Seating plan software compared

There are three ways people actually do this, and they suit very different situations. This page includes our own tool, so read it with that in mind. The recommendations are honest anyway, including the places where something else is the better buy.

1. Desktop seating software

The established option. PerfectTablePlan is the best known. It runs on Windows and Mac, works entirely offline, and is sold outright rather than by subscription. At the time of writing that is $29.95, £19.95 or €26.95 per user, with a money-back guarantee.

You enter the guest list yourself, or import it, and then assign seats automatically or by dragging. It is mature, fast, and it does not care whether you have an internet connection.

When it is the right choice

If you run events regularly, a one-off licence beats paying per event or holding a subscription. Ours included. Buy it once, use it forever. If you work in venues with bad wifi, offline is a real advantage rather than a talking point.

What you are taking on

All the data entry. Every name, every dietary requirement, every note about who should not sit near whom, typed in by you or chased over text messages first. For a 150-guest wedding that is a substantial evening's work before the seating even starts.

2. Full event platforms

At the other end, platforms like RSVPify handle the whole event: registration and RSVPs, a form builder with custom questions, ticketing and payments, email invitations, check-in apps, badge printing, and integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot and Zapier. Seating charts with drag-and-drop assignment are part of that, alongside meal choices and dietary handling.

It is subscription-based, with a free plan and paid business tiers starting around $39 a month on their business pricing page, rising steeply for larger plans.

When it is the right choice

When seating is a small part of a much bigger job. If you are running a conference with ticketing, badge printing and a CRM to feed, you want a platform, and buying a separate seating tool alongside it is a false economy.

What you are taking on

Cost and surface area, if seating is the hard part of your event. A monthly subscription for a tool you use twice a year is poor value. And a platform built around registration volume tends to treat the room as an afterthought. The seating view is usually a diagram, not a scaled plan of your venue.

3. A form, exported into an arranging tool

The most common approach of all, and it is not really a product: collect replies in Google Forms or Typeform, export the spreadsheet, then paste it into whatever will arrange tables from it.

It is free, it is flexible, and you can ask guests anything you like. It also breaks down as soon as the guest list moves, because every late reply means exporting and reconciling again. We have written about how to make this method work and where it gives out.

4. Where this site fits

UbiFrui Seating collapses the form step and the seating step into one place. Guests fill in their own details from a link: dietary requirements, who they are coming with, anyone they would rather avoid, and one open question about themselves. Those answers feed a suggested plan directly. Nothing is exported and nothing is reconciled.

Two things follow from that which the other approaches cannot offer. The open answer means seating can be based on something other than how you know people, and it gets printed inside the place card as a conversation starter. And because the room is laid out to scale, flagged conflicts are checked by actual distance, so two people you separated are marked if they end up back to back at adjacent tables.

Pricing is per event rather than by subscription: free up to 15 guests, then from £9, with an annual plan for people running events regularly.

Which to choose