Breakout Room Generator
Paste your attendee list and get random breakout groups of the size you choose — ready to read out or copy into your video call tool.
Paste your names above — one per line.
How to use it
- Paste your attendee list, one name per line, matching how they'll appear on the call.
- Set your target group size — four is a good default for discussion-sized breakouts.
- Generate the groups, then Copy the list or keep this tab open to read groups out.
- Assign attendees to your video platform's breakout rooms using the generated list.
Planning breakouts before you open the call
Most video conferencing tools can create breakout rooms and assign people to them automatically, but their built-in randomisation is a black box — you can't set a group size you're confident in ahead of time, you can't keep two people apart, and you generally can't see the groups until the rooms are already live and attendees are being shuffled in front of you. Planning the groups separately, before the call, gives you control over all of that and something concrete to refer back to.
This page defaults to grouping by size rather than by count, because that's usually how breakout planning actually works: you decide a discussion works best in groups of four, and the number of rooms just falls out of your attendee count. Paste your list, confirm the group size, and you'll immediately see how many rooms you'll need to create in your video platform — useful for a facilitator prepping an agenda before the meeting even starts.
Facilitators running recurring sessions — a weekly workshop series, a course with the same cohort — can use the rules system to keep the mix fresh without leaving it to chance. A keep-apart rule stops two colleagues who always end up chatting in the same room from being paired again next week, while a keep-together rule can pin a facilitator or note-taker into a specific group where their name would otherwise be shuffled randomly.
Once the groups are generated, Copy gives you a clean plain-text list you can paste directly into your meeting platform's manual breakout room assignment screen, into a shared doc, or into a chat message to co-facilitators. Download CSV works better if you're tracking attendance or reporting on session structure afterwards.
Because this is a planning step that happens before the call, Present mode is less central here than on our classroom or in-person pages — but it's still there if you're planning breakouts live, on a shared screen, with co-facilitators watching the same tab.
Frequently asked questions
- No — this tool generates the groups on your screen so you can plan the split in advance. You then create the rooms and assign attendees inside your video platform (Zoom, Teams, Google Meet) using the list this tool produces.
- Four is a common default for discussion-based breakouts — small enough that everyone has to speak, large enough to survive someone's camera or mic acting up. Drop to three for deeper discussion, or raise to five or six for a broader brainstorm.
- Yes, using a keep-apart rule in the Rules section. This is useful for keeping a facilitator's own team out of their room, or separating two colleagues who need to be in different discussions.
- Use the Copy button to get a plain-text list of names by room, then paste it into your platform's manual room assignment screen, or read the names out when opening rooms live.
- Yes — Share link saves your attendee list and settings in a URL you can bookmark, so each week you open the same link and reshuffle fresh groups from the same attendee list.