Indico vs PragmaPlanner

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.

PragmaPlanner is web-based event-organisation software for building multi-track schedules for conferences, interview days and summits. Its solver searches scheduling combinations while considering attendee satisfaction and organiser constraints. You can assign speakers, record participant preferences, set room capacities and blocked times, and lock rooms or time slots. The software flags speaker overlaps, capacity problems and invalid placements. Attendee records can include descriptions, email addresses, availability and preferences, with assignments tracked in the project. CSV and ICS support data exchange, while customizable PDF exports create agendas. ICS import and export work with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook and other digital calendar systems. Roomless sessions can run concurrently without room collisions, and hybrid schedules can combine physical and Roomless sessions. Projects are encrypted on the user's device before syncing or sharing, using AES-256-GCM, ECIES-based key exchange and HKDF-SHA-256. The maker says its servers cannot see schedules or participant data. The free plan costs nothing for up to 30 participants and 50 projects. Pro costs what you agree with the maker, billed plus taxes, with higher limits and priority support.