An interactive 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.
SeatLayer publishes this page, so read the product sections with that in mind. The definitions and requirements below apply to any vendor you evaluate.
Three words, one job, and the differences are habits of language rather than differences of substance.
Seating 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.
Seat 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.
Seat 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.
Rendering the room is the easy half. These are the things that decide whether you can actually sell from it.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 ship from the open seatlayer-sdk repository around one shared renderer, so the map behaves the same in every framework.
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.
Seat counts are where seat map claims usually stop being checkable, so the evidence is public.
The largest public SeatLayer demo is a 200,000-seat stadium that opens without signing in: open the stadium demo and pick a seat in it yourself. It is a synthetic fixture rather than a customer deployment, and live timing varies by device, network and run.
The benchmark numbers behind it, with the fixtures and method that produced them, are in the open seatlayer-performance repository, so you can run the same measurement yourself. Read them as renderer evidence from a local production build, not a concurrent-buyer capacity claim.
10,000 concurrent buyers tested on one event: hold p99 9 ms, zero server errors.
400,000 of 400,000 live seat updates delivered to 10,000 connected viewers.
3,552 requests per second sustained for two minutes on a single event.
Simulated buyers, isolated engine harness. Method and raw runs published. Concurrency 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.
Design the venue once, publish it, and render it wherever the buyer is. Start with a real chart rather than a slide of one.