Fireside vs MeetingHand Abstract Management

Fireside is free, open-source conference organizing software for managing submissions through the event agenda. It covers proposal calls, review rounds, placements, speaker obligations, scheduling, and attendee access. The software runs in the customer’s own Cloudflare account with one Worker and one database, and is available through web, API, and self-hosted deployment. Separate views serve organizers, reviewers, speakers, volunteers, attendees, and the public. Reviewers receive only assigned proposals with names concealed, while organizers can name and date review rounds, keep scores private until submission, and export results to CSV. Call forms allow configurable questions, conditional fields, and autosave. Scheduling rejects room or speaker double-bookings. Speaker records support filtering, saved searches, notes, duplicate merging, CSV import, and invitations. File requests preserve earlier uploads, comments, and ZIP export of current files. Attendees can save sessions without signing in, check walking conflicts, use calendar files, and connect with people they met. Fireside also provides an MCP endpoint and Claude connection guidance.

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.