The Timetable Planner for Everything
At a glance:
- Sessionplan works for any occasion with a time-based structure – from workshops to weddings
- Lighter and free compared to SessionLab, but more focused than Excel or Miro
- Timings recalculate automatically, even after drag & drop
- Timelines can be printed and shared via link – no account, no file ping-pong
- The Play Mode keeps you on track during the session itself
- Privacy-first, open source, and permanently free
A workshop, a wedding, a sprint planning, a D&D night on Friday: what these things have in common is rarely obvious. But they all need the same unglamorous backbone – a sequence of time slots that actually adds up. That’s exactly what we built Sessionplan for.
The rule is simple: wherever there are blocks, timings, and an order of events, Sessionplan fits. Planning workshops, structuring events, preparing meetings – those are just the most obvious cases. For general schedules and timelines, see the online schedule planner with more examples.
How Sessionplan differs from SessionLab
SessionLab has established itself over the years as the go-to tool for workshop planning, with extensive method libraries and a broad feature set. But that breadth also makes it heavy when you just want to build an agenda quickly.
Sessionplan takes the opposite approach: add blocks, set durations, done. No onboarding, no account, no gap between “I have an idea” and “the plan is ready.” And while SessionLab comes with a price tag, Sessionplan is free – for your tenth plan and your hundredth.
Being a lean, free alternative to SessionLab isn’t a side effect. It’s the point.
Tip from practice
You can try Sessionplan right now at sessionplan.de – no sign-up, no installation. Your first plan is ready in under two minutes.
Why Excel and Miro hit their limits
Excel spreadsheets and Miro boards get repurposed for schedules all the time, because they sort of work. The problem shows up the moment something changes: one agenda item runs long, another gets cut, and suddenly you’re manually recalculating every start time that follows. With twelve blocks, that’s annoying. With a three-day conference and parallel tracks, it’s a recipe for errors.
Sessionplan recalculates timings automatically – even when you drag and drop blocks into a new order. Move a block, and every start time after it updates instantly. No mental math, no slipping times.
Two more things neither Excel nor Miro can do out of the box: the finished timeline can be printed directly, and it can be shared via a link – no file attachments, no permissions to manage.
The Play Mode: from planning to running the session
Most planning tools stop where the actual event begins. The plan gets exported, printed, maybe skimmed one more time – and then you’re on your own.
Sessionplan keeps going. In Play Mode, you see live which block is currently running, how much time is left, and what comes next. If a discussion runs hotter than expected, one click extends the current block by five minutes – and everything after it shifts automatically. Anyone who has ever mentally tracked the clock while holding a printed agenda knows what that’s worth.
Planning and running the session happen in the same tool. No handoff, no second system to maintain in parallel.
Tip from practice
Activate Play Mode via the live toggle in the header – Sessionplan automatically detects which block is up and shows you the remaining time in real time.
Who uses it – and for what
What genuinely surprised us about Sessionplan is the range. Thousands of people around the world use it now, and the list of occasions reads like a grab bag: weddings, D&D nights, podcast episodes with precisely timed segments. Alongside the obvious cases: design thinking workshops, meetings, training days, retrospectives.
A dungeon master and a trainer running a two-day course don’t have much in common at first glance. In the end, both need the same thing: blocks that can be moved around without the whole schedule falling apart.
Some of the use cases Sessionplan gets used for regularly:
- Workshop planning and design thinking sessions
- Meeting agendas with clear time slots per item
- Podcast episodes with segment timings
- Wedding schedules from the welcome drinks to the last dance
- Scrum retrospectives and sprint plannings
- D&D sessions and other tabletop evenings
- Lesson plans and training days
Explore more use cases in the overview of all landing pages.
Privacy-first, open source, free – no asterisk
Sessionplan stores plans locally in your browser by default. No cloud, no account, no data landing on a server without you knowing. Sharing a plan with others happens via a link – a deliberate opt-in, not the default.
The tool is open source and permanently free. No freemium model, no features locked after a 14-day trial, no “Pro” tier that suddenly charges for things that used to be free.
If you want to see what that feels like: sessionplan.de – no sign-up required, runs right in your browser.
Tim J. Peters
Tim J. Peters is Executive Director at SCHUMACHER, a Berlin-based brand and interaction design agency, and has been working at the intersection of strategic design and workshop facilitation for over 15 years. He has designed and led workshops for DAX-listed corporations, federal authorities, startups and non-profits - covering one-day design sprints as well as multi-stage innovation processes.
He is co-founder of Usability Testessen Berlin and served as an expert coach at the Service Design Jam Berlin. He has spoken at MIT in Boston, FH Potsdam, and at several international conferences on design, innovation and sustainability. His workshops are built around one idea: good facilitation produces decisions, not just discussions.