Best EasyChair alternatives for academic conferences (2026)

EasyChair has run academic peer review for two decades, so most reviewers already have an account. But support is paid-only and the interface has barely changed in years.

It was also built for one job, collecting and reviewing papers, so registration, a website, and the attendee experience were never its focus.

If your conference has outgrown it, or you need a more modern solution with registrations, a mobile app and/or an event website in the same place, here are the best EasyChair alternatives for 2026, compared honestly.

Why organizers look for an EasyChair alternative

EasyChair is a reliable, familiar conference management system, and for a submission/review-only workflow it still does the job. The friction shows up as events grow:

• It is built for submissions, but a conference is more than that. Collecting and reviewing papers is only part of the job. The point of most conferences is to put that work to use, which usually means a beautiful program, a mobile app, and often a registration system and an event website. That calls for a complete conference management platform, not just a submission tool.
• The interface feels dated. It is the most common complaint across review sites and competitor roundups: the workflows look and feel the way they did a decade ago.
• The cost adds up. EasyChair’s documentation still lists a free license for events under 20 submissions, but organizers regularly tell us that free option is no longer available in practice. Above that threshold, pricing is per submission (from around $3.90) and grows quickly for a recurring conference.
• Support is paid-only. Technical support does not come with the free license, so smaller events are on their own when something breaks.

If your conference is essentially a review process, none of this may bother you. EasyChair is good at reviewing content; it is just less suited to putting that content to work across the rest of your event.

When EasyChair is still the right choice

A fair comparison has to say this: EasyChair is hard to beat for large, review-heavy conferences in computer science and engineering. Its peer-review workflow is deep, with paper bidding, conflict-of-interest handling, reviewer assignment, rebuttals, and discussion, plus double-blind review and a camera-ready stage for final papers.

Authors and reviewers in those fields already know it, so there is little onboarding. If review depth is your only requirement and your community already lives on EasyChair, switching may not be worth it.

I gotta admit, EasyChair’s old-school interface, while old looking, makes me a little nostalgic for the good old days. There’s something reassuring about a tool that has barely even changed in 20 years.

Also, its CFP directory is an interesting aspect: with nearly 2M users, posting your call for papers there puts it in front of an academic audience that newer platforms can hardly match.

The alternatives below matter most when your needs go beyond peer review.

What to look for in an alternative

Not every tool on this list does the same job. Before you compare names, decide which of these you need:

• Scope. Do you need a full event lifecycle (website, registration, payments, abstracts, program, virtual sessions), or only submission and peer review?
• Review depth. For review-heavy events, the platform should handle double-blind review, conflict-of-interest detection, paper bidding, and a camera-ready or proceedings export. Lighter events rarely need all of it.
• Pricing model. Free plan, per-submission, per-event, or quote-only. Transparency varies a lot.
• Registration and payments. Several tools handle abstracts but not registration.
• Modern, self-serve setup. Can your team configure it without a vendor doing it for you?
• Support. Free tiers often come with none.

EasyChair alternatives at a glance

Here is how the main options compare. “Limited” means the tool offers a basic version of that capability rather than a full one.

Tool	Free	Abstracts & peer review	Registration & payments	Mobile app	Pricing model
EasyChair	No	Yes (deep)	Yes	No	Per submission (from ~$3.90)
Fourwaves	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Free plan; pay on usage
ConfTool	Yes	Yes	Yes (Pro)	Yes	Free / quote (Pro)
Ex Ordo	No	Yes	Yes	Via integration	Quote-based
Oxford Abstracts	Yes	Yes (strong)	Yes	No	Free; per event $890–$3,450 (USD)
Microsoft CMT	Yes	Yes	No	No	Free (academic only)
OpenReview	Yes	Yes (open review)	No	No	Free

The rest of this article walks through each tool, starting with the one I work on so I can be specific about what an all-in-one platform looks like.

1. Fourwaves

Fourwaves covers the whole event in one place instead of only the submission step, and it is built for research and academic communities, so the workflows match how conferences run.

The interface is modern and easy to use with a small learning curve, and it strikes a good balance between flexibility and ease of use. Here is what it handles.

Abstract management

The submission form comes pre-built for a fast setup with custom fields like submission title, authors, abstract and more. Organizers can easily add any number of fields, including the event tracks, a presentation type preference question, as well as specific fields which can be edited upon acceptance, like full paper PDF, poster file, PowerPoint file and more.

Authors submit their work through a form you control, with the fields and file types you need. You can read more in my breakdown of the best abstract management software.

Peer review

Reviewers score and comment directly in the platform, and you can assign submissions, send bulk or personalized emails, and track review progress. It does have limits: for example, authors cannot reply to reviewer comments individually in text, though they can address the feedback by revising their submission, and Fourwaves does not handle indexing in platforms like Scopus directly.

The modern interface is praised by reviewers who can easily login and complete their assignments, helping organizers meet their deadlines.

Event website and registration

Every plan includes a customizable event website where participants can find all the information about the event. It also contains a powerful registration module where presenters and attendees can register and pay.

You can publish the accepted abstracts in a full program that attendees can browse and which is accessible through a mobile app included for free.

On the registration side you can:

• set early bird and regular rates, with different prices for each registration type
• create coupon codes to comp invited speakers
• generate name tags and certificates of attendance from the registration data

Pricing: Fourwaves has a free plan and only charges when you collect paid registrations through credit card transactions. See the pricing page for the current details.

Best for: academic and research conferences that want submissions, registration, website, and virtual sessions in one self-serve platform.

Less ideal if: you only need peer review and nothing else, where a free review-only tool may be enough.

Let us show you around.

Fourwaves is the all-in-one conference management tool you have been looking for.

Book a demo

2. ConfTool

ConfTool is a German platform, which makes it a strong choice for European organizers who want support in their own time zone. It comes in two versions: a free, self-hosted Standard edition for small non-commercial events, and the paid, hosted ConfTool Pro for larger, multi-track conferences.

Where it shines is abstract submission and peer review, which is exactly what matters most when you are leaving EasyChair. It is genuinely powerful here:

• You can set up multiple tracks, each with its own track chair role, plus a Program Chair committee role for fine-grained permission control.
• Reviewers can bid on the submissions they want to review, which makes assigning reviewers much easier. This is the kind of feature EasyChair users specifically look for.
• The abstract booklet, conference program, and camera-ready proceedings exports are very good, including parallel sessions, which are notoriously hard and time-consuming to format by hand.

For events that collect registrations, ConfTool charges no service fees on credit card transactions, a real plus for budget-conscious organizers.

The main downside is the interface. It is genuinely old, with many pages and sections packed with dense text, the support documentation is hard to navigate, and the initial setup is not intuitive. If you can get past that learning curve, it is a powerful and capable EasyChair alternative for submissions and peer review.

Pricing: Standard is free (self-hosted); Pro is quote-based.

Best for: budget-conscious or European academic organizers who want deep abstract and peer-review features and do not mind a dated, complex interface.

3. Ex Ordo

Ex Ordo is a conference management platform aimed at scholarly societies, and it is UK-based, which helps with support if you are in a European time zone.

It started as an abstract submission system and added modules over time. Because the all-in-one vision was not there from the beginning, some of the later modules can feel less tightly connected than on a platform designed that way from the start.

The abstract submission and peer-review side is genuinely strong. For example, it also handles panel submissions, a dedicated way to collect panel proposals that can later be placed into the program.

Their core business is very large conferences with an abstract-publishing component, so the registration side has had less attention than submission and review. For big events, small details in the registration flow can matter, but if you are coming from EasyChair you probably care most about submission and peer review, which is where Ex Ordo is strongest.

A mobile app is available as a paid add-on through a Guidebook integration. It is fairly expensive, around $3,500, and aimed at large scholarly societies.

The submission setup can be a little rigid: you cannot always change field types or the exact order shown to submitters, so some setups need workarounds. That cuts both ways, since fewer choices means you can be up and running faster. You are trading flexibility for a smaller learning curve.

Pricing: quote-based, with no public numbers and no free tier.

Best for: scholarly societies running large, review-heavy conferences that want a strong, quick-to-launch submission and review system.

4. Oxford Abstracts

Oxford Abstracts is an abstract management and peer-review platform that has grown to add registration, payments, and program scheduling. Submitters generally find the submission experience straightforward, and it is well rated for abstract handling.

It supports multi-stage submissions, so an event can collect an abstract first and a full paper later. Organizers control exactly what each stage requires through the form builder.

It also has a session submission module for collecting session proposals and controlling who can submit to specific sessions through a private or public link. This comes as a paid add-on called Symposium.

Organizers can turn the platform’s automatic emails on or off and customize their content, which makes author and attendee communication easy to manage.

Compared with EasyChair, Oxford Abstracts brings strong customization for abstract submissions and peer review, wrapped in a modern interface.

Pricing (USD): a free Basic plan for small events, then Abstract Management at $890, Standard Conference at $2,290, and Professional Conference at $3,450, each billed per event.

Worth knowing: for years, organizers told us the interface could feel confusing, with a lot of options and a real learning curve, which is not what people want when they are leaving EasyChair. The team has put serious effort into improving that. Support is a strong point, especially for organizers in Europe, since the company is UK-based.

Best for: abstract-led conferences that want strong submission and review workflows, multi-stage submissions, and responsive support.

5. Microsoft CMT

Microsoft CMT (Conference Management Toolkit) is free and backed by Microsoft Research, which makes it one of the strongest options if you only need submission and peer review. It is widely used across computer science conferences.

Like EasyChair and ConfTool, reviewers and meta-reviewers can bid on the papers they want to review. Program chairs get a discussion thread and can meet virtually to talk through decisions. There is also a streamlined IEEE e-copyright submission flow, which helps when you need to export submissions to IEEE. CMT also supports double-blind review and a camera-ready phase, the standard workflow at most computer-science conferences.

One standout feature is reviewer assignment through the Toronto Paper Matching System (TPMS). TPMS builds a profile for each reviewer from a list of their publications, then scores how well each paper matches. Since many EasyChair users come from technical conferences, this kind of automated matching can save a lot of manual assignment work.

CMT also supports multiple tracks with no limit, so you can configure separate tracks for a large, multi-track international conference. You can read more on the Microsoft CMT overview.

Limitations: it does only submission and peer review. There is no registration, no payments, and no event website, the interface is dated, and use is restricted to academic institutions.

Pricing: free (academic use only).

Best for: technical and academic conferences that need powerful peer review at no cost and handle registration elsewhere.

6. OpenReview

OpenReview is a free, nonprofit platform built for transparent, open peer review. It powers major conferences like NeurIPS, which makes it another strong contender if you specifically want a submission and peer-review system and nothing else.

Its mission is to make the peer-review process more open, while still addressing the legitimate privacy concerns that come with conference peer review. One feature academics like is that discussion about a paper can continue after acceptance, which helps researchers connect and keep useful conversations going.

Limitations: it is narrow by design. There is no registration, payments, website, or scheduling, and it takes technical configuration to run.

Pricing: free.

Best for: conferences that specifically want open or experimental peer-review models.

How to migrate from EasyChair

Switching is less work than it looks. Export your submissions, author data, and reviewer list from EasyChair as CSV files, then import them into your new platform during setup. Most teams move at the start of a new conference cycle rather than mid-review, which keeps the timeline clean. If you go with Fourwaves, the team can help set up your website, forms, and reviewer assignments so you are not starting from a blank page. My guide to organizing an academic conference covers the rest of the setup.

Which EasyChair alternative is right for you?

• You need everything in one place (website, registration, abstracts, program, virtual): Fourwaves or Ex Ordo. Fourwaves has a free plan and transparent pricing; Ex Ordo is quote-only.
• Abstracts and review come first, registration second: Fourwaves or Oxford Abstracts.
• You want a free option and can self-host: ConfTool Standard.
• You only need peer review, for free: Microsoft CMT, or OpenReview for open review.

If you want submissions, registration, and a conference website without paying per submission or waiting on a quote, book a demo and I will show you how Fourwaves handles it.