The Differences Between a Wedding Planner vs. a Wedding Coordinator
While planning your wedding, you may encounter tons of words and phrases that you don’t know. Some of the things you see may seem to be interchangeable, but many of the words and phrases mean very different things. If you’re looking into having some help plan your wedding or making sure someone is there to make your wedding day run smoothly, you may not really be sure what you’re looking for. Hearing from friends, family, and the internet, some people may tell you you need a planner and others may say a coordinator is a must. While they may seem identical, there is a pretty large difference between a wedding planner and a wedding coordinator. Here we will go through the key differences to help you better understand and decide which of these you would like to hire.
The Packages
A wedding planner will typically have more included in their packages. There will be more meetings and they will do the research to provide you with professional vendors. The planner may help you come up with the designs for your wedding and help you select the items that you would want for your wedding to feel a certain way for you and your guests. A wedding coordinator will usually have a meeting or two to make sure they get to know your wedding, but they will take your details, designs, vendors, and plans that you have already come up with and make them all run smoothly. Both of them will have similar items within their packages such as contract review or a final venue walkthrough, but you will get a lot more from a wedding planner’s packages than a wedding coordinator.
While it may be different for each planner, my own coordination package includes a details meeting, venue walkthrough, contract review, an open door policy, help with your timeline, the wedding rehearsal, and the 8 hours of coordination on the wedding day. This tends to average at about 20-30 hours of work put into your wedding. My full service package is for finding/researching all of your vendors, 4 details meetings, 2 extra hours of day-of coordination, and all of the other things from my coordination package. This is usually 55-75 hours of work, which is where the other differences come into play.
When to Hire
Typically, a wedding planner will be one of the first few vendors you would hire. They will help you find all of your vendors so you don’t have to. A wedding coordinator can be hired when you’ve found your vendors closer to the end and focuses mostly on the day running smoothly.
The Effort
While both a wedding planner and a wedding coordinator will both put in 100% of their effort into your event, there is definitely a difference in the amount of work that a wedding planner will provide versus a wedding coordinator. A wedding planner will likely spend 60+ hours working on your wedding. You may be thinking that it only includes the time that you have meetings with your planner, but this also includes any research, communication, design, or planning it takes to make your dream wedding a reality. A wedding coordinator will be putting in the time for the communication and planning, but often a coordinator doesn’t put in the time and work for designing your event and researching the vendors for you. Typically, you would have already thought of your design and you would have already selected your vendors yourself.
The Time
The hours spent talking to, meeting with, or having on your planner is significantly more than you would work with your wedding coordinator.
The Cost
If you haven’t already inquired with a planner or coordinator, you may be shocked to know there is a huge difference in how much each vendor costs. Wedding planners will be spending many more hours working for you, which makes sense that they will cost significantly more than a wedding coordinator. Depending on their experience, their location, and their packages, the range for a wedding planner may be $4,000-15,000 while a wedding coordinator may be between $1,000-$4,000. The ranges can be even smaller and larger than this as well depending on where and what you are looking for.
While that may seem like a lot of money, I find that if you can budget for a coordinator it’s definitely worth it. Not even because it’s my job, but because it really helps to ensure that you can enjoy your wedding and not have to think about the timing, the details, or the problems if/when they come up. Most couples that hire a coordinator say that it is worth it to make sure the day runs smoothly. And if you don’t have the time or energy to plan all of the details and you have it in your budget, a wedding planner can save you over 100 hours worth of agonizing over details and make sure you have vendors you can trust while knowing you are making good decisions for your day.
If you would like more help to plan your wedding, you can reach out to me at hello@firmlyrootedevents.com. I’ll send you monthly tips and my checklist so that you can stay on track while planning your wedding.
