Comparison
Curate is built for event florists who want proposals and the sales process around them handled in one place, while StemCount is built for the owner who wants the recipe, the wholesale order and the margin nailed down before a proposal exists at all.
Curate is a floral event proposal and business tool made for exactly this trade, which already puts it ahead of any general purpose software you might be looking at. The question is where you want the center of gravity. Curate organizes the client relationship and the proposal around it. StemCount organizes the recipe: focal, secondary, filler and greenery counts per piece, bunch rounding, freight, hard goods, design hours, install labor and the margin that survives all of it. If your proposals look right but your wholesale invoices keep surprising you, start at the recipe.
| What you are deciding | StemCount | Curate |
|---|---|---|
| Center of the workflow | The stem recipe and the cost stack built on top of it | The event proposal and the client process around it |
| Wholesale order list | Generated per vendor in bunches, ready to send Monday morning | Ordering is one part of a broader event florist workflow |
| Margin visibility | Live margin on every quote as you change counts, markup or labor hours | Financial views follow the proposal and business structure of the tool |
| Delivery day output | Hour by hour install, ceremony to reception flip and strike timeline | Event day planning sits within the wider platform approach |
| Best suited studio size | Solo florists through a small crew of designers and freelancers | Event florists who want a fuller business system around proposals |
| Substitution handling | Tiered alternates priced on the same recipe line before you send the quote | Depends on how the proposal and terms are written up |
| Time to first accurate quote | One evening building your seven core recipes | Setup scales with how much of the business you move into it |
On the right is the kind of tool Curate is and the job it is shaped around, rather than a list of what it includes at any given price. None of it stands still, so take the current position from them rather than from here. StemCount is published by MLJ, SASU and this page is written by Jimenez Julien.
There is a version of this business where the constraint is the sales process: consultations that go quiet, proposals that sit unread, contracts chased by email. If that is your bottleneck, a tool organized around the client relationship is the right purchase and the recipe math is a secondary concern.
There is another version where the weddings book fine and the money still does not show up at the end of the season. That is a costing problem, and it lives in the stems, the bunch rounding, the hard goods nobody priced and the four hours of install labor that got called a delivery fee. StemCount was written for the second version of the business.
A proposal describes the outcome: twenty centerpieces in a garden palette, an arbor asymmetric on the right. A recipe describes what it takes: nine spray roses, five ranunculus, three stems of eucalyptus and eleven filler stems per centerpiece, priced at what you will actually pay this week with freight included. Only the second one can tell you whether the price you quoted holds.
That difference shows up hardest under pressure. When a variety comes in short or the client adds two tables at the ten day mark, a recipe reprices the event in minutes because every dependency is already written down. A proposal, on its own, only tells you what you promised.
Plenty of studios evaluate these tools for a season with one wedding running through each. That is a reasonable test. Pick one mid size event, build the full recipe stack in StemCount, and compare the final wholesale spend against your quoted flower budget. The gap, or the absence of one, tells you more than any comparison page can.
If the numbers land where you expected, your existing costing method is fine and your money is better spent on the sales side. If the gap is a few hundred dollars on one wedding, multiply it by your season and decide from there.
It is built for wedding and event work, which is where recipe based costing pays off most. Corporate installations, galas and repeat monthly contracts all work the same way, since they are also priced by piece and stem. Daily shop orders and walk in retail are not what it is for.
Yes, client records import from a spreadsheet with name, event date, venue and contact fields. Recipes are worth building by hand rather than importing, because that first pass is where most studios find the counts they had been guessing at.
You lower counts or swap to a lower tier alternate on the recipe line and the price, the order list and the margin all move together. That is the point of costing from the recipe. You can show the client precisely what leaves the design when a number comes down.
Comparison
Details Flowers Software suits a studio that wants a wide design and business platform with client facing presentation at the center, while StemCount suits an owner who needs the stem arithmetic and the wholesale order to be right before anything else.
Comparison
HoneyBook handles contracts, invoices and client flow for creative service businesses of many kinds, while StemCount does the one thing no general tool can do for you, which is turn a floral design into stem counts, a wholesale order and a defensible price.
A head to head reads differently once your own guest count and table count are in it. Send a wedding you priced somewhere else and we will rebuild it from the recipe up, focal to filler, bunches rounded by variety, freight spread across the boxes. Then you can lay the two flower budgets side by side and see whether the gap is worth a switch.