The open-source Sessionboard alternative.
Call for speakers, submission review, speaker portals, agenda building, and speaker comms — the whole program side of your conference in one place. Free and open source: use it here, or run your own.
From first submission to final schedule.
Open the call, review what arrives, confirm your speakers, and build the agenda — with the follow-up work tracked in the same place, not in a spreadsheet on the side.
Call for speakers
A multi-step form builder with conditional logic, participant roles, and close dates. Copy the public link and submissions start arriving.
Submission review
Approve, maybe, or deny — routed to reviewers by track. Accepting a submission links each speaker's account and mints their onboarding tasks; decision emails go out only when you send them.
Speaker portals
A self-service home for every speaker: bios, headshots, slides, task forms, and a live view of where each submission stands.
Speaker comms
Templated confirmations, decisions, and reminders — editable subjects and bodies, reply-to that reaches your inbox, a full send history.
Agenda building
Drag accepted sessions onto a day × room grid. Double-booked speakers and rooms surface the moment they happen, not after publishing.
Outstanding tasks
Which speakers still owe a bio, a headshot, or a hotel form — the whole roster on one screen, no spreadsheet on the side.
Calendar invites that actually land.
Every acceptance and schedule change goes out with a real .ics attached — one tap and the session is on the speaker's calendar, correctly, in their timezone.
- One stable calendar entry per session — updates move it in place instead of duplicating it.
- A day of drag-and-drop batches into one send per speaker, never fifteen.
- Works in Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Calendar out of the box.
Drag the schedule into place.
Accepted sessions land in an unscheduled tray. Drop them onto a day × room grid and conflicts surface the moment they happen — no spinners between drags.
- Catches double-booked speakers and rooms before attendees notice.
- Auto-place fills open slots without a single collision.
- Publish once and the public agenda updates live.
The pages your attendees see, published live.
Schedule, speakers, and sessions render straight from the data your team edits — no export step, no stale copy on the event site. Embeds and JSON, XML, and iCal feeds included. These are the live pages of an event running on this site:
Same job. Yours to keep.
OpenRostrum covers the program side Sessionboard is sold for — with the source open and the data in your hands.
Own the software your event runs on.
OpenRostrum is MIT-licensed, and the full source and history are public on GitHub. If you ever want out of the hosted app, take everything with you: deploy to your own Cloudflare account and hold the database, the files, and every speaker record yourself.
- One codebase, no gated edition — every feature ships to hosted and self-hosted alike, with no paid tier to unlock.
- Your data leaves whenever you want it to: CSV exports, a .zip of every uploaded file, and JSON, XML, and iCal feeds.
- MIT license — you never lose access to the tool your event depends on, even if we disappear tomorrow.
Run your next event on OpenRostrum.
Create your organization, open a call for speakers, and take the program from first submission to published schedule.