Merry Christmas! Introducing our brand new tool, Santasack.io
It’s a Secret Santa generator – you just put in a list of names, tell the tool if there are any people who shouldn’t be allowed to be matched with certain other people, and voilà! It randomly assigns each person someone to give a gift to. You can download a .zip file that contains all the giving instructions, so you can either email the instructions to people without peeking, or print them out and distribute them physically.
Why did we build it?
For fun, mostly. A few years ago Jamie built a tool like this in Python for his family’s annual Secret Santa round. He thought it was time to convert it to Javascript, load it into a web app and tidy it up so it could be presented to the world.
But aren’t there already tons of Secret Santa tools out there?
There are a few, but none of them did exactly what we wanted. We checked a bunch out and here were some of the problems we found:
- Required signup
- Demanded personal information
- Didn’t go to any effort to hide the giving instructions from the person making the list – a big problem if the organiser is taking part in the game!
What is the best Secret Santa generator?
Here’s what we found:
| Santasack.io | sneakysanta.com | secretsanta.io | Elfster | |
| No signup | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| No personal info | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Truly secret instructions | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Simple | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Free | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Can be managed by one person | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Designed by Wordshop | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
Yeah, we’re a little biased. But seriously, it’s a great app. Take a look, try it out, and send us your feedback to info@wordshop.co.nz if you’ve got any feature requests or bugs to report!