Conferencer vs Sched — an honest comparison

What it costs

Sched: From $200 / event. Conferencer: $0.

Sched: From $200 / event; At 250 attendees the tiers list at $600 (Launch), $1,500 (Boost) and $2,250 (Ultra) per event, or $50–$188 per month billed annually — a sale at the time of reading brought the entry point to $200 per event. A basic call for papers starts at Launch; the advanced call for papers needs Boost. Events under 50 attendees are free.

Conferencer

$0, always

MIT licensed and self-hosted: no plan, no per-event fee, no limit on submissions, no share of your revenue. Your only bill is the box it runs on, and a $5 VPS covers it.

What Sched is

Event scheduling and management platform.

Sched is a hosted event platform built around the published schedule: registration and ticketing, attendee apps and session planning, with a call-for-papers module on the paid tiers. Its pricing scales with how many attendees you expect.

Who it is for: Conferences, festivals and professional-development events wanting scheduling, registration and an attendee app in one.

Side by side

The same job, line by line.

The Sched column states only what their own public pages state; the sources are linked at the foot of the page. The Conferencer column is checkable in the repository.

ConferencerSched

Published price

Conferencer$0 — MIT licensed, no plans, no per-event fee

SchedFrom $200 per event at 250 attendees; free under 50 attendees

Call for papers

ConferencerThe whole product: 14 field types, show-when logic, drafts

SchedA module — basic at $600 per event, advanced at $1,500

Committee review

ConferencerMulti-round plans, anonymized rounds, 8 scorecard types, conflict-of-interest recusal, auto-distribution with caps

SchedNot listed among the plan features

Agenda

ConferencerThe organizer's planning grid, then the public site

SchedTheir core product — attendee-facing schedules and apps

Registration

ConferencerNot included — Conferencer runs the programme, not ticketing

SchedBuilt in, with ticketing and check-in

Speaker onboarding

ConferencerOnboarding tasks, versioned file requests, a deliverables matrix, a speaker portal

SchedSpeaker profiles and communication tools

Self-hosted

ConferencerYes — one container, one SQLite file, Node 22+

SchedNo — hosted only

Where Sched is genuinely better

The attendee side: Personal schedules, mobile apps, check-in and networking — the half of the event Conferencer deliberately does not do.
Registration and ticketing: Built in rather than integrated, with attendance tracking and badges on the higher tiers.
Free for small events: Under 50 attendees it costs nothing, and there is a 60-day money-back guarantee.
Track record: Over 30,000 events, per their site.

Where Conferencer differs

The programme is the product: Not a module tiered behind a schedule tool: the call, the review, the decisions, the onboarding and the agenda are the whole thing, and all of it is free.
No per-attendee meter: The price does not move when your event does well. $0 at 50 attendees, $0 at 5,000.
Committee review is real: Multi-round plans, anonymized rounds, eight scorecard types, conflict-of-interest recusal and weighted results.

Sources for every claim about Sched on this page, read on 12 August 2026: sched.com/pricing · sched.com. If a figure here has gone stale, the linked page is the truth.

Conferencer vs Sched.

Sched: From $200 / event. Conferencer: $0.

Event scheduling and management platform.

The same job, line by line.