Seatly: Seating Chart Planner
Who sits with whom, settled in one tap
Deciding who sits with whom is the part of an event everyone ends up solving in a spreadsheet, with sticky notes on a printed floor plan and several evenings spent moving people between tables. It isn’t just filling chairs: some guests can’t be seated together, others need wheelchair access or a high chair, vegan and gluten-free meals have to be grouped, and families and work colleagues are better off at the same table.
Seatly treats all of that as rules. You add your tables with their capacity and your guests with their tags and requirements, set who goes together and who stays apart, and one tap seats everyone while respecting every condition. Then you fine-tune whatever you want by hand.
The interesting part isn’t the interface, it’s the assignment: it’s a constraint solver, not a language model. Hard constraints are satisfied first — table capacity, guest conflicts, accessibility — and only then does it optimise the soft ones, which are keeping tagged groups together and balancing table sizes.
Free, no account and no subscription. Also available on Android as Smart Seating Planner.
Features
- One-tap automatic assignment of every guest, respecting the rules you set
- Dietary and accessibility needs as first-class rules: vegan, vegetarian, celiac, lactose-intolerant, reduced mobility and high chair
- Seating rules: who must sit together and who must never share a table
- Round or rectangular tables with their own capacity, plus multiple events and venues side by side
- Manual drag-and-drop fine-tuning, with a live count of assigned and pending guests
- Works offline, with no account and no subscription
Problems it solves
- Building the table plan for a wedding or event without fighting a spreadsheet and sticky notes
- Not forgetting each guest’s dietary and accessibility needs
- Resolving conflicts between guests without redoing the whole layout by hand
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