Free tools that run in your browser
A Secret Santa draw, a random name picker and a White Elephant turn order. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, and the pickers never send your list anywhere.
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Office secret Santa
A limit people can afford, a quiet way to say no, and a posting date that works for the half of the team who are not in the building..
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Random name picker
Paste the names and pick one, or shuffle the list into a numbered order.
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Secret Santa generator with exclusions
An exclusion blocks two named people from being matched, in either direction.
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Secret Santa generator
Add the names, block the couples, run the draw.
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Secret Santa generator no email
Names only.
What each tool is for
The Secret Santa generator is the one that saves a real list on our side, because every participant needs a private link that keeps working after you close the tab. It handles exclusions, a spending limit, a date and per-person wishlists, and it never shows you the whole pairing, which is the point: you can honestly say you do not know.
The name picker and the White Elephant turn order run entirely in your browser. The list you paste never leaves the tab, nothing is saved, and reloading the page wipes it. That makes them fine for a work list you would rather not upload anywhere.
Picking the right one for your group
- Everyone buys for one named person, in secret: Secret Santa generator.
- Everyone brings one wrapped gift for anybody, and gifts get stolen: White Elephant turn order.
- You need one name out of a list, or a fair running order: random name picker.
- You also need a date, an address and a headcount: make an invitation and add the draw to it.
Why a draw in software beats a hat
A hat has three failure modes and all of them happen every year. Somebody draws their own name, which means a redraw and a room full of people who now know one extra pairing. Two people in a couple draw each other, which wastes a slot on a gift they would have bought anyway. And whoever holds the hat has to be in the room, so the one person organising it either misses out or sees more than everybody else.
A draw run in software fixes all three in the same pass. Self-matches are impossible by construction, excluded pairs are enforced before the result is accepted, and the organiser gets a link like everybody else rather than a view of the whole list. The practical gain is that the group no longer has to be in one building on one evening for the draw to happen.
What it does not fix is the shopping. A draw tells you who to buy for; it does not tell you what they want. That is what the wishlist box on each private link is for, and it is the single change that moves a gift exchange from polite to good.
What these tools do not do
None of them send anything. There is no email, no text message and no push notification anywhere on this site, which means no address to hand over and nothing landing in a spam folder, but it also means the distribution is your job. You copy the links and paste them into whatever app your group already uses.
The two browser tools keep nothing at all. Reload the page and the list is gone, which is what you want for a work roster and what you do not want if you were hoping to come back to it tomorrow. The Secret Santa generator is the opposite: it keeps the draw so the private links keep working, and since there is no account, a lost organiser link cannot be recovered by us. Save it somewhere before you close the tab.