About tablout

tablout is a small, independent seating chart maker. It runs entirely in your browser, it has no accounts, and it never sees your guest list.

Why it exists

Seating charts are a genuinely annoying job, and they arrive at the worst possible time. The last fortnight before an event is when the final numbers land and everything else is already booked. Most of the tools for it want an email address before they will show you anything, and several want a subscription for a task you will do exactly once.

tablout is the version of that tool without the gate. Open it, build the plan, export what you need, close the tab.

What happens to your data

Nothing leaves your browser. Your tables, your guest list and your groups are stored in your browser's local storage. That is the same place a site remembers your dark-mode preference. There is no server-side database and no account, and the only analytics is an anonymous page-view count.

That is a real trade-off rather than a marketing line, and it cuts both ways:

• Good: nobody can lose, sell or leak a guest list we never had.
• Less good: clearing your site data deletes your plan, and it will not follow you to another device on its own.

Which is why Save Project exists and why we nag about it. It downloads a small file you can email to yourself, keep in a cloud folder, or open on another machine. Treat that file as the real copy. The privacy page spells out the details.

What it is good at, and what it is not

It is good at the mechanical part: laying out tables, taking a pasted guest list, filling seats sensibly by group, and producing something printable. A plan for a hundred guests takes around half an hour.

It is not a venue design package. There is no room background image, no scale drawing, no stage or dancefloor objects, no real-time collaboration, and no way yet to say "these two must not share a table". That last one is what people ask about most. Those are hand decisions today. If you need them, the step-by-step guide explains how to work around it: place the difficult people first, then let auto-seat fill in around them.

How it is built

A single-page application in React, deployed as static files. No backend, which is why hosting it costs almost nothing and why there is no account system to maintain. The seating chart poster is generated in your browser. The layout engine works out the type size and column count that fit your guest count, then draws the result to a canvas at up to 300 DPI, less on the largest sheets and in Safari.

What it costs

The planner is free and stays free: up to 50 tables and 500 guests, auto-seating, CSV and text exports, the floor plan image, and a watermarked preview of the poster. The one paid thing is the print-ready poster file. That is a single payment of €9.99, not a subscription, and still no account.

There is also a tip jar, which is genuinely optional and funds nothing more exciting than the domain renewal.

Who makes it

Made by one person in Portugal, after building one of these by hand one time too many.

Get in touch

Bug reports, feature requests and "this seated my mother-in-law next to my ex" stories are all welcome. See contact.

Common questions

Is tablout really free?

The planner is, permanently and without an account. The only paid item is the print-ready poster file, which is a one-off €9.99 payment.

Do you store my guest list?

No. It lives in your browser’s local storage and is never uploaded. That also means you should use Save Project to keep a copy of your own.

Can I use it for something other than a wedding?

Yes. It is used for corporate dinners, banquets and classrooms as well.