EasyChair vs OpenSession

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.

OpenSession is a free, MIT-licensed platform for managing conference programs from proposal intake through speaker onboarding and agenda publication. Organizers create call-for-papers forms with MDX, conditional logic, multiple speakers, and file uploads; each speaker may submit up to three talks per event. Reviewers can vote, comment, and view aggregate scores without administrator access. The agenda builder assigns accepted sessions to rooms and time slots while flagging room and speaker conflicts. Schedule changes automatically update RFC 5545 ICS invitations. Accepted speakers receive a self-service portal for profiles, submissions, onboarding tasks, and files. Organizers can publish embeddable agendas and speaker galleries, plus JSON and ICS feeds. The software can be self-hosted on Cloudflare Workers, using D1 for its database and R2 for files. The listed plan is free, billed free forever. Cloudflare’s listed free-tier limits are 100,000 requests daily, 5 GB of D1 storage, and 10 GB of R2 storage. It does not cover CRM, marketing pages, or payment processing.