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Guide · for venues and ticketing platforms · reviewed 27 October 2026

Interactive seating chart and seat map software for event ticketing

An interactive seating chart, or seat map, is a drawing of a venue in which every seat is a separate object the buyer can click or tap, backed by live data saying whether that exact seat is still for sale. It is the difference between a picture of a seating plan and a surface you can sell from. This guide covers the terms, the requirements, the two ways to put one on your site, and the API and SDKs behind it.

Free to start: 100 sold seats free every month on the SDK, or $0.50 a ticket hosted, first 25 free.

SeatLayer publishes this page, so read the product sections with that in mind. The definitions and requirements below apply to any vendor you evaluate.

The words people use

Seat map, seating chart and seat picker

Three words, one job, and the differences are habits of language rather than differences of substance.

Three sections, rows A–D, aisles betweenPrice zones: front, middle, backTwo accessible positions

The document: the room as drawn, with its sections, rows, aisles, accessible positions and price zones.

Venues and box offices
Seating chartSeating chart is the older phrase, and the one box offices, venues and organizers reach for first. It usually means the document: the room as drawn, with its sections, rows, tables, aisles, accessible positions and price zones.
Developers and product teams
Seat mapSeat map is what developers and product teams say, and what tends to appear in API and SDK documentation. It means the same document seen from the integration side: something you render, query and sell against. Airlines popularised it, which is why searches for it mix travel and event intent.
The buyer on the page
Seat pickerSeat picker is narrower again: the buyer-facing control itself, the thing on the page where a person chooses their seats. A seat picker is one way of rendering a seat map, which is one way of reading a seating chart.

Treat them as interchangeable in conversation, but check which one a contract or a price list means. SeatLayer publishes one document and renders it as all three: the seating chart a venue designs, the seat map a developer embeds and the seat picker a buyer uses.

The requirements

What a good interactive seat map must do

Rendering the room is the easy half. These are the things that decide whether you can actually sell from it.

  1. 01Live availabilityEvery seat's state comes from the server, per event, and updates while the buyer is looking. A map that loads availability once will sell seats twice on a busy on-sale.
  2. 02Holds, so two buyers cannot take one seatSelecting a seat places a short, server-owned hold with an expiry, and only one hold can exist per seat. The decision has to be made in one place, and the loser told immediately.
  3. 03Best availableMost buyers want four seats together, near the front, under a price. Best available has to honour adjacency, aisle boundaries and party size rather than picking the first free identifiers.
  4. 04Ticket tiers and price zonesSeats belong to categories with prices, and the map has to show the tier, filter by it and refuse selections the buyer is not entitled to make.
  5. 05A 3D seat viewA 3D venue and a view from the chosen seat answer what the buyer will actually see, without leaving the map.
  6. 06Mobile touch behaviourMost buyers are on a phone. Pinch, pan, momentum, fingertip-sized tap targets and a tray that does not cover the map decide whether the sale happens.
  7. 07AccessibilitySeats must be operable by keyboard and screen reader, each with a name a person can act on, and wheelchair and companion positions must be real inventory rather than a note.
  8. 08Large venuesA 300-seat room and a 60,000-seat bowl are not the same rendering problem. Big venues need zone-to-seat navigation rather than every seat drawn at once.

Requirement 02, played out: two buyers ask for one seat at the same moment, and exactly one hold wins.

Two buyers, one contested seat: C-14
Buyer ASuccess

Holds C-14. On to checkout.

Buyer BConflict

C-14 was just taken. C-13 is still yours.

Seat map service
  1. A → hold C-14
  2. B → hold C-14
  3. A ← success: C-14 held
  4. B ← conflict: C-14 taken
  5. → every open map: C-14 held

Each run picks the winner at random, the way arrival order would. Whoever loses keeps the rest of their selection and carries on choosing.

Two routes

Two ways to use the SeatLayer interactive seat map

SeatLayer is interactive seating chart software built for stadium scale. Platforms embed the white-label seat picker with their own checkout; organizers sell seated events on their own website with their own payment gateway.

For platforms · SDK

Embed it, and keep your own checkout

If you already run a ticketing product with a cart and order records, you do not want another checkout. Install the web or mobile SDK, render the seat map against an event, and let your own system take the money. SeatLayer owns the chart, live inventory, holds and confirmed booking. Billing is per confirmed sold seat, starting at $0 with 100 free credits each month.

For organizers · Hosted

Sell on your own website, with your own gateway

If you are an organizer or a venue, you probably do not want to build a checkout at all. Hosted Ticketing puts the seat map on the site you already publish, runs checkout on your own connected payment gateway, issues QR and PDF tickets, and adds box office and door check-in, with the SeatLayer iPhone app or a phone browser, on the same inventory. It costs $0.50 per confirmed ticket.

Both routes read the same published chart, so a venue that starts hosted and later builds its own product does not redraw anything. Both include the 3D seat map and the view from every seat, at no extra cost.

For developers

Seat map API and SDKs

The REST API owns charts, events, inventory, holds and bookings and is described by an OpenAPI 3.1 document. The client SDKs render the interactive seat map against it; the server SDKs call it from your backend. Signed webhooks report booking and inventory changes.

All four web packages ship from the open seatlayer-sdk repository around one shared renderer, so the map behaves the same in every framework.

WordPress

The WordPress seating chart plugin adds an interactive seat map to a page or post through a block or a shortcode, with the secret key held on the server. Install it from the plugin directory.

Start from the quickstart, or read the seating chart API and SDK overview. Every repository above is public, so you can read the source first.

Scale

An interactive seat map at stadium size

Seat counts are where seat map claims usually stop being checkable, so the evidence is public.

  • 200,000

    seats in a public stadium demo, no sign-in

    Open the stadium

  • 10,000

    buyers on one event, zero server errors

  • 9 ms

    to hold a seat under that load (p99)

  • 400,000

    live seat updates delivered to 10,000 viewers

Synthetic fixtures and simulated buyers, September 2026; live timing varies by device and network.Fixtures, method and every runRaw concurrency runsConcurrency method and limits

What makes that size workable is navigation rather than raw drawing speed. A buyer arriving at a bowl that large wants to see the venue, choose a zone or a price tier, and have the map resolve to real seats from there. Test that with your own venue geometry and your buyers' devices before deciding on any vendor, including this one.

Zone to seat · drawn here to show the idea

Then the map resolves to seats

Zone 103 · tier 1

Pick a zone on the bowl, or filter by tier first.

The public 53,018-seat stadium demo works this way: buyers pick a zone or a price first, then the map opens to seats. Try it, no sign-in ↗

Keep reading

Questions people ask about seat maps

7 questions

A drawing of a venue in which every seat is a separate object a buyer can click or tap. Unlike a picture of a seating plan, it knows which seats exist, what tier each belongs to and whether each one is still for sale right now. Selecting a seat changes live state on a server, which is what makes it a surface you can sell from rather than an illustration.

In event ticketing they are used interchangeably. Seating chart is the older phrase, common in venue and box office language; seat map is more common among developers and in API documentation; seat picker means the buyer-facing control itself. SeatLayer publishes one document and renders it as all three.

Three routes. On WordPress, install the SeatLayer plugin and add a block or shortcode. On any other site, paste the hosted embed and sell through your own connected payment gateway. In a product you build yourself, install the JavaScript, React, Vue or Angular package. All three read the same published chart.

Yes. With Hosted Ticketing the buyer picks exact seats on your own page and pays through your own connected payment gateway, so the money goes to your account. SeatLayer supplies the seat map, holds, order, QR and PDF tickets and door check-in at $0.50 per confirmed ticket. If your product already has a checkout, use the SDK instead.

Yes. The public stadium demo linked above opens without signing in, and the fixtures and method behind the published benchmark numbers are in the open seatlayer-performance repository. Large venues rely on zone-to-seat navigation: the buyer starts on the whole bowl, picks a zone or price tier, and the map resolves to individual seats from there.

Draw it in the free Venue Designer. Start from one of 58 venue templates, describe the room to an AI and get a chart back, or upload your floor plan as a PDF or picture and click each block of seats. Publish it, and the same chart is the seat map on your website, the 3D view and the map your box office sells from.

Yes. A REST API described by an OpenAPI 3.1 document, with server SDKs for Node, Python, PHP, Ruby, Java, Go and .NET and signed webhooks for booking and inventory events. The API owns charts, events, inventory, holds and bookings; the client SDKs render the map against it. Holds are server-authoritative.

Didn't find your answer?

Put an interactive seat map on your own page

Design the venue once, publish it, and render it wherever the buyer is. Start with a real chart rather than a slide of one: the free seating chart maker needs no signup.

Start free Read SeatLayer pricing