SeatLayer vs seats.io: the seating layer, plus the ticketing behind it.

seats.io is not: it is the seating layer, and you bring the ticketing system. SeatLayer is both. Platform SDK gives your product the same seating layer while you keep checkout, payment, orders, tickets, refunds and customers. Hosted Ticketing is a complete seated-event ticketing stack on the organizer's own website with their own payment gateway: checkout, orders, QR and PDF tickets, Box Office, Control Room and door check-in.

SeatLayer standard Platform/SDK can enter production for $0 with 100 free sold-seat credits per organization each month. Paid credits run from $0.10 down to $0.05, never expire and need no subscription. seats.io Silver is €450 prepaid annually for 2,500 used seats and starts at €0.18 per used seat. SeatLayer has around a 50% lower starting seat price, and the meter differs: SeatLayer bills a confirmed sold seat, seats.io bills a used seat, which it defines as selected, booked or assigned. Your total cost depends on sales volume and the plan you choose.

Yes. The box office counter sells from the same live map buyers use online, suggests the best available seats, prints tickets on 80 mm receipt paper or A4, and finds any order by name, email, phone, order number or ticket code. Organizers issue full or partial refunds through their own payment gateway. Door check-in runs in the browser on a phone or tablet. With seats.io, those tools come from the ticketing system you bring.

Yes, for every customer. 3D and view from seat are built from the same chart buyers pick from in 2D, so selection, live availability and fly-to-seat navigation carry across, and opening 3D uses no extra sold-seat credit. The complete 2D picker stays available on every device.

SeatLayer publishes its scale evidence: public 100,000-, 150,000- and 200,000-seat fixtures benchmarked on 15 September 2026, a 200,000-seat stadium demo and a 100,000-seat arena demo anyone can open, and a sell-out on one event never slows another. seats.io publishes large-venue customers but no comparable public fixture or benchmark. Test your own venue and device profile on both before deciding.

Their framework coverage is comparable. SeatLayer documents React, Vue and Angular, seven server SDK families covering Node, Python, PHP, Java, Go, Ruby and .NET, vanilla JavaScript for other web frameworks, and production React Native, Flutter, Swift/iOS and Kotlin/Android SDKs; seats.io documents the same families. The difference is what sits behind the SDK: SeatLayer also ships hosted checkout, tickets, Box Office, door tools, an embeddable Control Room and per-tenant workspaces. seats.io stops at the seating layer.

Yes. Paste the public buyer-page URL of a seats.io event and SeatLayer creates an editable draft of the chart, with sections, rows, seats, labels and price levels. Review it before publishing. The import does not move the seats.io account, orders, tickets, customers or payments.

Yes. With the SDK you can embed the SeatLayer control panel in your own admin, next to the Designer. Organizers watch sales, holds and blocked seats in real time, open or close sections and pull reports, and your server decides which tools each person gets.

Yes. Every organization gets 100 free sold seats a month with the SDK, in production, and the first 25 hosted tickets are free. The chart maker is free, and you can start without signing up. Purchased credits never expire.