Party Pro Manager vs. Tidybash: Which is Better for Activity Providers? (2026)

Scheduling staff. Their Staff Portal handles availability, days off, assigning entertainers to gigs and having them confirm, and tracking what each of them is owed, on plans sized up to a hundred staff. They also send SMS to clients and staff, sync two-way with Google Calendar for the whole team, and handle contracts. Tidybash has none of those. Team logins and a shared dashboard we do have; the scheduling layer on top of them we don't.

Solo plans are $24, $35 and $69 a month. Team plans, which include the Staff Portal, are $46.99, $69.99 and $130.99. USD, no setup fee, month to month, with unlimited events on every plan. SMS is a $5 a month add-on, extra staff are $10 a month per ten, and extra brands are $20 a month per three. Tidybash is $49, $99 and $149 with every feature on every plan.

Staff. Their Solo plans have no staff user accounts and no Staff Portal at all, and the feature table on their own pricing page leaves both blank across all three Solo tiers. What you get instead is a single restricted admin assistant account. So if you want the staff scheduling Party Pro Manager is known for, you need a Team plan, and those start at $46.99 a month rather than $24. Team plans then cap active staff at ten, forty and a hundred, with more sold at $10 a month per ten. Within each track, the tiers differ on how much you can build: one catalogue and fifteen packages at the entry level, two catalogues and fifty in the middle, unlimited at the top.

No. There's a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, and after that you're on a paid plan starting at $24 a month for Solo or $46.99 for Team. They also run what they call an Outrageous Guarantee, which can get your money back after the trial ends within either 30 or 90 days, depending on the conditions you meet. The terms are worth reading properly, and we cover them under cancelling below. Tidybash has no free plan either. Our trial is also 14 days, and it does ask for a card.

No. Their feature list has no waivers, no RSVPs and no guest list. Invitations run through YAY-List, which their site lists as an integration and which is a separate product on its own paid subscription. So the guest side of the party happens outside the software the booking lives in, and it costs extra. Every Tidybash booking comes with a party page that carries the invitation, collects RSVPs and takes signed waivers before the day.

In Tidybash, yes. A booking stays editable after money has been collected. Add an add-on or a custom line item, adjust the headcount, apply a discount, and the total recalculates with the deposit already recorded against it, so what's still owed updates straight away. You don't rebuild the booking or open a second one alongside it.

Party Pro Manager users complain about how this works on their platform. Their event list handles changes to event details, but adding to a booking after a deposit has been taken is a recurring complaint. Say a school books face painters for a date in October, pays the deposit, then asks you to add a magician to the same party. If that comes up often in your business, it's worth testing in a trial before you commit.

No. Everything they publish is built for entertainers who travel to a customer's address: solo entertainers, small teams, agencies, magicians, face painters and character companies. There is no venue or location setup, so there's nowhere to configure a fixed site and run parties against its availability. Tidybash is built for activity providers with a venue, without one, or both.

Their published list is your website, a booking request button for your Facebook page, Google Maps for directions to events, two-way Google Calendar sync, one-way feeds to other calendars, YAY-List for invitations, Excel and CSV export, PayPal, Square, Facebook and Google login for staff, and YouTube for embedding video in staff training guides. Two things worth drawing out of that: card payments run through PayPal or Square, and invitations require YAY-List, which is a separate product on its own subscription. Tidybash lets you keep whatever processor you already use and record payments against the booking, or connect your own Stripe account and take card payments on the booking itself, with no booking fee added on top.

Probably not worth it. You would be paying two subscriptions to run one party, with the booking living in one system and the guest side in the other, which means copying details between them by hand. That is the work both tools exist to remove. Pick the one that matches the harder half of your job.

Then the staff argument doesn't apply to you at all, and the choice is narrower than it looks. Party Pro Manager's Solo Lite is $24 against our $49, so if you want the cheapest way to take structured booking requests and keep your events in one list, they'll do it for less. Tidybash is worth the difference if you want the guest side handled in the same place as the booking: invitations, RSVPs and signed waivers coming back through the party page instead of through your inbox.

Their plans are month-to-month with no long-term commitment, and their own wording is that you can cancel any time and your subscription expires at the end of the current billing cycle. No notice period is published. If you're early enough, their Outrageous Guarantee may also return your money: unconditionally within 30 days of your first payment or before your second payment, whichever comes first, and conditionally within 90 days if you can show you asked for help, set up your catalogue, added their booking form to your website and requested a troubleshooting call. Past that you're cancelling, not refunding. They do say they'll help you export your event and client data on the way out, which is worth doing before the account closes.

It depends what you're looking for. Some providers replace it with a generic scheduling tool and piece the rest together themselves. Others move to a different dedicated party tool, which is what Tidybash is. And if the entertainer scheduling is the part you can't lose, you're looking at staff scheduling software rather than party booking software. We put together a list of 17 tools kids activity providers use to book birthday parties, with the real prices we could find for each, in our party booking software pricing guide.