Indico vs OpenSession

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.

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.