EasyChair vs MeetingHand Abstract Management

EasyChair is a web service for managing conferences from abstract submission and review through program generation, registration, and proceedings publishing. Its review workflow includes reviewer management, paper assignment, online discussion, and an author rebuttal phase, with support for standard and multi-track conferences. Other listed services include Smart CFP for calls for papers, Smart Slide for presentations, proceedings publishing, and preprints. Executive and VIP licenses include integrations with IEEE copyright management and ACM and Springer proceedings. The free license allows at most 20 submissions and excludes technical support. Professional licenses allow up to 60 submissions, cost $3.90 as a one-time purchase billed per submission, and require credit-card payment. Executive and VIP rates are listed from $6.10, paid once billed per submission, with unlimited submissions; helpdesk and technical support are included, and VIP adds an assigned manager. EasyChair says licenses include encrypted access, data backup, and replication. It is hosted on its own servers and cannot be installed on a customer's server. EasyChair says conferences using the service range from small workshops to events with nearly 5,000 submissions and thousands of participants.

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.