Headtable vs Seated

Design your floor plan to scale, collect RSVPs online and seat every guest — in one app, for one price. Headtable is the seating chart planner for weddings, receptions, banquets and parties, from a dinner party to 100 tables. Lay out the room, seat guests on the floor plan or table by table, plan with your partner and print a chart worthy of the day — offline, with no account. THE FLOOR PLAN • Enter your room's size and plan to scale — Headtable flags tables that sit too close • Set up the whole room in one step, up to 100 tables, and save a room to reuse for your next event • Round, oval, square, head and sweetheart tables, banquets up to 60 chairs, one-sided or joined tables • Dance floor, DJ booth, bar, cake and gift tables, stage; trace your venue from a photo (Pro) SEATING • Switch between the floor plan and a grid of every table, each chair where it really is • Drag a guest onto any seat, or tap them to pick a table • Color-code guests by group, with a ring for whose side they're on, in colors you choose • Search any guest or table, and tap anyone to edit their group, meal, dietary needs or note • Seat the head table first; Auto-arrange fills the rest, keeps families together and follows your rules • Keep-together and keep-apart rules that nudge you, and never block you • Lock finished tables, shuffle a dinner party, undo anything, and keep unseated guests in a tray • No list yet? Type the names you know and each takes a seat GUEST LIST • Groups you can fold away (the Smiths +2), sides, RSVP status, meal choice, dietary needs, VIPs, kids' meals and a note on any guest • Paste a whole list, import from Contacts, or open a CSV or Excel file, including exports from Zola, The Knot and Joy • Export your guest list as a CSV at any time, free PLAN TOGETHER • Up to four people — your partner, a parent, your planner — edit the same plan from their own phones, and changes appear in seconds. Inviting needs Pro; joining is free INVITATIONS & RSVP • Send each guest or household a private link; they reply without an app or account: coming or not, meal, allergies and a plus-one • Several venues, each with a time and a map, in your chosen design, with Add to Calendar • Replies land on your guest list and free the seats of anyone who can't come FOR THE CATERER AND THE DAY • Per-table view with meal counts, and a printed chart color-coded by meal • A web page for your venue and caterer with every table, meal and dietary need, updated as you change seats (Pro) • One tap turns the finished chart into a PDF for Messages, WhatsApp or Mail • Send each guest their seat in a personal text or email: "You're at Table 4" • Day-of check-in at the door • Quiet reminders 8, 4 and 2 weeks out PRINT & SHARE • The full print pack (Pro): a clean seating chart, per-table lists, an alphabetical escort list and a caterer meal summary in eight designs, plus place cards and table-number cards • A find-my-seat QR code (Pro): guests scan it at the door, type their name and see their table • Your own look (Pro): paper, accent color, font and art on every chart, card and invitation • A free Story card: your names, date and design as a picture for Instagram or TikTok • Several events, and Duplicate to try a second seating plan (Pro) WORKS OFFLINE, PRIVATE BY DESIGN Your guest list and chart live on your iPhone or iPad, so Headtable works with no connection. Invitation links, the find-my-seat and venue pages and a shared plan upload only what they need — never phone numbers or emails — and are deleted 30 days after the event. No account, no ads, no tracking. HONEST PRICING Free: your whole guest list, unlimited tables and rules, up to 50 seated guests, invitations with your first 8 replies, your chart as a PDF, and joining a shared plan. Headtable Pro, one purchase with Family Sharing, seats everyone and adds every reply, the full print pack, the QR code, the venue page, a venue photo, planning together and extra events. No subscription, ever.

Seating is the worst job in planning any event, and every app built for it makes you do the work yourself. They hand you a floor plan and a hundred little name circles to drag around. Seated does the opposite. You tell it who must sit together and who must not, and it produces the plan. A wedding, a gala, a company dinner, a conference, a fundraiser, a birthday — if people have to sit somewhere, and it matters where, this is for that. THREE TABS: PLAN, HALL, GUESTS Add tables on Plan. Arrange the room in Hall — tap a table and put a name on each chair. Guests shows the same chairs, in seat order. A guest without a chair is not on the list. TWO KINDS OF RULE, AND NO MORE Must sit together. Must not share a table. That is the whole vocabulary, because a seating plan you cannot explain is one you cannot defend to the guest who asks why they are at table nine. A rule between two people applies to everyone they are grouped with, so keeping one half of a couple away from someone keeps the other half away too. IT WILL NOT QUIETLY BREAK A RULE This is the part that matters on the day. If Seated cannot honour every rule, it says which rule was the problem and names the people involved, and it leaves them unseated rather than putting them somewhere you forbade. It never fudges the arrangement to make the numbers work. It tells you what is wrong in plain words — that you are six seats short, that a family of nine will not fit on a table of eight, that two people are set both to sit together and to sit apart. ADD A GUEST WITHOUT LOSING YOUR PLAN A late RSVP does not reshuffle the other hundred and nineteen. Seated leaves everyone exactly where they were and finds room for the new arrival. You have already told those people where they are sitting. FOUR THINGS TO PRINT Table plan, for the venue and the caterer — every table with its guests and headcount. Find your table, for the board by the door — one alphabetical sheet, sorted by last name. Numbers — one page of headcounts per table for final numbers. Notes — dietary and allergy notes, grouped by table. All four come from the same plan, so they cannot disagree with each other. Reprint them as often as you like; the list will change again before the day. YOUR GUEST LIST STAYS ON YOUR PHONE A guest list is a map of a family. Who is divorced, who is not speaking, who cannot be near the bar. Every name, rule and table is kept on this device and is never uploaded. Signing in creates an account so the app knows whose list is whose — the list itself never leaves the phone, and there is no tracking and no analytics. PRICING Building the list, setting the tables, writing the rules and reading the finished plan are free, and stay free. The four printed documents are a single payment of $29.99 — no subscription, nothing to renew, nothing to cancel. The event happens once.