What free means here
Open the planner. There is no account, no email box and no trial clock. The planner never stops working partway: it holds up to 1000 guests across up to 100 tables, and every part of planning the seating is free at that size or any other.
| Free | Print pack, €9.99 once |
|---|---|
| The whole planner: 7 table shapes, drag, resize, rotate, duplicate, rename | The print-ready poster: PNG up to 300 DPI (less on the largest sheets and in Safari), vector SVG, print or save as PDF, and a 3 mm bleed PNG, with no watermark |
| Up to 1000 guests across up to 100 tables, added one at a time or pasted as a list | Place cards |
| Colour-coded groups, auto-seat, and seating rules to keep two guests apart or sit two together | Table cards |
| Undo and redo, guest search and the over-capacity warning | The caterer sheet, table by table, led by the dietary roll-up |
| The Room: every table drawn where it stands, on screen | The print floor plan, the guest list (CSV) and the table list (TXT), for plans of 50 guests or more |
| The guest list as CSV and the table list as TXT, with tables and diets, for plans under 50 guests | One design for all of it: the style, an accent colour, plain white paper or the style's own (the caterer sheet always prints on white), English or Portuguese wording, and A4 or US Letter for the cards and sheets |
| Save and open a project file (.tablout.json) | |
| The print floor plan for the venue, for plans under 50 guests | |
| Every file on screen in Download before you pay, the poster in all four styles and both layouts, clean and in full |
Where the line is
Three files depend on the size of the plan: the floor plan, the guest list and the table list. Count everyone on your list, seated or not. Under 50 guests, the print floor plan is free, with a small tablout credit, and so are the guest list (CSV) and the table list (TXT). From 50 guests, all three are part of the print pack, alongside the poster and the cards, and there is no free version to download. Nothing is watermarked on screen: you see every file in Download before you pay, and the Room, where your tables are drawn in position, stays free at any size.
So the pack is the finished files for the day: the poster at the entrance, the cards on the tables, the sheet for the kitchen and, for a larger plan, the floor plan for the setup crew and the lists for the caterer. Everything you need to plan the event and check the arrangement is free, without an account.
Under 50 guests, if you do not need printed stationery, you need never pay. Plenty of people put a tablet on the door, or write escort cards by hand. Seating chart vs escort cards weighs those options up.
Where your data lives
Your plan is stored in your browser's localStorage. In practice:
- Nothing about your guests is uploaded to us. We do not have a copy of your list, because we never receive one.
- There is no account to breach, no password to leak and no marketing list you have been added to.
- The plan is tied to that browser on that device. Open tablout on your laptop and it is there; open it on your phone and it is not.
- Only one plan lives in the browser at a time. Starting a second event replaces the first in storage.
The honest risk, and the fix
Browser storage is not a backup. It disappears if you clear your site data or browsing history, if you use a private or incognito window and close it, if a device-cleanup app tidies up behind you, or if your browser evicts storage under pressure. It also will not follow you to a new laptop.
Do this once and stop worrying. When your plan is roughly right, hit Save Project. You get a .tablout.json file. Email it to yourself or drop it in your cloud folder. That file is the real copy of your seating plan. Reopen it in tablout any time, on any device. Save again after any big change. The print pack unlock is not in that file. It lives in this browser: to unlock another device, copy the unlock code from the print pack card in Download and enter it there. The number on the Stripe receipt is a different thing and cannot be checked.
The same file is how you keep two plans at once. Save wedding-v1.tablout.json and wedding-v2.tablout.json, then open whichever you want to work on.
What no account means, both ways
Being straight about this is more useful than pretending there is no cost.
| What happens here | |
|---|---|
| Time to first table | Seconds. There is nothing to sign up for or verify. |
| Your guest list | Stays in your browser. We never receive it. |
| Opening the plan on another device | Only through the saved project file |
| If you clear site data | The plan is gone unless you saved the file |
| More than one plan | One in the browser, as many as you like as files |
| Working on it with someone else | Not supported. There are no sharing links. |
| Marketing email afterwards | None. We never ask for an address. Stripe asks for one at checkout, to send your receipt. |
No account buys you speed and privacy, and costs you a manual save. For most people planning one event over a few weeks, that is a fair trade. If you need three people editing the same plan at once, tablout is genuinely not the tool. It has no sharing links and no collaboration.
What you can build in the free planner
Nothing below is held back, at any size, except the three exports that follow the guest line.
- Seven table shapes: round, rectangle, square, oval, U-shape, L-shape and banquet. Drag them into place, then resize, rotate, duplicate and rename as needed.
- Paste a whole guest list, one name per line. Add a comma and a group name, as in Tom Everitt, Colleagues, and the group is applied automatically. A diet in brackets, as in Tom Everitt (vegetarian), Colleagues, is picked up too.
- Colour-coded groups: Family, Friends, Colleagues, Plus Ones, plus up to 16 custom groups of your own.
- Auto-seat, which seats the whole list by group on a best-fit basis, a different arrangement each press, and reports who did not fit. That report tells you whether you have a capacity problem before the day.
- Seating rules: keep two guests apart, which auto-seat never breaks, or ask for two to sit together, which it tries for.
- Undo and redo, a warning when guests outnumber seats, and a search box for finding one name in a long list.
- Exports: the whole project as a file, free at any size. The print floor plan, the guest list as CSV and the table list as TXT are free for plans under 50 guests; from 50, they are in the print pack, and you see each one on screen before you pay.
- Mobile support, for the inevitable moment when you are rearranging table six on a train.
Undo covers what you have done since you opened the planner. Save your project file at milestones as well: it is the version you can go back to next week.
A sensible free workflow
- Confirm your table count and sizes with the venue before you start. How many guests per table covers the usual capacities.
- Open the planner and place your tables. Duplicate one table rather than adding each from scratch.
- Paste the guest list with groups appended.
- Run auto-seat, read the did-not-fit report, then move people by hand.
- Save Project. Email the file to yourself.
- Export the CSV or TXT list for the caterer, and the floor plan for the venue: all three free under 50 guests, in the print pack from 50.
- Only at the end, once nobody else has dropped out, decide whether you want the print pack.
If you have not built one before, how to make a seating chart walks through the thinking rather than the buttons, and the wedding seating chart guide covers the specifics of a reception.
Beyond weddings
The planner does not care what the event is. The same tables and groups work for a corporate event, a banquet, or a classroom. For a classroom, use rectangles or squares in rows, with groups standing in for reading sets or behaviour groupings, and print a fresh floor plan each time you reshuffle. It prints free while the class list is under 50.
Common questions
- Is the planner free, or is it a trial?
The planner is free at any size, with no trial period: up to 1000 guests and 100 tables. The project file, and seeing every file on screen before you pay, cost nothing either. The print floor plan and the CSV and TXT lists are free for plans under 50 guests; from 50 guests they are in the €9.99 print pack. That pack is the only paid thing: the print-ready poster, place cards, table cards, the caterer sheet and, for plans of 50 or more, the print floor plan and the two lists.
- Do you store my guest list?
No. Your plan is saved in your own browser's local storage and is never sent to our servers. We have no account system, so there is nothing of yours for us to hold.
- What if I clear my browser data?
The plan is lost. This is the real trade-off of not having an account. Use Save Project to download a .tablout.json file. That file is your backup and reopens in the planner on any device.
- Can I keep more than one seating plan?
Only one plan lives in the browser at a time. To keep several, save each as its own .tablout.json file and open whichever you need. Opening a file replaces what is currently in the browser.
- Is there a watermark on the poster?
No. The poster is shown clean and in full on screen in Download, so you can check the layout, style and size before you pay. There is no free download of it. The print file, with every full name and no mark, in PNG, SVG, print or save as PDF and a 3 mm bleed PNG, is in the print pack.