Indico vs OpenCFP

Indico is a free, open-source tool for organizing events, archiving materials, and supporting collaboration. It provides workflows for seminars, meetings, workshops, and conferences, and can bring an institute’s events together. For conferences, organizers can handle registration and abstract submission, store papers and other materials, and provide participant badges. Events use hierarchical categories, protections for resources, and roles within events. The room-booking module supports delegated management, booking approvals, and audiovisual equipment management. Indico integrates with Zoom so participants can join video conferences with a single click; listed plugins also cover PayPal payments and Amazon S3 event-file storage. It can be customized through configuration and plugins, and its HTTP Export API exposes category contents, events, rooms, and bookings. Indico is installed as a self-hosted instance. The project began in 2002, and CERN adopted it for event management in 2004 and has financed its development since. The maker describes room booking as suited to companies, research institutes, and universities.

OpenCFP is a free, PHP-based system for collecting conference talk proposals and managing their review. Speakers register with contact information, submit proposals, and manage profiles through a dashboard. Reviewers can view and rate talks, while administrators can review speaker information, favorite proposals, and make selections. Command-line utilities support administration of users and reviewer or administrator groups.

The application sends notifications through configured SMTP settings, and its configuration includes options for OpenCFP Central single sign-on. A Docker Compose file is provided for building and running it in containers. The README lists PHP 7.4 and recommends Apache 2 or later with mod_rewrite and AllowOverride enabled. OpenCFP is listed for Linux, self-hosted, and web use, and costs nothing. The project is in maintenance mode and accepts security fixes only. Setup guidance recommends enabling secure_ssl when possible; it requires a valid SSL certificate. The project also advises protecting collected personal information and deleting database data within 15 months of accepting submissions.