Examples of Indico being used for events with 700+ participants?

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I would like to know some statistics regarding the usage of Indico but I am not sure where I can find it.

We are evaluating several different systems for conference registration, payment and abstract handling for an event next year. We have already installed Indico and set up an event website.

While I like Indico so far, it is not known to the local community and so there are a lot of doubts, even when I pointed out the successful systems in CERN and elsewhere. In fact, there are currently ongoing discussions about a move to a completely different conference management system such as SciSerTec or event management by one of the societies or XING events, as they thought it would be more stable and secure.

Can the community point me to some events managed by Indico which have 700 or more attendees, and share what infrastructure and personnel were in place for these comparable events?

What is the maximum number of simultaneous registrations/abstract submissions on the system?

Moreover, is it possible for people to share whether they had any problems with using PayPal to process all the payments, as I have heard that they can sometimes withhold funds for long periods?

Many thanks in advance for any experience you can provide.

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Hi there,

I can tell you the stats from CERN, which are the ones I have access to.
There are events in the Indico DB with more than 700 participants (a little over 10 of them). These are two examples:

I cannot talk much about infrastructure, as we’re mostly focused on the software side of things. You could perhaps try to contact the organizers and check directly with them (you can find their contacts on the event page).

While there’s no way I can be sure that Indico is the best choice for your use case (that’s up to you and your organization to evaluate), I can tell you what it has that makes it a good choice:

  • It’s feature-complete, with modules that target Web site creation, registration, abstract/paper reviewing and timetable building alike. I don’t know of any systems that can provide that amount of feature coverage;
  • It’s battle-tested - we have thousands of events using it every year and we know it works. The High Energy Physics Community uses Indico extensively (> 200 institutes);
  • It doesn’t lock you in. You can import and export all kinds of data to and from Indico. (e.g. you could choose to do the registration elsewhere and import the registrant data to Indico). After your event ends, you can export your site to a static site and put it up somewhere, or move it to another Indico server that accepts to host it;
  • It’s free and Open Source - while anyone could provide a commercial service based on it (and we know of companies who do), you’re always free to set up your own server and have as many events or participants as you want;
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We used CERN indico to organize EPS-HEP 2017 in Venice and Quark Matter 2018 again in Venice. As I said we used the indico at CERN without problem. I cannot comment on the payment sides since we used a separate system based on credit card. I like this aspect of indico that you can use it for the registration, schedule, refereeing but then you can redirect your registrant to an external system to complete the payment. Of course in such a case, you need to take care manually of who still need to pay. Many paid cash/credit card on the first day of the conference.

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Thanks. Can you share a bit of information about how many people is in the administrative team for the conference, in particular for supporting participants in using Indico?
Also, how many people were doing the part of taking care manually of who still needs to pay?

The community that we are serving for our conference would probably be much less familiar with Indico, so we are worried that there will be a lot more questions from the participants, and would like to know if we need to expect questions on a daily or weekly basis.

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Thanks for the statistics and it is helpful to see previous successful events. We are currently leaning towards a scheme where the registration will be outsourced (mainly because of the complications in our case regarding payments and tax) but the abstract handling will be carried out by Indico. I am investigating the CSV import of registered participants so may come back later with other questions.

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