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 email gate or the subscription. Open it, build the plan, close the tab.
If you are here for a wedding, the wedding seating chart guide takes you through the whole job in about half an hour. For any other event, the table plan generator guide does the same, and starts by settling what a table plan, a seating plan and a seating chart each mean.
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 analytics is a cookieless page-view count plus product events such as a table added, a file exported or checkout clicked, which carry no guest data. The privacy page lists them.
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, and no real-time collaboration. "These two must not share a table" now exists — it was the most-requested thing by a distance. Open Seating rules in the guest list, set the pair under Keep apart, and auto-seat will route around them; drag someone into a rule by hand and you get a warning rather than a block. Sit together works the other way, as a preference auto-seat tries for. For the rest, the step-by-step guide explains the order that works: 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, at any size: the tables, the guest list, auto-seating, the Room, the project file, and seeing every file on screen before you pay. The floor plan for the venue and the CSV and text exports are free for plans under 50 guests; from 50 guests they are in the pack. What is free and what costs money is set out as a table, line by line, on its own page.
The paid item is the print pack: the print-ready poster, place cards, table cards, the caterer sheet and, for plans of 50 guests or more, the print floor plan and the two lists. The printed ones share one design you adjust: the style and colour, the style's own ground or plain white paper (the caterer sheet always prints on white), English or Portuguese wording, and A4 or US Letter for the cards and sheets. That is a single payment of €9.99, not a subscription, and still no account.
One honest caveat on the "no email" part: checkout runs through Stripe, which asks for an email address so it can send you a receipt. Using the planner never requires one. What unlocks the pack on another device is not the receipt number but the unlock code, starting cs_, shown on the print pack card in Download after checkout — that one can be checked against Stripe, and the receipt number cannot.
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, at any size, permanently and without an account. The only paid item is the print pack, a one-off €9.99: the print-ready poster, place cards, table cards, the caterer sheet and, for plans of 50 guests or more, the print floor plan and the guest and table lists. Under 50 guests those three are free.
- 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.