Seating: the hardest job of the wedding, solved
The seating plan is the last big task before the wedding and the only one people reliably cry over. It is not design — it is diplomacy with a fixed number of chairs. The good news is that it has a method, and a computer is better at the method than you are at eleven at night.
Rules first, names second
You record the constraints — who must sit together, who certainly must not, which group holds together — and the arrangement follows from them. Doing it the other way round, by dragging name cards, is how an evening disappears and a plan still breaks the one rule that mattered.
The app tries the combinations, you adjust
Thousands of arrangements are tested against your rules and the best one is offered. You then move whatever you want by dragging — and every change is checked against the same rules, so you find out immediately if a move has separated a couple or seated two people who should not be together.
Round tables and long ones behave differently
On a round table everyone can see everyone; at a long one a guest talks to four people, two beside and two opposite. The arrangement takes that into account, because on a long table who sits next to whom matters far more.
Children, wheelchairs and the people who need a quiet corner
Children are seated beside their parents, and a guest who needs space for a wheelchair gets a place where that space exists. These are not preferences to be balanced against a nicer layout — they are constraints, and the arrangement respects them as such.
When somebody declines, you see which seat opened
A reply changes the plan without rebuilding it. You see exactly which place became free, and can fill it or leave it. Nobody redoes the whole layout over one guest.
Every attending guest needs a seat
Including an infant with a high chair. Age group affects catering — the portion and the price — but not the demand for a place at the table, because a high chair takes up room exactly like an adult. Venue capacity is counted in people, not in meals.
It runs in front of you, and you can stop it
The arrangement is computed in your browser rather than on a server, in short slices with a progress bar and a stop button. You are never left looking at a frozen page wondering whether it is working — and if the first result is close enough, you stop it and adjust by hand.
Common questions
- Do I have to enter every rule before it will do anything?
- No. With no rules at all it will still seat everyone by household and by side, which is a better starting point than an empty room. Rules are what you add when you know something the app cannot guess — that two cousins argue, or that a grandmother should be near the door.
- Can I move people afterwards?
- That is the expectation. The arrangement is a starting point, not a verdict. You drag whoever you like; the rules are rechecked after every move and a broken one is flagged rather than silently accepted.
- What about divorced parents?
- Record it as a “must not sit together” rule and let the arrangement handle the rest. Equal distance from the top table and different tables tends to work better than any logic about who is more important — symmetry is what people read.
- When should we do the seating?
- After the RSVP deadline. Seating guests who have not confirmed is work you will do twice, and the second time in a worse mood. Do prepare the “together / apart” rules beforehand, though — those do not change.
- Can we print it?
- Yes — as a plan for the entrance and as place cards for the tables. The entrance list is ordered alphabetically by name rather than by table, because a guest is looking for their own name, not for their table.
- Is seating in the free version?
- It is part of the full version, a one-off 490 CZK. Up to forty guests everything else — the guest list, replies and the checklist — is free with no time limit.