★★★★★
“Sessionboard has been one of our most successful investments this year, making our team more efficient and allowing us to focus on the most critical components of our events.”
Almost nobody shopping for conference management software needs all of it.
Conference management software is not one category. It divides into registration and ticketing, abstract and program management, attendee apps, and continuing education. Suites bundle several and specialists do one deeply. Most buying mistakes come from assuming one system covers all four, then discovering the abstract committee and speaker workflow were the thin part of the bundle.
Nearly every product in this market is strong at one of these and adequate at the rest. Naming which one hurts is most of the decision.
Selling tickets, badges, housing, and payments. Cvent, Swoogo, RainFocus and Stova compete here; it is the most mature and most expensive part of the market.
Call for papers, scored and blind review, committee workflow, speaker portal, and the schedule that comes out of it. The part most often underestimated in a suite purchase.
Agenda, maps, notifications, and on-site wayfinding. Cadmium's eventScribe, Whova and EventMobi live here, and it is largely a solved commodity.
Credit tracking, accreditation reporting, and learning records. Usually an LMS — EthosCE, Elevate, CloudCME — rather than event software at all.
“Sessionboard has been one of our most successful investments this year, making our team more efficient and allowing us to focus on the most critical components of our events.”
“Sessionboard saves significant planning time and makes it easier than ever for speakers and sponsors to participate in our clients' events.”
“We used Sessionboard daily. It served as our source of truth for tracking speakers, sending emails, and accessing reports. The ability to set a weekly digest email was a huge time saver.”
“Honestly, I loved it! Getting everything out of the spreadsheet. It collects all the information and gives you a visual of who you might want to invite.”
Grouped by where each is genuinely strong rather than by what its homepage claims, which is the distinction that survives an implementation.
| Vendor | Best when | Tradeoffs | Pricing note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cvent | Large-scale registration, housing and sourcing across a portfolio of events, where procurement wants one enterprise contract. | The abstract and speaker modules are the shallow end of a very deep suite, and configuration changes typically route through services rather than the committee. | Enterprise licensing, usually the highest in the category. |
| Cadmium | Medical and scientific societies that want registration, the eventScribe app, exhibits and CE credit on one contract. | Abstract Scorecard and Conference Harvester stop at collection and review; the program build and speaker readiness that follow are largely manual, and workflow changes are vendor-configured. | Bundled by module. |
| Swoogo | Registration and event websites built quickly and self-service, at a materially lower price than the enterprise suites. | Not an abstract or program platform, and it does not pretend to be — which is why it pairs with one rather than replacing it. | Mid-market, transparent. |
| Academic tools (Ex Ordo, Oxford Abstracts, ConfTool) | Peer-reviewed academic conferences where scored review and proceedings are the deliverable. | The workflow generally ends at the accept or reject decision, so speaker confirmations, materials and scheduling need another system. | Per conference, on submission volume. |
| Whova / EventMobi | The attendee app and networking are the actual requirement, for a conference whose program is already built elsewhere. | Abstract review and committee workflow are light, and the program layer is not the product's centre of gravity. | Per event, app-led pricing. |
| Sessionboard | The abstract committee, speaker operations and program build are where the time goes — call for papers with self-service forms, multi-round blind review, speaker portal, poster sessions, scheduling, and session content capture on one record that persists across years, running beside whatever handles registration. | Deliberately not a registration or badging system, so it coexists with Cvent, Swoogo, RainFocus or an AMS rather than replacing them. | Licensed by meeting and submission volume. |
Software that handles the operational work of running a conference. In practice it spans four distinct jobs — registration and ticketing, abstract and program management, the attendee app, and continuing education — which different products cover to very different depths.
The terms are used interchangeably by vendors, but conferences carry work most general event tools do not address: a call for papers, peer review, a speaker and faculty program, poster sessions, and often CE credit. Software built for corporate events and trade shows usually stops at registration and the app.
Most conferences of any complexity run two or three. A registration system, a program and abstract platform, and often an LMS for credit. Single-suite purchases tend to be made for procurement simplicity and regretted at whichever module was thinnest.
It depends on whether the deliverable is proceedings or a program. For scored peer review and published proceedings, the academic specialists are purpose-built. For a program with invited faculty, speaker readiness, posters and recorded content on top of review, a program platform is the closer fit.
A wide range. Registration platforms are frequently priced per registrant, so cost scales with attendance, while abstract and program platforms are usually priced per meeting on submission volume. Enterprise suites run well into six figures across modules; specialists are a fraction of that per job.
Free tiers exist for small events, and free form builders handle submission collection under roughly fifty abstracts. The limits appear at blind review, reviewer assignment, conflict-of-interest handling, and anything that has to happen after acceptance.
Some can and many cannot, and it is worth asking directly. Posters are frequently pushed to a separate ePoster product, which splits one program across two systems and two contracts.
Ask them to change a form field live, show what happens automatically at the moment an abstract is accepted, and show last year's data in this year's event. Those three answers separate self-service platforms from vendor-configured ones faster than any feature list.
Talk through your event workflow — abstracts, speakers, content, and marketing on one program graph.
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