Conference App Recommendations

July 7, 2022 10:20 AM

I'm looking for an app to help us plan and manage our conference and events.

I volunteer on the tech side for a nonprofit that hosts one large in-person event and multiple smaller virtual events throughout the year. We've been using Attendify to manage our events but would like to explore other options. (Attendify was recently acquired by Hopin.)

If you've used other conference apps as either an organizer or an attendee, I'd love to hear about your experiences.

Thank you!

posted by cursed to Technology (5 answers total)

One of the conferences I attended pre-pandemic used this:

https://guidebook.com/

Seemed to work ok.
posted by jacobean at 2:05 PM on July 7, 2022

We used Bizzabo for our in-person conference earlier this year and was a colossal disaster. Do not recommend. Their onsite app (checkin, badge printing, session scanning) was buggy, they sent dead equipment, it was a whole mess. Then they basically lost our checkin data in their system for a week!

We used Notify (formerly Intrado/INXPO) for our virtual conference this year and it was generally solid. However Notify has one big downside - it does not handle live streaming video well. (I had the same experience as an attendee using Notify at another conference). I've also used 6Connex and that was solid as well (have not tried streaming video). I really liked our 6Connex PM.

Last year our CEO got "shiny object syndrome" and we used this awful virtual platform called The Echo by Event Farm. It's a "virtual world" almost like The Sims. Cool in theory, awful in practice. Really buggy and clunky. Horrible attendee tracking. And it's a downloadable desktop tool which was a problem for a lot of attendees.
posted by radioamy at 3:26 PM on July 7, 2022

I'm "at" a conference right now that's using Whova, and it's OK. It integrates with zoom, albeit a bit clunkily, and seems to push a lot of "social" features (like a "leaderboard" where you compete for interaction with its features). But it seems pretty solid for organizing a schedule and allowing participants to sort individual agendas. I think it might be even better for an in-person event--i'd certainly rather have it on my phone than a physical conference program.
posted by Mngo at 3:28 PM on July 7, 2022

I've managed events with CVENT. Do not recommend. Lots of custom coding required to make it look/act like the demo, and the back end seems stitched together from a few different platforms - you have to do several things twice.
posted by nkknkk at 6:30 PM on July 7, 2022

In November of 2020 I put on a virtual convention convention, and a couple of follow up meetings. I documented my tools here. Talks are archived here, notably Rachael Livermore talked about various ones she looked into and had a warning about Accelevents.
posted by Sophont at 10:23 PM on July 7, 2022 [2 favorites]