Why this instead of a spreadsheet
Nearly everyone starts a seating chart in a spreadsheet, and nearly everyone abandons it somewhere around the third revision. The reason is not that spreadsheets are hard. It is that the actual difficulty of a seating chart is not arithmetic — it is the handful of people who must not end up at the same table. A spreadsheet cannot know that, so every rearrangement means manually rechecking the same awkward pairs.
That is the specific problem this tool is built around. You tell it which pairs must stay apart, and from then on it treats those as hard rules: the automatic arrangement will never break them, and if you place people together by hand, the table is flagged immediately. Everything else — the drag and drop, the capacity counter, the printable output — exists to support that one idea.
How your data is handled
The tools run entirely in your browser. Guest lists, class lists, table layouts and rules are stored in your own device's local storage and are never transmitted to a server. There is no account system, because there is nothing to store an account against. This is a deliberate choice: guest lists and student names are sensitive, and the safest place for them is a device you control.
The practical trade-off is that a chart you build on your laptop will not appear on your phone, and clearing your browser data will remove it. Save a PDF once you are happy with a chart — that is your durable copy.
What it costs
The tools on this site are free to use, with no seat limits, no watermark on printed charts and no trial period. The site is supported by advertising. If a paid tier is added later, the core planning tools described on these pages will stay free.