What a switch actually costs you.
Four things decide whether this is survivable: what comes out of the tool you are leaving, what goes into this one, what has no equivalent here, and what your speakers notice. Claims about anyone else's product were checked against their own pages in August 2026.
Two things import cleanly. Four do not move at all.
A CSV creates people and the event roster. For the rest the honest answer is that last year stays where it is.
| What you are moving | How | What that means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Speakers, and everyone else you hold an email address for | CSV | Headers spelled Speaker Name, E-mail or Employer map themselves. Matching is on email, so re-running the same file updates rather than duplicates. |
| Who is staff, who reviews, who speaks | CSV | A second pass over the same file with two more columns. Somebody who chaired review last year and submits this year stays one person. |
| Sponsors, their contacts and what they bought | API | The importer previews sponsor rows and then refuses to write them. Sponsors, sponsorships and entitlements each have a create endpoint, so a loop over your spreadsheet does it. Otherwise it is typing. |
| Last year's sessions and abstracts | No | Nothing imports them and no endpoint authors them: a session exists here because a decision was published. What carries forward is the people, and a directory that remembers them across editions. |
| Proposals part-way through a review round | No | Finish the round where it started. Running half a round in each tool is how a proposal ends up with three scores in one place and two in another. |
| Last year's scores, comments and decisions | No | They stay in whatever your current tool exports. Podium's own trail starts the day you do, and answers "why was this rejected" from then on. |
| Slides, headshots and other uploaded files | No | There is no bulk file import. Accepted speakers upload again during onboarding — chased automatically, but a chase you would not otherwise have had. |
| The schedule on your website | Rebuilt | Place sessions into rooms and times, and conflicts are computed as you drop them. Publish a snapshot and point your site at it. |
Nobody has publicly moved a live conference onto Podium yet. The import runs against a real database on every commit, and it has never been pointed at an export from a commercial tool in anger. Budget an afternoon for the file, not five minutes.
They did not choose any of this.
Four things change for the two hundred people who never see an admin screen. One of them is a real loss.
A different link, from you
The invitation comes from your event rather than a product they have never heard of, on a hostname you chose.
No password to set
Password sign-in is off in a production deployment. Speakers arrive on an emailed link, and there is no reset form to forget.
They keep their own profile
Name, pronouns, bio, headshot, links. What they write is what the public schedule renders, so nobody on your side copy-edits sixty biographies.
Whatever they had in the old tool is gone
Old submissions, old profile, old history. For a returning speaker that is a bio to paste and a headshot to find again, and they will notice.
Start here and you may not need the rest.
Sessionize
Community tech conferences and user groups.
A hosted call for speakers with a long track record in this space, free for non-commercial events and 499 USD plus tax per event occurrence for commercial ones. If your conference fits its shape, it is a good answer and a cheap one.
Sessionboard
Large commercial events with a content team and a budget line.
Speaker CRM, submissions, agenda building, and a catalogue their pricing page puts at 15+ integrations including Zapier, Cvent and Bizzabo. Three plans, the top one a sales conversation. If you are running a trade show with a team to match, this is its category.
Podium
AI-Engineer-shaped conferences that want to own the whole thing.
Free, MIT-licensed, and it deploys to your own Cloudflare account. Built for the program chair who is also the review chair, sells sponsor sessions, and would rather read the rules than file a ticket to find out what they are.
Everything below holds whatever ships next.
There is no feature matrix here. It would mean asserting from the outside what two proprietary products do, and it would be stale the day either ships a release. These rows are licensing, hosting and published packaging.
| Podium | Sessionize | Sessionboard | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence | MIT | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Where it runs | Your Cloudflare account | Their servers | Their servers |
| Who holds the speaker data | You do | They do | They do |
| What it costs | Nothing to licence; you pay your own hosting | Free for non-commercial events; 499 USD + tax per event occurrence otherwise | Three plans with a published monthly price; the top tier is a sales conversation |
| Can you read the source | All of it | No | No |
| Can you change it | Fork it | Feature request | Feature request |
| Getting your data out | CSV, JSON and ZIP exports, and a REST API, all yours | Export and API per their terms | Export and API per their terms |
Pricing and packaging change. Confirm both on their own pages before you decide: Sessionize and Sessionboard. Do not take a competitor's word for it, ours included.
Five things the incumbents do better, today.
None of these is fixable by writing a better sentence about it.
Nothing to run
Both are hosted. You sign up and start. Podium needs somebody to deploy it and keep an eye on it — an afternoon for anyone who has met Cloudflare, and a blocker if there is no such person and no agent doing it for them.
Years of conferences behind them
Sessionize has run thousands of events. Podium has run its own seed. You get a full test suite and a written specification instead of a decade of edge cases somebody else already found. If that trade sounds bad, it should.
Somebody to call
They sell support. Podium has an issue tracker answered by the people who wrote it, with no promise about when.
Bigger integration catalogues
Sessionboard's pricing page counts 15+ integrations, Zapier and the large event platforms among them. Podium ships adapters for email, chat, storage, two-way sync, first-pass review and workshop capacity, and a contract for the rest.
The attendee side of the event
Podium does no ticketing, no registration, no badge scanning and no attendee app, and is not going to. It asks your ticketing system one question — is this workshop full — and stays out.
Do not pick Podium if any of these is true.
Better to find this out here than in February. If two or more land, buy something hosted and enjoy your conference.
- You need registration, badging and the program in one system, from one vendor, on one invoice.
- Nobody on the team can deploy and own a web application, and nobody can be hired to.
- You need a signed support agreement, a vendor to answer a security questionnaire, or somebody contractually on the hook in March.
- You are mid-round, the decisions go out in three weeks, and there is no gap between now and then.
- Your event is a hundred people and one track. A spreadsheet is fine, and we would rather you kept it.