SeatingSorted vs Cvent Event Diagramming

Looking for a Social Tables alternative

Checked August 2026

What happened

Social Tables now trades as Cvent Event Diagramming. It is a serious, well-built product for collaborative room design — to-scale floor plans, real-time 3D, several people working in the same layout at once — and it is aimed at planners working with hotels and venues.

There is a free tier, and it is worth knowing its shape before you plan around it: at the time of checking it covers one user, three events, two diagrams per event and attendee lists up to 150. Paid plans start around $150 a month. For a venue running events every week that is a rounding error. For one wedding it is more than the wedding needs.

The short answer

If you are a venue or a planner who works inside venues every week, and the deliverable is a diagram the banqueting team builds from, this is the better tool and it is not close. If you are seating one event and the difficulty is the people rather than the room, a monthly diagramming subscription is the wrong shape of thing to buy.

Cvent event diagrammingSeatingSorted
Built forHotels, venues and the planners who work with themWhoever is deciding the seating for one event
PricingFree tier (1 user, 3 events, 150 attendees); paid from about $150/monthOne payment per event, from $50, no subscription
Room diagrammingExcellent — to-scale, 3D, collaborativeSimple, printable floor plan
Deciding who sits whereYou drag guests onto tablesRules in, plan out
Asking guests anythingAttendee lists, not questionsRSVP link with a confidential “rather not sit with” question
Keep-apart enforcedNo — you check by eyeYes, on every run
Team collaborationReal-time, multi-userOne organiser, plus read-only sharing
Re-seating after changesRe-dragRe-run; pinned seats hold

Use Cvent Event Diagramming when

  • You are a venue, or you diagram rooms for a living.
  • Several people need to be in the same layout at once.
  • You need 3D and a scale plan the operations team will build from.

Use SeatingSorted when

  • One event, and a monthly subscription is the wrong unit.
  • The seating is the hard part, not the drawing.
  • You want guests asked, confidentially, who they would rather not sit near.
  • You are over the free tier's 150 attendees but nowhere near needing enterprise diagramming.

The part people find out too late

Both of these tools have the words “seating chart” on the box and they are not doing the same job. One produces a picture of the room. The other decides what goes in it. If you buy the first expecting the second, you will have spent $150 a month to do the difficult part by hand anyway.

Comparisons age. This one was last checked in August 2026 — if something here is out of date or unfair, tell us and it gets corrected.

Where these figures come from

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