You download a file called Altar.html. Double-click it. It opens in your browser. That's the entire installation process.
The first thing you see is an onboarding sequence — clean, unhurried, and actually well-designed. It asks for your names, your wedding date, your venue, and lets you set your budget across each event you're planning: the wedding itself, the rehearsal dinner, the honeymoon, the bachelor and bachelorette parties, and the bridal shower. Each one gets its own budget allocation, which feeds into a grand total you can see from the dashboard at any time.
The whole onboarding takes about 3 minutes. After that, you're inside the app. No email confirmation, no loading screen, no tutorial video you have to dismiss. Just: open file, answer a few questions, start planning.
Every time you open Altar, you land on the dashboard. It's a live summary of your entire wedding: budget spent vs. total, guest RSVP breakdown, task completion percentage, vendor count, and days until your wedding. Everything updates in real time as you work in other sections.
The dashboard also surfaces what needs your attention — upcoming payment due dates from your vendor hub, overdue tasks from your checklist, and an RSVP response rate so you always know where you stand on headcount.
The guest manager is where you'll spend a lot of time early in your planning. You can add guests individually or import from a CSV file. Each guest record holds: their name, group (family, friends, colleagues, etc.), RSVP status, dietary restrictions, meal selection, plus-one status, email address, phone, mailing address, invite sent date, and any notes you want to add.
The filter and sort system is genuinely useful. You can instantly pull up everyone who hasn't RSVP'd, everyone with a dietary restriction, everyone in the family group, or everyone who was invited but hasn't responded in over 30 days. When your caterer asks "how many vegetarians?" — two clicks and you have the answer.
Confirmed guests with meal selections automatically feed into the catering section, so your menu counts stay accurate without manual updating. Add a plus-one confirmation and their meal choice gets counted too.
The budget section is where Altar starts to show real depth. Your total budget is broken down across all your events — you can see your wedding budget, rehearsal dinner budget, honeymoon budget, and party budgets separately, or as one grand total. Within the wedding budget, you create categories (Venue & Catering, Photography, Florals, etc.) and add individual expenses to each one.
Every expense has: a vendor name, amount, deposit paid, balance remaining, payment due date, and paid/unpaid status. The payment due date field is the feature most people underutilize. When a due date is approaching, it surfaces on your dashboard as an alert. This alone has saved couples from missing deposits they'd mentally noted but not formally tracked.
The budget bar for each category fills as you log expenses. Go over budget on florals? The bar turns red and a warning appears on the dashboard. Under budget on entertainment? That surplus is visible at a glance and you can reallocate it intentionally rather than letting it disappear.
Every vendor you work with gets a record in the vendor hub: business name, contact person, phone, email, website, contract status (unsigned, signed, deposit paid, fully paid), contract amount, deposit amount, deposit due date, final balance due date, and notes. That's the full picture of each vendor relationship in one view.
One feature worth highlighting: the "Generate Reminder Task" button. Click it on any vendor record and Altar automatically adds a task to your checklist with the correct due date — one week before their payment is due. You don't have to manually track "I need to pay the DJ by March 14." It just appears in your task list at the right time.
Guest manager, budget tracker, vendor hub, tasks, timeline, catering, and seating — all included at no cost. No account required.
Download Altar Free →The seating section has two layers. The first is a table assignment view: you create tables (giving each one a name, number, and seat count), then drag guests from your unassigned list into seats. Altar tracks how many seats are filled at each table and flags any guests still unassigned. Filter by group or dietary need to make placement decisions easier — seating all the family tables together, for example.
The second layer (available in Gold) is a visual floor plan editor. You drag tables onto a canvas, resize the room, add objects like a dance floor, bar, or stage, and see a spatial layout of your reception. When you're happy with it, export it as a PNG to send to your venue coordinator — they'll actually love you for it.
Printable place cards are generated directly from your seating assignments. Each card includes the guest's name, table number, and meal choice. Print them at home or take the PDF to a print shop. No additional software required.
89 guests seated · 4 unassigned · 12 tables total · Print Place Cards ↓
Altar comes pre-loaded with over 80 wedding planning tasks organized by timeline — 12 months out, 9 months, 6 months, 3 months, 1 month, 1 week, and day-of. Every major decision and booking you need to make is already there, in roughly the right order, with suggested timing.
You can add your own tasks, set priority levels (urgent / normal / low), add due dates, and mark tasks complete. Tasks from the vendor hub (payment due date reminders) appear here automatically. The dashboard shows your overall completion percentage and highlights overdue items.
It's not a fancy project management system — it's a focused, comprehensive checklist for exactly this one life event. Which is exactly what it needs to be.
This is the section that makes vendors actually happy to work with you. You build a minute-by-minute run-of-show for your wedding day: what's happening, when, where, and who's responsible. Hair and makeup start time, ceremony processional, cocktail hour, first dance, dinner service, speeches, cake cutting, last dance, departure — every moment, scheduled.
Once your timeline is done, you export it as a printable run sheet. Hand copies to your photographer, venue coordinator, caterer, and DJ. Everyone shows up knowing exactly what's expected of them and when. The number of couples who skip this step and then have a chaotic wedding day is staggering — and entirely avoidable.
The catering section lets you build your full menu with courses, individual dishes, and dietary tags (Gluten-Free, Vegan, Dairy-Free, Nut-Free, Halal, Kosher, and more). Guest dietary counts are pulled automatically from your guest list — when you tag a guest as vegetarian, that choice shows up in your catering totals without manual entry.
The part that catches people off guard is the printable menu card generator. Design a menu card with your names, wedding date, and full menu — in the same elegant typography as the rest of the app — and print it as a PDF. Place one at every seat. It looks like something a stationer would charge $3–$5 per card to produce. You print it at home for pennies.
Every section of Altar has a print view. The app generates clean, formatted, printer-ready layouts — not "here's a browser print of the app." Actual designed documents.
What you can print directly from Altar: place cards (one per guest, with name, table, and meal), menu cards (full menu in an elegant card format), vendor contact sheets, the day-of run sheet, your full guest list, budget summaries by category, and a comprehensive planning report that pulls everything together. The print report alone is something most couples would pay a planner to produce.
Download Bronze free — dashboard, tasks, calendar & mood board with no account or subscription. Add Silver ($9.99) for the full planning toolkit, or Gold ($34.99) for every feature. One-time payments, permanent unlock.
See Pricing →After planning an entire wedding with Altar, the thing that stands out most isn't any single feature — it's the fact that everything talks to each other. The guest you add with a dietary restriction shows up in catering counts. The vendor payment you log hits the budget automatically. The task your vendor hub generates lands in your checklist with the right due date. Nothing is siloed.
Most wedding planning tools ask you to maintain five or six separate systems — a spreadsheet for the budget, an app for guests, a document for the vendor list, a notes app for the timeline — and the connections between them live entirely in your head. Altar makes those connections explicit, automatic, and visible.
Is it for everyone? Probably not for couples who want a polished mobile app with real-time collaboration and cloud sync. But for couples who want a comprehensive, private, offline planning tool that works on any laptop and never expires — there genuinely isn't anything else that does what Altar does.
The free version is worth downloading just to see what's in it.
Everything described in this walkthrough is in Altar right now. Download the free version, open it in your browser, and spend 20 minutes clicking around. The onboarding takes 3 minutes and nothing requires an account or payment to try.
Download Altar free at getaltar.co — and if you have questions, reach out at altarsoftware@gmail.com.