Pulpetti VS TopTablePlanner

Pulpetti's answer

Three things, and the first one is why the app exists.

• The rules stay. You say once that two people must not sit at the same table, or that a pair belongs side by side, and the rule holds in every chart you make afterwards. Seating is rarely a one-off job — a class gets a new chart every few weeks, an organiser runs the same dinner every year — so Pulpetti is built around the second time you do it, not the first.
• One tool, four rooms. Classroom, restaurant dining room, wedding and event hall are separate workspaces with their own wording, templates and defaults. A teacher sees desks and a class; a wedding planner sees round tables and guests.
• You draw the room to scale. Round, rectangular and square tables, desks, a stage, a buffet, a dance floor — in metres or feet, snapped to a grid. What you print matches the real room, and a large hall is tiled across several sheets so the names stay readable instead of shrinking to nothing.

Everything printable comes with it: floor plan, name list, place cards and table signs, on A4 or Letter. Nine interface languages, and a free tier that does not expire.

Pulpetti's answer

People who have to decide who sits where and then show the result to someone else. They are not software buyers.

• Teachers and school staff. A class chart redone every few weeks as periods rotate, printed so a substitute can read it.
• Couples and wedding planners. Guest tables, place cards, table signs — the most deadline-driven group.
• Restaurant and café staff. A dining room plan for a fully booked evening or a private function.
• Event and conference organisers. Banquets, gala dinners, trade fairs, cabaret-style rooms.

What they share: they use it a few times a year rather than daily, on a laptop, and the real deliverable is something printed — pinned to a wall or laid on a plate. That shapes the product: no installation, a free tier without an expiry date, and a print set that covers every piece of paper the evening needs.

Pulpetti's answer

Pulpetti came out of a practical need, from two directions at once.

My partner is a teacher, and in a classroom the seating chart is not decoration — it is one of the few levers you have for keeping the room calm. Who sits next to whom decides how the lesson goes, and the chart gets redone every few weeks as the periods rotate.

Separately, I have organised events myself, and saw how slow it is to work through every constraint by hand: these two must not share a table, this pair belongs together, this one needs to be near the door. You end up holding the whole list in your head and moving names around on paper.

Both are the same problem. The constraints are the work, and nothing was remembering them for you. So that is what Pulpetti does: you enter the rules once, and they hold in every chart you make afterwards.

Pulpetti's answer

Pulpetti is a web application — nothing to install, and it runs in any modern browser.

• Frontend: React, with a canvas library doing the floor plan so that dragging tables, chairs and names feels immediate rather than like editing a form.
• Backend: Node.js and Express.

On the free tier your data stays in your own browser; paid plans sync it instead.

Pulpetti's answer

• A free plan that is permanent, not a trial. Draw a room to scale, set the rules and seat a group of up to 15 people without paying and without a deadline. Printing, PDF export and cloud storage are what the paid plans add.
• It remembers the constraints, not just the layout. Dragging names onto tables is the easy part. The hard part is the dozen things you know about the people and have to hold in your head; those go into the app once.
• Manual and automatic seating work together. Place the people you care about by hand, then let the draw fill the rest — it leaves your own placements untouched.
• The whole print set in one place. Floor plan, name list, place cards and table signs, in metric (A4) or imperial (Letter) sizes.
• Nine languages — Finnish, English, Swedish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Dutch — in the interface, the help and the printed output.
• Nothing to install, and no account needed to start.