Random Group Generator

Splitting a room of people into groups sounds trivial until you're standing in front of thirty of them with a marker and a whiteboard, trying to count off evenly while everyone waits. A random group generator does the counting for you: paste the list, pick a number, and the groups are on screen before anyone has finished finding a seat. It removes the two things that make manual splitting slow and awkward — arithmetic under pressure, and the perception that you picked favourites.

The tool on this page is deliberately general-purpose. If you're a teacher forming discussion groups, a manager splitting a team for a workshop exercise, a sports coach dividing players, or a Secret Santa organiser pairing up colleagues, the underlying mechanics are identical: take a list of names, apply a rule for how big or how many groups you want, and shuffle fairly. What changes is the detail — a classroom often needs mixed-ability groups of four, a five-a-side match needs exactly two even teams, a gift exchange needs people kept apart from their partner. We've built dedicated pages for those specific situations (linked below) with the right defaults already set, so you don't have to reconfigure the tool every time.

Everything runs in your browser. Names you type or paste are never sent to a server, logged, or stored anywhere except your own device's local storage — which exists purely so your list is still there if you accidentally close the tab. That matters more than it might seem: teachers are routinely handling children's names, and team leads are handling colleagues' names, and neither should have to think about where that data ends up. There's more detail on this in our privacy page, but the short version is that there's no database behind this tool at all.

The rules feature is what separates this from a plain "deal into piles" shuffle. Real groups have constraints — two people who work badly together, a pair who always end up chatting instead of working, siblings who shouldn't be on the same team. Add a "keep apart" rule and the shuffle will actively avoid that pairing across every reshuffle. Add a "keep together" rule — for a student who needs a support buddy, say — and those two names will always land in the same group. If a rule genuinely can't be satisfied with the number of groups you've chosen, the tool tells you exactly which rule is the problem instead of silently ignoring it or crashing.

Once your groups exist, Present mode turns the results into a full-screen, high-contrast display built to be read from the back of a room or projected onto a wall — no toolbar, no ads, no navigation, just large type. Pair that with Shuffle again for redraws, Copy or Download CSV for record-keeping, and Print for a paper copy at the door, and this covers the full lifecycle of a single grouping session from raw list to handout.