Indico vs Sciencesconf

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.

Sciencesconf is a free web service for managing scientific events from submission through peer review, scheduling, registration and proceedings. After an event request passes validation, it supplies a hosted site on a dedicated sciencesconf.org address, so organizers do not need local infrastructure. Organizers can assign roles, edit templates and menus, and use email templates, mailing lists and mailing tools. Submission workflows support calls for papers, abstracts or full texts, communication types, themes, proposal selection, programming and proceedings. Review features include grids, theme coordination, reviewer invitations, reminders, and review distribution and follow-up. Registration tools cover periods, forms, registrant lists and participant communication, with Paybox or Azur colloque payment configuration. HAL can autocomplete author and affiliation data and receive transferred papers when settings permit. Sites remain public after events, but administration ends after two years. Virtual conference tools are not integrated.