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A Great conference management software should provide time- and stress-saving solutions that add real value to your life. Here we share eight of the industry’s favourite conference management tools for 2025.

If you’re a conference organiser or association professional involved in scholarly events, you’ll know that orchestrating a top-drawer meeting demands organisational and time-management skills. Whether you’re planning a physical, virtual, or hybrid event, simplifying and streamlining your processes with conference management tools and systems is essential to taming the conference planning beast. Sourcing and setting up your abstract management software, and cross-checking whether your presenters have registered (and paid), are just a fraction of the challenges inherent to planning and executing these types of events. 

Negotiating the complexities of research conferences is stressful enough. And we know that choosing the right software can also be a daunting task in its own right. So, to spare you days of research, we’ve curated a list of tried-and-tested conference management tools that are designed to not only make your life easier, but thanks to their great UI and UX software design, will go a long way in keeping your hard-working committee, events team members, and volunteers invested and engaged.

Conference Management Software vs Event Management Software

First, we’ll briefly explain the difference between event management software and conference management software, to clear up any confusion between the two.

Event management software is the generic term for a wide range of software used for managing commercial or corporate events. This is often an all in one solution designed to provide a wide range of features with limited functionality. If you have a complex peer review or conference programme then you are better looking at conference management software. 

Conference management software is software designed specifically for medical, technical, scientific, and academic conferences (aka research conferences aka scholarly events aka symposia). The core functionality of conference management system is abstract management (collecting submissions and managing peer review), with further conference management features linked into this. Management tools such as your conference programme, your mobile conference app, conference registration, book of proceedings and virtual/hybrid system.

We cover both the top conference management software and event management softwares in this article to keep you covered. Let’s get started.

“When planners say sustainability is so expensive, it’s actually not. You’re wasting so much money in places you don’t even realise. You need to go into the kitchen after every meal function, and see what food and beverage you have left over. You will learn what your attendees like to eat, what they don’t like to eat, and where you’re over-ordering, or under-ordering. Have a conversation with the chef and talk through the process of that food prep to see how you can minimise it. Just going back of house and witnessing what waste you have created is a huge eye-opening experience.” – Courtney Lohmann.