Three good answers to different questions.
Sessionize and Sessionboard are both reasonable buys, and for some conferences they are the right one. Here is the shape of the choice, including where they win. Checked against their own pages in August 2026.
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 community events, priced per event for commercial ones. If your conference fits its shape, it is a good answer.
Sessionboard
Large commercial events with a content team and a budget line.
Speaker CRM, submissions, agenda building, and a catalogue of integrations with the big event platforms. Sold through a demo request. If you are running a 10,000-person 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 is true regardless of what 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 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 community events, per-event pricing published for commercial ones | Plans published, prices on request |
| 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 export and a REST API, both 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 andSessionboard. 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 once and keep an eye on it — an afternoon for an engineer, a blocker if there is no such person.
Years of conferences behind them
Sessionize has run thousands of events. Podium is new. 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 in particular connects to the large event platforms: registration, badging, the expo floor. Podium ships adapters for email, chat, storage, two-way sync 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.
Five differences worth switching for.
Sponsor sessions are modelled, not bolted on
A package is a countable set of entitlements — two session slots, a logo placement — and a sponsor session consumes one. Used against bought, on the same screen as the deal. Most tools in this category leave the paid half in email.
Review integrity is enforced, not requested
A reviewer who submitted, is credited on, or has declared a conflict with a proposal cannot score it. The write is refused, with no convention to rely on and no flag for someone to catch afterwards.
An agent can drive it without breaking it
Every write takes an idempotency key, so a retried call cannot book the room twice. A refusal names the rule it broke instead of returning a bare 400. Read, write and personal data are separate scopes.
The rules were written down before the code
What happens to an unused sponsor slot, who may see a reviewer's score, what a deadline does when it passes. All specified in a normative model, with a check in CI that fails the build when code and model disagree.
No per-speaker pricing, ever
Nothing costs more because your CFP went well. You pay your own hosting bill, and nobody can change the price between editions.
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.
- Your event is a hundred people and one track. A spreadsheet is fine, and we would rather you kept it.
Still here? Go and use it.
Fifteen minutes in a conference already mid-flight will tell you more than this page did.