Indico vs Oxford Abstracts

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.

Oxford Abstracts is web software for managing academic conference submissions, reviews, decisions, and events. Organisers can build customized submission forms, assign reviewers by category or group, and track reviewer progress while reviewers’ changes save automatically. Scheduled emails can be tailored for reviewers and submitters. The free Basic plan includes unlimited submissions, review and decisions, event ticketing, reviewer tracking, customizable forms, and emails. The Abstract Management plan costs $890/event and adds custom emails, fully customizable forms, detailed reports, instant abstract books, and optional add-ons. The Conference plan costs $2,290/event and adds a live conference platform, program builder, attendee networking, on-demand and live content, and an interactive poster gallery. Ticketing integrates with Stripe and PayPal. Online programs are accessible from any device. Oxford Abstracts lists onboarding support, free video calls, tutorials, and a knowledge base. It is headquartered in Acharacle, United Kingdom, and hosts data on UK-based Amazon Web Services servers.