Meet Partiful, the Gen Z party-planning staple that's taking on Apple

When Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao decided to launch a party-planning startup in 2020, they settled on a business goal of "bringing people together in person."

The Covid-19 pandemic demanded the exact opposite.

Despite the challenge of the pandemic, Partiful survived, and five years later, the New York startup is now used by millions of people to plan events such as birthday parties, housewarmings and weddings.

The app's a favorite of those ages 20 to 30, and it's added 2 million new users since January, Partiful CEO Murthy told CNBC. The company has never revealed its exact base of monthly users.

Partiful drew attention on social media after Apple, known for replicating features from popular apps on the iPhone, launched its own event-planning service in February, and the startup posted a joke about "copycats" on its X account.

Of course, Partiful isn't the first party-planning app. It competes against not only Apple Invites, but also Eventbrite, Evite, Punchbowl and others.

Each service differs slightly in its target markets and features. Evite, for example, uses a "freemium" model, where certain invitation designs and other features are paywalled. Eventbrite is often used to promote and sell admission to large public events.

What sets Partiful apart from its competitors — and appeals to its Gen Z user base — is its often humorous, casual designs, some of which are created by Partiful's in-house designers.

"Friend invited me to a gathering that doesn't have a Partiful….feeling lost, confused, unprepared…much like when I (Gen Z) receive a phone call out of the blue," X user Athena Kan posted in August.

For the first quarter of 2025, Partiful averaged 500,000 monthly active users, up 400% year over year, with 9 out of 10 users on the app based in the U.S., according to estimates provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, a market research firm. That compares with Eventbrite's 4.4 million monthly active users, which is up 2% year over year, and Punchbowl with approximately 85,000 monthly users, which is down about 2% compared to a year ago. A spokesperson for Evite told CNBC that the service saw more than 20 million monthly active users for the first quarter of 2025.

It's unclear how many people still use Facebook's once-popular event-planning feature Facebook Events. Facebook's parent company, Meta, shut down the standalone app.

Murthy and Tao both went to Princeton University and worked at Palantir Technologies at the same time, but they didn't meet until they were introduced later by a mutual friend. Both were looking to move to the consumer-facing side of tech.

Tao, then a software engineer at Meta, wanted to leave the company to focus on products that were more relatable to daily life, and said that the social media company's goal of keeping users engaged on their apps sometimes can create "perverse incentives."

"For me, driving more people to spend more time staring at their phone, staring at this endless feed of content, wasn't super motivating, wasn't super meaningful to me personally," said Tao, Partiful's tech chief and a self-described "avid party planner."

Meta declined to comment.

Tao and Murthy went through a sort of "dating period" where they asked each other what they thought leading a startup together could look like. Among the voids they identified was how intimate social events, such as birthday parties where a host would be likely to see the attendees again, were still planned on text chains that made it difficult to track, communicate or plan an ideal event time with guests.

"If you're not sure when people are free, that's a really annoying problem," Murthy said.

She and Tao took the leap.

With few in-person events happening during the 2020 lockdowns, Partiful's engineering team focused on building the platform's text message-based infrastructure so that the service could be used by both iPhone and Android users.

Partiful's team, which has now grown to 25, operates out of downtown Brooklyn. The service is no longer limited to text messages and its website. The company launched apps for the iPhone and Android devices in 2023 and 2024, respectively, and Partiful now serves as a one-stop destination for organizing the different phases of planning and hosting a party. The company has reportedly raised $20 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

What makes Partiful fun for users is how customizable an invite can be.

Hosts can create a free birthday invite with a lime-green parody cover of Charli XCX's "brat" album, for example, or plan a girls' night out with a cover photo of Shrek in sunglasses. They can track "yes," "no" or "maybe" RSVPs under a portrait of Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, and invited guests can use a "boop" feature to send random emojis rather than a direct message to each other.

Party planners can also send out uniform text blasts to the group before and after the event and manage an in-app photo album for uploading memories.

Partiful is available for anyone to use, but Murthy said the company sees the most need for the service among young users in the "postgrad" period of life. That's a stage where people might be moving to new cities and away from their established college friend groups.

"You're starting your adult life and have to not only figure out, 'How do I rent an apartment? How do I work a new job? How do I exist in this new version of myself?'" Murthy said. "On top of that, you're also having to rebuild your entire social circle."

For the hosts and partiers in its user base, Partiful has become part of their social routine, and it has continued to gain traction online. The company told CNBC that over 60% of its active app users check Partiful every week.

As for Apple, Partiful isn't sweating its new rival just yet.

Apple Invites requires that users have an iCloud+ subscription to create events, though it's free to RSVP if a guest doesn't have an Apple account. That service starts at 99 cents a month in the United States. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Partiful is free, at least for now.

Like many other tech companies that rely on distribution services such as Apple's App Store, Partiful has a nuanced relationship with its much-larger counterpart. Partiful could lose some users to Apple, but it can also benefit from promotion by the app distributor.

That's what happened in 2024, when Partiful was named a finalist for Apple's App Store Awards for Cultural Impact, and won Google Play's "Best App of 2024." The app remained an "editor's choice" pick on the App Store as of publication.

For now, Partiful remains confident.

"We haven't really seen any users that have been leaving Partiful for Apple Invites," Murthy said.

WATCH: Why iPhones may get more expensive amid Trump tariffs