ConfTool vs MeetingHand Abstract Management

ConfTool is conference management software for academic conferences, congresses, workshops, and seminars, including on-site and virtual events. It supports submissions and reviews, program scheduling, participant registration, administration, and invoicing. With ConfTool Pro, organizers can configure open or blind reviews, optionally use multiple tracks, schedule accepted submissions, and check presenter conflicts. Participants can create personal agendas. Pro registration supports participant groups, time discounts, event options, and admission limits; payments can be handled by bank transfer, PayPal, Stripe, or connections to more than 45 online credit card payment systems. Pro can link sessions and presentations to external virtual-event resources and export data in Excel, Word, CSV, JSON, and XML. ConfTool Standard is free on request for smaller non-commercial events, for up to 150 participants, and requires local installation. Pro is hosted and billed per conference; its fee depends on event requirements and size, and optional modules may cost extra. The maker lists HTTPS access, automatic backups, and role-based access control. Standard comes without support, while Pro includes professional support.

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.