A guest list, a room and a handful of rules about who sits where. Set them up once, let auto-assign draft the tables, then fix the draft together with your partner.
Free for up to 20 guests and 4 tables. No credit card required.
Set up the inputs properly and the chart mostly follows.
Import the spreadsheet and give every guest a category: family, college, work, the wedding party. Mark who has replied so the count is real.
Less decorating, more deciding.
Bring the guest list in from a CSV, including meal choices, dietary notes and allergies, and it arrives in the plan ready to seat.
Tables at the venue’s sizes, in the venue’s room, so the plan matches what gets set up on the day.
From seat these two together and keep those two apart to send the college friends to the tables tagged near the bar. The chart flags a move that breaks one.
Get a full first draft from your rules in seconds, see it before it is applied, and change anything you would not have chosen.
Send a view-only link to your partner, your parents or the venue. On the Planner plan, your partner can edit alongside you.
Export a PDF for the coordinator and a spreadsheet for the caterer with every guest’s table and meal.
Get the inputs right first. A clean guest list with a category on every name, and a room with the venue’s real tables, solves most of the problem before anyone is seated.
Agree the rules with your partner before drafting, not after. Five or ten rules usually cover it: who must sit together, who must not, and which groups belong near the front.
Let auto-assign produce a draft and read it as a draft. It follows the rules you gave it, and it cannot know that two friends have not spoken since college. That part is yours.
Then hand it around once, collect changes in one go, and export the final version for the venue a week or two before the wedding.
A step-by-step method for assigning tables.
The traditions worth knowing before you start.
How many tables your guest count needs.
The list, the room, the rules and the draft in one place.
When the count changes the week before, update the reply status, move the few people it affects, and export again.
You can seat a wedding with a spreadsheet and sticky notes on a printout of the room. People do. It works until the third change, when the sticky notes and the spreadsheet disagree.
PlanSeats keeps the list and the room as one thing, so a change is made once and the numbers stay right.
| By hand | PlanSeats |
|---|---|
| Table counts added up by hand | Seats and totals counted for you |
| Rules remembered, or not | Rules written down and checked |
| A first draft takes an evening | A first draft takes seconds |
| The venue gets a photo of a printout | The venue gets a PDF |
It will draft all of it from the rules and categories you give it, and show you the result before applying it. Expect to move a few people by hand. That is the part only you two know.
Ask your venue coordinator for a floor plan and the size of their tables. If you have a PDF or photo of the floor plan, you can place it under your tables and trace the room.
Yes, on the Planner plan ($8.99 a month), which lets you invite up to three people to edit. On Free you can share a view-only link.
Free for up to 20 guests and 4 tables. The whole wedding on the Planner plan is $8.99 a month.
Export the guest list as a spreadsheet. Every row carries the guest’s table, seat, meal choice, dietary needs and allergies.
Set up the list, the room and the rules once, get a draft in seconds, and finish it with your partner.
Free for up to 20 guests and 4 tables. No credit card required.