Best Conference Management Software 2026: Top 15 Tools Reviewed

Reviewed by the NeucitePress Editorial Board — PhD academics, peer-reviewed journal editors and medical communication specialists.

Last updated: July 2026 • Reviewed by the NeucitePress Editorial Board • Reading time: 10 minutes

“Conference management software” is not one product category — it’s a cluster of related but distinct tools that handle different parts of running an academic or professional conference. Some organizers need all of them; many only need one or two, depending on whether their event is a 200-person single-track workshop or a multi-track international conference with a formal peer-reviewed submission process. Rather than force-ranking a padded list of tools, this guide breaks down the real categories, names a handful of genuinely well-established platforms in each, and lays out the criteria that actually matter when choosing between them.

The Four Main Categories

Before comparing specific products, it helps to be clear about which job you’re actually hiring software to do.

• Registration and ticketing. Handles attendee sign-up, payment processing, ticket types and pricing tiers, discount codes, and (often) check-in/badge printing on-site.
• Abstract and paper submission with peer review. Manages the academic side of a conference: call for papers, author submissions, reviewer assignment, scoring and comments, and program/track scheduling based on accepted papers. This is a distinct need from registration and is common at academic and scientific conferences specifically.
• Event app and agenda tools. Mobile or web apps that give attendees a personalized schedule, session details, speaker bios, maps, networking/messaging features, and live polling or Q&A during sessions.
• Virtual and hybrid streaming platforms. Tools for live-streaming sessions, hosting virtual-only tracks, enabling remote Q&A, and providing on-demand recordings after the event.

Many larger platforms bundle several of these categories together (an all-in-one suite), while many academic conferences mix and match — for example, using a dedicated abstract-management tool for peer review alongside a separate registration platform.

Registration and Ticketing Platforms

Cvent is one of the largest platforms in the space, built for large and complex events and commonly used by big professional and corporate conferences that need advanced registration workflows, venue sourcing, and reporting all in one system. Eventbrite is widely used for its simplicity and self-service setup, with a large public event-discovery marketplace attached, making it a common choice for smaller academic workshops and single-track conferences that don’t need heavy customization. Both are established, well-documented platforms with long track records; the right choice between them (and others in the category) usually comes down to event size, budget, and how much configuration flexibility is needed versus how much simplicity is preferred.

Abstract and Paper Submission / Peer-Review Management

This category is specific to academic and scientific conferences and is where general-purpose event platforms usually fall short.

• EasyChair is one of the most widely used conference management systems in the world for handling submissions, reviewer assignment, and program scheduling, and it is free for organizers and authors to use, which has made it especially common for computer science, engineering, and many other academic conferences.
• OpenConf is a longer-standing peer-review and conference management platform offering low-cost, per-event licensing, aimed at small to mid-sized academic conferences that need reliable submission and review workflows without a large feature set.
• Ex Ordo is a more modern abstract-management system with a stronger focus on user experience for reviewers and program chairs, mobile-friendly submission, and features that extend into scheduling and, in some cases, publishing workflows.

Organizers choosing between these should weigh the complexity of their review process (single-blind vs. double-blind, multi-round review, bidding on submissions), how many submissions and reviewers are involved, and whether the tool needs to integrate with a separate registration platform or event app.

Event App and Agenda Platforms

Whova is a well-known event-app platform frequently used at academic and professional conferences for attendee engagement — personalized agendas, in-app networking and messaging, sponsor showcases, and session polling — and is often praised specifically for its sponsor and exhibitor tools. Many of the registration and all-in-one platforms mentioned above (Cvent, and others) also include their own native event-app modules, so this is an area where the “best” choice often depends on whether you’re buying an integrated suite or picking a best-of-breed app to sit alongside a separate registration system.

Virtual and Hybrid Streaming

For conferences with a virtual or hybrid component, dedicated streaming and virtual-event platforms handle live session broadcast, breakout rooms, virtual exhibit halls, and on-demand replay. Many organizers now handle this need through the virtual-event modules built into the larger platforms named above, rather than a fully separate streaming vendor, though dedicated virtual-conference platforms still exist for organizers who want more specialized virtual-attendee experiences.

Key Selection Criteria

• Match the tool to the actual workflow, not the category label. A conference with a formal peer-review process needs an abstract-management tool first and a registration platform second — not the reverse.
• Integration between systems. If you’re using separate tools for abstract management, registration, and the event app, check what integrates natively (via API, CSV export/import, or a built-in connector) versus what requires manual reconciliation of attendee and author data.
• Total cost, not just sticker price. Registration platforms in particular often charge a base fee plus a per-registrant or per-transaction fee plus payment processing costs; abstract-management tools may charge per conference or per submission. Ask for the full fee structure, not just a headline number.
• Support for your specific review process. If double-blind review, multi-track scheduling, or reviewer conflict-of-interest management matters to your program committee, confirm the tool supports it before committing, since retrofitting a review process onto a tool that doesn’t support it well is a common source of frustration.
• Vendor track record and support responsiveness. Conference software failures during the event itself (check-in outages, app crashes during a session) are highly visible and hard to recover from gracefully; support quality and uptime history matter more here than in lower-stakes software purchases.

Budget Tiers

Broadly, organizers can expect three rough tiers of cost, though exact pricing depends heavily on attendee count, feature set, and negotiated contracts: free or near-free tools (some abstract-management systems, and free tiers of registration platforms for very small or no-cost events), mid-range per-event or per-registrant pricing (typical of most standalone registration platforms and abstract-management systems, scaling with attendee or submission volume), and enterprise-tier annual licensing (typical of the largest all-in-one suites aimed at large, recurring, multi-track conferences with substantial budgets and a need for dedicated account support). Most academic conferences, particularly smaller and mid-sized ones, fall into the first two tiers rather than the enterprise tier.

The Bottom Line

There is no single “best” conference management software, because the category covers genuinely different jobs. The most useful exercise for an organizing committee is to separately identify needs for registration, abstract/peer review, attendee engagement, and (if relevant) virtual delivery, and then evaluate platforms against each need rather than searching for one tool that claims to do everything equally well. For most academic conferences, that means pairing a dedicated abstract-management tool (EasyChair, OpenConf, or Ex Ordo) with a registration platform (Cvent or Eventbrite, depending on scale) and, where budget allows, an event-app layer such as Whova for attendee engagement.

Sources

• EasyChair
• OpenConf
• Ex Ordo
• Cvent
• Eventbrite
• Whova