Evaluating a conference app used to mean a sales call, a demo account, and someone else's fake data. Now it means pasting a link: if your programme is public on Indico, EasyChair, or ConfTool, a private preview of your own conference builds itself in about 30 seconds.
Every conference app vendor says “book a demo.” The demo shows someone else’s conference — tidy sample data, three tracks, no posters, nothing like your programme. You leave the call still not knowing the only thing that matters: what does my event look like in this thing?
We removed that step. On the try-free page, paste the public programme link of your conference. If it lives on one of the supported systems, HEPCon reads it and builds a private preview of your actual event — sessions, parallel tracks, contributions, speakers — in about 30 seconds. No account, no call, no re-typing.
What counts as a supported link
The instant path works with public programme pages from three ecosystems:
- Indico — any
…/event/<id>/URL, whether it’s hosted at CERN, on indico.global, or on an institutional Indico instance. More on the integration: Indico conference app. - EasyChair — the Smart Program page of your conference. Details: EasyChair conference app.
- ConfTool — the public programme (“Browse the agenda”) pages of a
conftool.pro/conftool.comevent. Details: ConfTool conference app.
Everything else — EDAS, Microsoft CMT, OpenReview, a spreadsheet, a custom website — goes through the same form as a concierge build: we set it up for you within 48 hours. Same result, one extra day.
What actually happens in those 30 seconds
There is no magic and no manual step. The importer fetches your public programme, maps its structure — days, sessions, parallel tracks, contributions, speaker lists — into HEPCon’s event model, and registers a private event in the app. You get two things on screen:
- A join code for the HEPCon app on iOS or Android.
- A private link you can forward to your organising committee.
The preview is not listed anywhere public. It is your copy of your programme, visible only to people you give the code to. If you walk away, it simply expires and gets removed — nothing to cancel.
Why a preview beats a demo
A demo shows features. A preview shows your Tuesday afternoon — the one with nine sessions in parallel, the poster block, and the speaker who’s in two rooms eleven minutes apart. That’s the moment you learn whether an app can carry your programme or just a brochure version of it.
It’s also the fastest way to answer the committee. Instead of forwarding a vendor PDF, you forward a join code: everyone opens the real agenda on their own phone, offline included, and the discussion moves from “should we have an app?” to “this is what ours looks like.”
The scale ceiling is not a concern either: the same import pipeline carries ICHEP 2026’s 1,023 contributions across up to 12 parallel sessions. Your programme will not be the one that breaks it.
What it costs
Nothing to try, and for many events nothing at all: programmes under 50 contributions are always free — preview, publish, and run the event. Larger programmes get a fixed quote (€500–€900 for workshops and research days, €900–€2,500 for full conferences) — never per-attendee. The specifics are on the pricing page, including what every tier ships with.
One honest deadline to know about: if you decide to go live officially, that decision is due one week before your event — the app needs a few days to be branded, checked, and announced to attendees properly.
Try it with your real programme
If your conference is on Indico, EasyChair, or ConfTool, the next 30 seconds can settle the evaluation:
Not on those systems? The same form takes any export or link — and the concierge path has you covered within 48 hours.
Written by Dr. Martin Vassilev
Founder & Product Lead
Software engineer supporting scientific conferences with mobile agenda systems. Lead developer behind HEPCon.
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