Looking for a Wheel of Names Alternative

WheelieNames is a free spinning wheel picker that runs without an account and keeps your entries in the browser. People arriving here tend to want the same answers before they move their wheels across: how many names fit, what happens to duplicates, whether a name can be drawn twice, whether real names are safe to type in, whether results can be made reproducible, and why a wheel sometimes refuses to spin. All six are answered below, about our tool specifically.

What you give up by switching

An honest answer matters more than a feature list here, so: because wheels are stored in your browser rather than on our server, they do not follow you to another device or another person. If your team shares one wheel across five laptops and expects edits to sync, this is the wrong swap and you should stay where you are.

There is also no seeded or reproducible mode, on purpose. And there is no import tool, so moving a long list means copying and pasting it once. For most classrooms and giveaways that is a one-minute job; for someone maintaining fifty saved wheels it is an afternoon.

What you get instead

• •No account wall. Nobody has to hand over an email address to run a draw, which matters when the person spinning is a substitute teacher or a volunteer at a school fair.
• •Results come from the browser’s cryptographic random generator rather thanMath.random. Why that distinction is not just marketing.
• •Nothing about your entries reaches us, so there is no data retention policy to read and nothing for us to hand over if someone asks.

The questions people actually ask

Is there an entry limit?

There is no hard cap. Lists of a few hundred names run smoothly on a normal laptop or phone. Past that the wheel stays accurate but the labels get too thin to read, which is a display problem rather than a maths one.

What happens if the same name appears twice?

Duplicates are kept, not merged, and each copy is a separate slice. That is how you weight a draw: add a name three times against someone else once and the first person holds three quarters of the wheel, exactly like buying three raffle tickets.

Can I stop a name being drawn twice?

Yes. Switch on Remove Winner After Spin and each name leaves the wheel once it has been called, so a roster or an entrant list runs to the end before anything repeats.

Is it safe to put real names in?

The names stay in your browser. There is no account, nothing is uploaded to a server, and saved wheels live in your own device storage, so clearing site data deletes them. For classroom use, first names or a first name plus last initial are still the sensible habit.

Can I set a seed so the result is reproducible?

No, and that is deliberate. A seeded wheel lets anyone who knows the seed predict the winner, which is the opposite of what a public draw needs. If you need deterministic output for testing or research, use a proper PRNG library instead of any wheel tool.

Why is the wheel not spinning for me?

Nine times out of ten it is a blocked script or a very old browser. The wheel needs JavaScript and the Web Crypto API, both standard in any browser updated in the last few years. A hard refresh clears most of the rest.

If you came for one job

Everything else is in the FAQ.