How this directory compares
Five ways to find a speaker, and the one question that separates them: who decided this person belongs on the list, and what can you check about it without asking us?
Five models, and who each one answers to
The differences that matter are structural — where the records come from and who the money comes from. Everything else follows from those two.
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Speaker marketplaces
- Who is listed
- The speaker, by registering.
- Who pays
- The speaker, on a subscription. Organizers browse free.
- What you can check
- The profile is the speaker’s own account of themselves. Asking for evidence would empty the database, so nothing on it is checkable from the page you are reading.
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Event platforms
- Who is listed
- Anyone who submitted a talk through that platform’s call for papers.
- Who pays
- The organizer, for running the CFP. Discovery is given away.
- What you can check
- Real session and event counts, which is genuine evidence. The limit is structural rather than sloppy: a record ends where the platform’s customer list ends, and the counts are not links to an outside agenda.
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Speaker bureaus
- Who is listed
- A roster, curated by the bureau.
- Who pays
- The booker, as commission on the fee.
- What you can check
- A relationship and a reputation, which is worth a lot at the top of the market. A bureau will not list someone it cannot bill for, so the practitioner tier under the headline keynote is permanently absent.
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LinkedIn
- Who is listed
- Everyone. It is not a speaker directory.
- Who pays
- Nobody, for this use.
- What you can check
- Whatever someone wrote about themselves, plus your own reading of it. It works — at about a day per shortlist, and with no way to filter on when someone last actually spoke.
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speakerstrail
- Who is listed
- Nobody applies. Records are extracted from public conference agendas, after the talk happened.
- Who pays
- Organizers and agencies, eventually. No speaker has ever paid to be here.
- What you can check
- The agenda URL the record came from, on every talk, one click away. Check it yourself; you never have to take our word for it.
The boundary, as a number you can reproduce
Not a claim about who covers more. A statement about which shelf each of us is on.
The strongest free alternative is an event platform whose directory is built from talks submitted through its own call for papers. That is real evidence, and it stops where its customer list stops. Ours starts somewhere else: we index agendas the conferences published themselves, whatever tooling produced them.
Right now that difference is total. The 39 conferences in this dataset publish their agendas across 23 distinct hosts — and not one of those hosts is that platform. The check runs when this page is built, over the same evidence links the records carry, so it cannot go stale on the shelf.
Read that as a description of where our seed happens to sit, not as a claim that the other directory covers nothing European. The same conferences run their calls for papers on different platforms in different years, and nothing stops anyone indexing external agendas tomorrow.
Where we stop
The cases where one of the others is the right answer, said plainly rather than left for you to discover.
- Fees, availability and contact details. We hold none of it. A minority of records carry a LinkedIn link-out and that is the whole of it. If you need a quote and a calendar, a bureau or a marketplace is doing a job we do not do.
- Anywhere outside Europe. Not limited — none. There is no US coverage to compare.
- Where a speaker is from or based. The dataset carries the country of the event, never of the person. Inferring one from the other is the exact error the field naming exists to prevent.
- A complete roster. 39 conferences is a deliberate, hand-sourced slice. Absence from this directory is not evidence that somebody has not spoken.
- Anything that has not happened yet. A speaker announced for a conference next quarter has been booked, not heard, and is not in here. That is the rule the whole thing rests on.
Ready to shortlist?
You have just read what this directory refuses to do. If what is left is still what you need — people who verifiably took a stage, each entry carrying the agenda link that proves it — the beta is open. We let agencies in ten at a time so we can actually talk to each one. Free, no card.