Most seating-chart advice is written for someone planning one wedding. If you run ten, twenty or forty events a year, almost none of it applies. You are not choosing a tool for one evening of moving names around. You are choosing something you will open on a Tuesday for a conference dinner and on a Saturday for a 200-guest wedding, and hand printed output to a caterer who has never heard of it.

This autumn the question got forced on a lot of planners at once, because Prismm (formerly AllSeated) goes view-and-export only on 1 October 2026 and closes for good on 31 December. If you are in the middle of that move, our step-by-step migration guide covers the export order. This article is the other half: how to judge the thing you move to.

Six requirements a couple never has

A couple needs a chart. You need a workflow. The gap is these six:

  1. Several live events at once. You are rarely working one plan. Switching between events should take a click, not a separate file, a separate login, or a separate paid slot.
  2. Cost that doesn't scale with your calendar. Per-event pricing is fine for one wedding and punishing at thirty. Per-month pricing is fine in season and wasted in February.
  3. Documents a client will actually look at. A floor plan with your studio name on it reads as your work. One with a software company's name on it reads as something you forwarded.
  4. Vendor-ready formats. Catering wants per-table guest lists with meal counts. Your stationer wants a CSV they can merge into escort cards. Both want PDF or CSV, not a screenshot.
  5. An answer to "where does our guest list live." Corporate clients ask this now, and increasingly so do venues. "It stays on my laptop" is a shorter answer than a security page.
  6. It has to work in a ballroom. Load-in day is the one day you need the plan most, and it is often the one day the signal is worst.

The cost math, done per event

Ignore the sticker price and divide by your real event count. Three pricing shapes, and where each one wins:

  • Per event (a one-time fee for each chart). At 3 events a year this is usually the cheapest thing on the list. At 25 it is the most expensive, and it makes you hesitate before opening a tool for a small rehearsal dinner, which is exactly the hesitation you don't want.
  • Per month. Wins for high-volume venues and agencies running several events a month year-round. Costs you real money in your off-season unless you remember to cancel, and cancelling mid-contract is how you lose access to a plan you still need in March.
  • Per year, flat. Predictable, survives a quiet February, and the only shape where the per-event cost keeps falling as your year gets busier.

Run your own number before you decide: take last year's event count, multiply by the per-event fee, and compare it to twelve months of the subscription. Our priced comparison of the main Prismm replacements has the current figures for the tools most planners are looking at, including the desktop one-time option, which is worth a look if you work from a single machine.

One more line in that math: how long a rebuild takes. A tool that re-seats around your rules in seconds saves more hours across a season than any price difference between two of these tools.

Reusable rooms are worth more than 3D

If you run events at the same three hotels, the thing that saves you the most time is not a rendered 3D walkthrough. It is being able to lay out that ballroom once and start from it next time. Ask about it directly before you commit, because it is rarely on a feature list and it is the single biggest per-event time saving a venue-heavy planner can get.

The related trap: floor-plan files almost never move between tools. Guest lists export as CSV everywhere. Layouts do not. Whatever you pick, assume the room gets re-entered by hand once, and pick the tool where that hour is least painful — which usually means simple shapes and seat counts, not a furniture library.

What the client, the caterer and the venue each need

Three different documents come out of one chart, and it is worth checking all three before you buy:

  • The client wants a floor plan they can read at a glance, with table numbers matching whatever you have been calling them in email, and your name on it.
  • The caterer wants per-table lists — who is at table 9, and how many of them are vegetarian. Counts, not a picture.
  • The venue and your stationer want the flat data: an escort-card CSV, an alphabetical name-and-table list for the board at the door. If you are deciding between a board and individual cards for a given event, escort cards vs. place cards vs. a seating board walks through which one suits which room.

If a tool gives you the pretty floor plan and not the other two, you will rebuild them in a spreadsheet the week of every event.

Before the site visit, know your table count and your square footage

Two numbers stop most planner-side surprises: how many tables the guest count needs, and whether the room holds them with a dance floor. The table math guide covers the first, and how much space a reception actually needs covers the second, including what to ask when a venue quotes you a capacity number. Take both to the walkthrough rather than working them out afterwards from a floor plan PDF.

For galas and corporate dinners, the seating politics are a separate skill from the layout — sponsor tables and VIP order are covered in corporate gala seating.

An hour-long test before you commit a season to anything

Run this with one real event, not a demo file:

  1. Paste a real guest list, plus-ones and households included. Count how long it takes and how much cleanup it needs.
  2. Rebuild one real room — table shapes, seat counts, dance floor, head table. Time it. That is your per-event setup cost forever.
  3. Enter your worst keep-apart pair and confirm the tool warns you when the rule breaks, rather than leaving you to check by eye.
  4. Change 10% of the RSVPs and re-seat. This is the job you do most often and the one most demos skip.
  5. Print all three outputs — floor plan, per-table lists, escort-card CSV — and look at them as a caterer would. Check your own name is on them.
  6. Take your data back out. Export or back up the plan and confirm you can still read it if the tool disappeared tomorrow. Anyone who lived through the Prismm wind-down knows why this is on the list.

Where Seatwise fits, stated plainly

We make one of these, so here is our own line without the sales voice.

Building is free and needs no account: paste the list, drop tables, set keep-together and keep-apart rules, press Auto-seat, move anyone by hand. Events sit side by side, so switching between a Saturday wedding and a Tuesday gala is one click. Nothing uploads — plans live in your browser's own storage, which is also why you keep the JSON backup.

Printing and copying the exports is the paid part. For a couple planning one wedding it is a $12 key, once, for that event. For planners there is a Planner licence at a flat $49 a year: unlimited events in that browser, all four exports (floor plan, per-table lists, printable "find your seat" board, escort-card CSV), and your studio name and logo on the print views instead of ours. It checks the key about once a month rather than every time you open it, so a ballroom with no signal doesn't lock you out on load-in day.

What it doesn't do: 3D renders, AV diagramming, room measurement, or client collaboration in the software. If your clients expect a walkthrough render, you need a different tool, or Seatwise alongside one.

FAQ

Is there free seating chart software for professional planners? The planning part is free in several tools, including ours. The part that is almost never free at professional volume is printing and client-facing export without a watermark or a competitor's name on your floor plan. Budget for that line specifically.

How many events before a yearly licence beats paying per event? Divide the yearly price by the per-event price. With our own numbers — $49 a year against $12 per event — it is the fifth event. Run the same division on whatever two options you are comparing; it takes ten seconds and it is the only honest way to compare a subscription to a one-time fee.

Can I put my own branding on a seating chart I give a client? Only in tools that offer it, and it is usually a paid tier. Check whether it is a logo on the print view or just a removed watermark, because those are different things to a client looking at a PDF.

What happens to my charts if the software shuts down? This is not hypothetical any more. Keep a CSV of every guest list and a PDF of every floor plan, per event, outside the tool. Ten minutes per event now is worth more than any migration feature promised later.