Airballoon vs MeetingHand Abstract Management

AirBalloon is a conference-management platform for academic events, covering submissions, peer review, registration, presentations, publishing, and attendee networking. AirMaster provides committee roles, programs and tracks, a website builder, announcements, and webmail. AirReview handles custom submission forms, anonymity checks, expertise matching, bidding, conflict detection, AI review assistance, decisions, and camera-ready collection. AirReg manages ticket types, add-ons, invite codes, fee exemptions, checkout, receipts, invoices, and refunds. AirUp supports session planning, schedules, rooms, chairs, and speaker uploads for onsite or hybrid events. AirExplore handles DOI and citation metadata and proceedings with ISBNs or ISSNs for recurring series. Attendees can use agendas, notifications, connections, QR contact exchange, chat, and a community feed. The platform runs on web and API. The full AirCore conference plan is free on or before December 31, 2026, then 3.0%. Other listed fees include AirReg transaction charges and AirUp presentation and storage charges.

MeetingHand Abstract Management helps academic event organizers collect, review, schedule and publish submissions. Organizers can configure submission forms with topics, presentation types, rules, deadlines and author fields, and accept text, file or multimedia uploads. Review features include assigning reviewers, recording scores and comments, tracking progress on dashboards and conducting blind peer review. Authors can edit abstracts until the deadline if the organizer enables that permission. Accepted submissions can be scheduled into a multi-track agenda and exported as a book of abstracts. Abstract submission can connect with conference registration through single sign-on, with an option to require payment for submissions. MeetingHand says the system is designed for events with hundreds or thousands of submissions. Pricing depends on registrations or abstracts collected: Free covers up to 25, Pay as you go costs $4.90 a month and is charged according to collected registrations and abstracts, and Small is a prepaid plan at $990 a month for 250. The Medium plan covers 1,000, but no price is listed. The software is web-based. MeetingHand offers human support and a knowledge center; it also notes that its site is not tailored to regulations such as HIPAA or FISMA.