Conferencer
Open the demo

Collect talks.Review them.Publish the agenda.

Conferencer is free, open-source software for running a conference programme: the call for speakers, committee review, accept and decline emails, speaker onboarding, the agenda, and the public schedule site.

You run it yourself: one container, one SQLite file, no database server. MIT licensed, so there is no per-event fee, no cut of your ticket sales, and no demo to sit through.

Open the live demoSign in as an organizer

Demo organizer · [email protected] · SbekTest!2027-org

The organizer dashboard: 274 days until the event opens, then counts for submissions, accepted speakers, sessions scheduled and outstanding tasks.
The organizer's view of the demo conference, on the day this was captured.
11
Sessions published
12
Speakers listed
23
Submissions received
273
Days until it opens

Counted when you loaded this page, in the demo conference this instance is running — DevFlow Conf 2027, May 12–14, 2027. They come out of its SQLite file, not a marketing deck.

How it works

From an open call to a published agenda.

One loop, and anything that does not sit on it was left out. The half after step four — onboarding accepted speakers, chasing their bios and slides — is the part free tools hand back to you and paid ones charge for.

  1. 01

    You build the call for speakers

    Write your questions in the form builder: 14 field types, required and locked flags, and show-when rules that hide a question until it matters.

  2. 02

    Speakers submit

    A public form anyone can fill in, no invitation needed. It creates their account along the way, and saves a draft they can come back to.

  3. 03

    The committee reviews

    Reviewers score submissions against your scorecard, in one round or several. An anonymized round hides the author from them.

  4. 04

    You accept or decline

    One at a time or in bulk, with a templated email you can preview per recipient before it sends.

  5. 05

    Speakers onboard

    Accepting opens each speaker their own portal and assigns their tasks — bio, headshot, slides — so you can chase the deliverables in one place.

  6. 06

    You publish the agenda

    Drag sessions into rooms and days. Room clashes are blocked, speaker clashes are flagged, and publishing shows you what changed.

What it costs

Nothing. Here is what the same work costs elsewhere.

Every figure is quoted from that vendor’s own pricing page and linked so you can check it. Watch the shapes as much as the numbers: per event, per submission band, per month, or a slice of the tickets you sold.

Sessionboard
From $249 / mo
The suite whose Program module this was written to replace. Every plan — Professional, Enterprise, Tailored — ends in the same button: request a demo.
Sessionize
$499 / event
Per event occurrence, plus tax. The free tier is for free community events only, not for commercial, private or internal ones.
Oxford Abstracts
$890–$3,450 / event
Add-ons cost $150 to $850 each — a second submission stream is $850. Registration takes 2.5% of your ticket revenue, capped at $5,000.
Ex Ordo
Ask us
The pricing page is a contact form. It asks how many submissions you expect, and then a person sends you a number.
PaperCall
$0, until August
Free, well liked, and closing on 31 August 2026. New events can no longer be created.
pretalx
From €199 / event
Open source and genuinely good, hosted or self-run. Self-hosting wants Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, a cron runner and a reverse proxy.

Conferencer

$0, always

No plan, no per-event fee, no limit on submissions, no share of your revenue, no account to create. Your only bill is the box it runs on, and a $5 VPS covers it.

Public pricing pages, read on 11 August 2026; follow the links and check us. Ours is the LICENSE file, which is twenty-one lines and has no pricing table in it.

And nobody can switch it off.

A hosted programme tool is a tenancy: it can be repriced at renewal, acquired, moved upmarket, or shut down. PaperCall is free and widely used, and it closes on 31 August 2026 — no new events, and the existing ones are guaranteed only to that date. Conferencer cannot do that to you.

No licence check
Nothing to phone home to, no key that expires, no seat count. It runs with the network unplugged.
One file, on your disk
Every submission, review score, decision and uploaded slide deck lives in data/conferencer.db, which any tool that speaks SQL can read.
Leaving is a copy
Back the whole conference up with cp. If this repository went quiet tomorrow, yours would not notice.

The product

Three screens do most of the work.

Real screenshots of this repository, running the demo conference. Nothing below was drawn for the page.

01The form builder

You write the call for speakers question by question: 14 field types, required and locked flags, character limits, and a show-when rule that hides a question until an earlier answer calls for it.

Step 3 of 7 of the call-for-speakers builder: a section heading, then questions tagged Short text, Long text, Required, Locked and a 4000-character limit.

02The review committee

Every round has its own reviewers and its own scorecard — scales, weighted questions, free text. An anonymized round hides the author from reviewers while you still see everything.

An evaluation plan with two rounds: the first anonymized, each with its own scorecard of scales, weights and free text, and its own named reviewers.

03The agenda board

Accepted sessions wait on the left until you drag one onto the grid, or click Place to pick a slot. Two talks in one room is never right, so it is blocked; a short overlap between rooms can be deliberate, so it is only flagged.

The agenda board: two unscheduled sessions on the left, a rooms-by-time grid for day one on the right, and a Conflicts tab reading zero.

Features

Everything it does

The whole list, not a highlight reel — ten areas across 116 screens. Unusually for a feature list, you can go and check it line by line.

Call for speakers
A form builder with 14 field types, show-when logic, track routing, close dates, per-person limits, saved drafts and your own success page.
Submissions
Status tabs with counts, inline and bulk edits, a column picker, saved views, search, CSV export, and a change history you can restore from.
Review
Multi-round plans, eight scorecard types, anonymized rounds, conflict-of-interest recusal, auto-distribution with per-reviewer caps, weighted results.
Decisions
Accept and decline in bulk, with templated email, merge fields and a per-recipient preview. Acceptance hands off to onboarding on its own.
Speaker portal
Each speaker's own submissions, profile and tasks, scoped in SQL rather than by hiding links. Another speaker's page returns a real 403.
Speaker CRM
An organization-level directory that outlives one event: cross-event history, duplicate merge, a sourcing pipeline, saved segments, bulk email.
Tasks and files
Action, file-request and form tasks. Versioned uploads with the latest flagged, comments across roles, a deliverables matrix, ZIP export.
Agenda
A rooms grid you drag sessions onto; list, day, week, month and conflict views; auto-schedule assist; .ics invites and per-speaker calendar feeds.
Public site
Sessions, speakers, agenda, itinerary, gallery and a personal schedule with .ics export — all of it readable without signing in.
Embeds and API
One script tag per widget, plus HTML, JSON, XML and iCal feeds. A bearer-token REST API with cursor pagination, OpenAPI 3 and signed webhooks.

What attendees see

And then it is just a website.

Publishing gives your conference a public site nobody has to sign in to read: sessions, speakers, the agenda grid, an itinerary, a speaker gallery, and a personal schedule that exports to .ics. A session appears only once you have both accepted it and approved its content — two separate gates.

See the published agendaTry the submission form
The public agenda for day one: four rooms across the top, times down the side, each session card showing its title, time and track.
The same agenda, published — no login, and a banner carrying the open call.

Before you ask

Reasonable questions

It's free. What's the catch?
There is no paid tier, no seat limit and no feature held back for an enterprise plan. One repository, MIT licensed, all of it. It was written to replace the programme module of a suite that cost one conference about forty thousand dollars a year, and publishing the result cost nothing extra.
What happens to my conference if this project stops?
Nothing. It is already on your machine: no licence server to check in with, no phone-home, no key that expires. An abandoned repository still boots, and you can fork it. Compare a hosted tool: PaperCall is free and well liked, and it closes on 31 August 2026.
Isn't pretalx open source already?
It is, it is excellent, and if it fits your conference you should use it. Two differences. Conferencer keeps going after the schedule is released — decisions, onboarding tasks, versioned deliverables, a speaker CRM across events. And it installs with Node 22, or one docker compose up, where pretalx wants Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, a cron runner and a reverse proxy.
How do I get my data out?
The database is the export: data/conferencer.db is one SQLite file you can copy, open in any tool and query with plain SQL, with the uploads beside it in data/uploads/. There is also CSV for submissions, speakers, tasks and scores, a ZIP of every uploaded file, iCal feeds, and a REST API with an OpenAPI 3 document.
Do I need Postgres, Redis or a queue?
No — Node 22 and nothing else. Queries are synchronous and sub-millisecond, which is what lets every page render in one server pass. There is no client-side data fetching and no loading-spinner waterfall anywhere in the product.
Can a stranger submit a talk without an invitation?
Yes. The public form creates the account as it goes — an email address and a password, with no confirmation step in the way — then walks through the submission, the participants and a review screen before it posts.
What happens if I never configure a mail provider?
The send still succeeds and lands in the in-app outbox, so you can see exactly what would have gone out. Set RESEND_API_KEY when you want it to leave the building. Missing credentials never break a feature: with no OpenAI key, AI triage falls back to a local rubric that reads the abstract.
How do I deploy it?
npm run deploy is docker compose up -d --build. One container, one volume at /data holding the database and the uploads. Set SESSION_SECRET and APP_URL and you are done.
Who is behind it, and can I change it?
It was built for one real conference and opened up because there was no reason not to. Read it before you trust it with a call for speakers: plain SQL, no ORM, the schema in one schema.sql file. Changing a review rule, adding a field type or deleting a module you do not want is a pull request against your own fork, not a feature request in someone else’s backlog.