Indico is CERN's open-source event management platform for conferences and meetings. Explore its features, self-hosted pricing, and top alternatives.
Indico is an open-source event management platform that grew out of a European Union-funded research project at CERN in 2002 and has been developed and financed by CERN since 2004. Originally built to organize the physics laboratory's own meetings and conferences, it has since become a globally adopted platform used by research institutions, universities, and international organizations including the United Nations.
The software is MIT-licensed, built on Python and Flask with a PostgreSQL database and a React front end, and its source code is publicly maintained on GitHub. Because there is no official hosted SaaS edition, organizations run Indico on their own servers, giving them full control over data and customization at the cost of managing their own deployment.
Indico covers the complete lifecycle of an event: creating flexible timetables for conferences, meetings, and lectures; managing attendee registration; and controlling multi-level access permissions for who can view, edit, or manage specific event content. For academic and scientific conferences, it includes a structured paper submission and peer-review workflow, letting organizers collect, review, and score submitted papers within the same system used to run the event itself.
Beyond scheduling, Indico provides document management for archiving presentations, slides, and papers permanently alongside event metadata, plus room and resource booking for physical meeting spaces — CERN alone uses Indico to coordinate over 200 meeting and conference rooms. This combination of scheduling, review, archival, and room booking in a single open-source system is what distinguishes Indico from lighter-weight ticketing tools.
Indico is free and open source under the MIT license. There is no commercial pricing tier or official CERN-hosted SaaS product; organizations download the software from GitHub and deploy it on their own infrastructure.
Because it is self-hosted, the real cost to an institution is the infrastructure and system-administration effort required to run and maintain an instance, not a licensing fee. This makes Indico attractive to research institutions and international bodies that already operate their own IT infrastructure and want full control and long-term data ownership.
Yes, Indico is fully open source under the MIT license and free to download and self-host.
Indico originated from a 2002 European Union-funded project and has been developed and financed by CERN since 2004.
There is no official CERN-run SaaS edition; organizations self-host Indico on their own infrastructure.
Indico is built in Python using the Flask framework, SQLAlchemy with PostgreSQL for data storage, and React for the web interface.
Indico is used by more than 300 organizations worldwide, including the United Nations and the Max Planck Institute for Physics.
Yes, Indico includes a structured paper submission and peer-review workflow for academic conferences.