obvious whether or not you can download and save photos (I assume you can but I haven’t figured it out yet). It would be super cool if you could also add video clips in the same storage area. Also, Hobnob doesn’t update when people respond to invites so it feels very clunky at times... I have to close and re-launch Hobnob just to get it to display the right number of RSVPs. Overall, I like this app but would have to see a lot of improvement to stay loyal. On the plus side, their customer service team has been very helpful when I’ve reached out to them.

I was really excited about using this service however my daughter and I spent time creating her birthday invite and I set her as a cohost. All seemed great until she tried to invite a guest. Hobnob shows the invite was sent and delivered to the correct phone number as a text, but the guest never got the invite. We tried multiple times and still nothing.

This is making Hobnob completely useless as the intent of sending invites via text message is not working properly. I have even activated the free trail which will charge my card once the week is up and it still isn’t working correctly.

Update- in response to the developer’s response......The persons phone was right next to me. They did not have Hobnob installed and did NOT get the text message with the invite. Hobnob makes it seem that the person does not need Hobnob to be notified they have an invite. It makes it hard to use because you then are forced to make sure everyone you invite downloads Hobnob first so they get notified. No one lied about anything.

Hob Nob looked to be a fun alternative to Evite and Paperless Post. They offer unique layouts and fonts as well options to add details the previous sites mentioned do not. Text notifications and option to text invites are nice. My frustration came near the end of creating my invite. Only on the hour, :15/:30 and :45 past the hour are options for start and end times. A 5 or 10 minute difference may not seem important but for my event it was. I didn’t want to start my invite over on another site (because I’m lazy) so I just went with inaccurate times and made note of it in the extra details section. The term “null” is used for any imported contact making it necessary to click on “null” to reveal the guest’s name. Total pain to do that every time I check rsvps so I had to write them down. Petty little complaint but I wish it I could use Hobnob in landscape view.

This is a very organized and creative app in that it has the ability, with out payment, to do the following: choose a creative template, make your own template, send up to 5 invitations per event (for 3 events), have automatic reminders sent to invitees scheduled, chat individually with invitees, create groups, chat with groups, add photos of the event, like certain photos, forward the invite to multiple platforms (Twitter, text, instant messages, copy link, etc), invitees can RSVP, keep count of adults and children together or separately, inviter can manually adjust the RSVP & number of attendance...and much more. You can earn 5 extra invites when one of your invitees registers themselves in Hobnob . Past this, to invite more people and have more than 3 events, you have to pay for it.

I’ve been using this app for a few months now and have really enjoyed it, and had lots of feedback that it worked really well for my monthly event invitations. However, they recently removed many of the features for pay only, and it’s made it quite difficult to coordinate my events. The changes also seem to affect the text messages/notifications so people aren’t actually seeing my invite anymore. Definitely bummed since it worked so well at first, but this will be the last event I’ll be using this app for.

Update: Appreciate your developer response, and I understand needing to charge in order to be sustainable. Unfortunately, $46 just to be able to send updates and I still have to individually contact people to check Hobnob to make sure they see the invite isn’t going to work for me right now. I’ll check back in a few months to see if anything has changed since I really did enjoy your product before.

Needed a way to do a digital invitation for my child’s wedding rehearsal dinner and after experimenting with several different apps, this by far was the best! Extremely easy to use and loved the fact all guest could communicate via this one invitation as a group… whether it was important information that needed to be shared about the event, random comments or questions from the guests, and even sharing memorable photos following the event! Was able to provide guest with location information of the venue and helped me keep up with attendance count to submit to my caterer. Definitely will use Hobnob again for any group gatherings!

I really liked Hobnob at first. The invite was easy to set up and add guests, there is a nice variety of invite themes, and it has the ability to monitor, update/edit rsvp’s, etc. However, about 15 days before my event I couldn’t update the rsvp’s anymore. I could only remove guests or add them as a co-host. The option to make updates should be available up until the day before the event, in my opinion. Knowing that the rsvp edit/update options change I probably won’t use Hobnob again, which is frustrating because it’s a great app otherwise. In addition, it would be nice to have a feature that allows the user to send a reminder. Hobnob does this automatically a few days after the original invite is sent, but I would have liked to send another reminder two weeks before, but it’s not an option.

Decided to use this to organize a bday party for adults meeting in another city. The creation of the invitation was great - lots of cool options and everyone rec’d the text with initial invite. My complaint/suggestion is that I wanted to be able to continue texting everyone through Hobnob after the initial invite was sent. However Hobnob isn’t designed to do that - so incorrect assumption on my part. After the initial invite - the users have to use Hobnob to see the group messages and apparently Hobnob isn’t that great about sending notifications consistently. So to ensure everyone rec’d important messages, I ended up sending group texts from my cell phone AND from the HobKnob app. I was hoping to just use the HobKnob app. Hopefully the push to text feature is something that can be added in the future.

There is some weird thing when I was trying to create the invitation for my daughter’s birthday party for 3 pm. The only option I had is 15:00. There was no way to change that. Also, some of the designs had date format in such a weird way: April 28,15....for us it looked like I put a wrong year but all it was April 28 (at) 15:00 hour. No designs had a year. That was very strange to me. Won’t use Hobnob again and I wish I wouldn’t pay for it.

To developer who responded with “there is no issue with app but rather it is your device setting being 24 hour format”. Thank you. I know I am using 24 hour format but I think your app should have option of editing time without attaching it to setting on my phone. I wonder why developer didn’t respond about issue with no year and having hour showing up right after month and day so it looks like it is a year not a time? The response didn’t change my mind about Hobnob .

I want to like and use your app and am even potentially willing to pay a reasonable subscription price to do so.

However, after reading the Terms of Use — Yes; some users do that — I was not sure whether this app sells, rents, gives, or distributes my phone number or my contacts’ phone numbers to third parties. If so, this should be stated clearly and up front. As it is the Terms of Use seem to imply that this app does not do that. I am skeptical, however, because, although I see the in app purchase, this sort of thing — selling user data — is a typical business model.

By the way— I gave it only three stars in part because I couldn’t bypass the “Please Rate this app” Popup unless I have it a thumbs up. There’s something wrong with the way that screen interacts with the iPhone X’ screen and keyboard.

I’ve been using this app for the last 6 months or so and have had nothing but a great experience. I have used it for parties and events personally and we use it at our church as a way to network and stay connected with events taking place through the week. It simplifies the stress that comes from planning an event with the auto reminders and easy design and communication with attendees. I also love the reminders I get for events I’ve been invited too. Being able to send a message to a group without the complications of a group text is also awesome. I highly recommend using Hobnob!!

I like the site, but there are a few things that I think need to improve.
1. There is no way to edit the guest list. My daughter entered mostly email addresses because she didn’t have everyone’s telephone numbers at the time & when she later got the telephone numbers I was not able to update the information.
2. There is no way to make a contact list directly on this app. You have to get contacts from your phone or enter information manually, but I don’t see a way to create a contact list to be able to refer to for future invites like I can on evite.

3. I like that I can add my own flyer, but there is no way to add my own fonts or background appearance, so You have to choose the very limited fonts and graphics on the site.

So far, kinda good. It has fun invite templates to use. The free version makes it a little cumbersome to send out invites. (There are only so many invites you can send out using text messages.)

The reason for 4 stars, not 5? I’ve had several guests say that they RSVPd but Hobnob did not update. I’ve had to manually update the attendance info for some. I can say, (for me) this aspect defeats the purpose of using or paying for Hobnob. I assume this is a glitch, not a feature. That has been the only aspect that has made me regret using Hobnob.

Nonetheless, we’ll get through this event and give it a chance to redeem itself at a smaller event later on. Based on how it performs at that event, I’ll update this review.

Overall Hobnob is pretty easy to use and for a basic e-vite allows you to customize a good deal. I’m rating it 3 stars due to the invitation limitations on the free version (which didn’t use to be there). You can only invite 10 people before needing to upgrade to a paid version which is no where near enough for a party or group gathering that would need an invite (I could easily put under 10 people in a group text). I only use an e-vite once a year so for me it’s not worth paying for Hobnob and potential added costs if they change like they have before (used to be able to invite more people on the free version). I will use another e-vite app this time around (or worst case scenario put out a group text or 2).

Free only allows 10 invites. Every time I attempted to send the invitations it would say there was a problem. If I didn’t get that error it would say it was sending but nothing ever went. Why would I pay even $4/mo for limited options on a product that doesn’t work?

After reading many of the reviews it seems like the most recent update removed a lot of features on the free or cheaper plans and they want you to pay $47/mo for full features. SERIOUSLY???? Who would do that unless it was a tax write-off?
Developers, more options for less money equals happy customers. Happy customers share the product and get their friends using it and in turn those friends spread the word to their friends, and so on. Unhappy customers find new products and advise their peers to not use said product. Just a bit of a tip for you.

I’ve been using Hobnob for the past 3years and love it, but I would say I use to be able to invite as many ppl as I wanted through Hobnob until they changed it. You now are given 10 invites free and have to purchase a yearly subscription. If you have many events it would be worth it, of course free is always better. Lol... The reason for the 4 stars instead of the 5 is because of that plus I wish that I could send out a group message to everyone I’ve invited instead of individual messages through Hobnob . Either way, it’s great and love the new feature where you can upload your own video and use it as part of the invite.

I loved Hobnob when it was free and allowed unlimited invites, reminders, and sent without errors. Now that they app costs money, Hobnob limits your invites. My usual guests for this annual event had trouble opening the invites or even receiving them. No reminders can be sent unless you pay extra. Confirmation reply’s were not working properly so I had multiple guests show up who said they sent an RSVP but it never registered a reply on Hobnob . I contacted customer service 4 times with concerns and issues regarding my annual event (which I’ve used Hobnob for previously), with a reply of absolutely no help or refunds due to the constant issues.

Hobnob was great for previous events when it was free, but I’ll never use it again with the awful changes and lack of customer service.

Beyond discouraged

We’ve used this app to host a few parties at our house and it’s great. Especially since we and most of our friends have deleted Facebook, it’s the solution we needed for Events.

My main complaint right now is that it doesn’t support landscape on iPad; it’s stuck in portrait. Considering that so many people use their iPad docked to a keyboard (like a classic laptop) for at least some of their day, this seems like a bizarre omission.

I also wish the chat feature let us share locations other than the one we’re in. Like “hey let’s all go meet at [that place over there].”

Original review:
So easy to use. Beautiful designs and you can use your own image even. I love that it uses text as well as email and it's super easy for guests to reply and rsvp. Will definitely be using this often! Thank you!!

Update:
Just opened Hobnob to create a new invitation to learn you now have to pay to send over 10 invites and apparently a bunch of other features aren’t available in the free version either. I loved Hobnob but I have no desire to pay any subscription fees for something I use 4-6x a year. If it were a one time app purchase I would’ve probably paid $5 or less but I can no way justify any monthly payment for this. I’ll probably have to find something else or go back to the old way of Facebook invites and text messages. It is a nice app and I enjoyed using it while it was free.