speakerstrail vs Sessionize
The CFP platform that built a free speaker directory on top of its own event data.
Model: Event platform · 1205 speakers and 39 conferences in the speakerstrail dataset
Side by side
Who is listed
- Sessionize
- Anyone who submitted a talk through a Sessionize-powered call for papers.
- speakerstrail
- Anyone who appeared on a published conference agenda, whatever tooling produced it.
Who pays
- Sessionize
- The organizer, for running the CFP. Discovery is free.
- speakerstrail
- Organizers and agencies, eventually. No speaker has ever paid to be here.
What you can check
- Sessionize
- Session and event counts — real evidence. No per-talk source link; no way to verify a specific talk against the event’s own agenda.
- speakerstrail
- The agenda URL on every talk, one click away. Check it yourself.
What Sessionize does
Sessionize is a call-for-papers platform used by conference organizers to manage submissions, schedules and speaker communications. On top of that, they built a free public speaker directory with 84,000+ profiles, topic categories, and per-speaker session and event counts.
The directory is genuine evidence. A speaker’s profile shows how many talks they gave and at how many events. That is far more than any self-registered marketplace can offer.
The structural difference
Sessionize’s directory covers events that ran a Sessionize-powered CFP. That is its strength and its boundary: a speaker’s record ends where Sessionize’s customer list ends.
speakerstrail starts from a different place. We index agendas the conferences published themselves, whatever tooling produced them — Pretalx, Sched, the event’s own site, FOSDEM’s archive. The boundary is what we have ingested, not what one platform’s customers generated.
The other difference is granularity. Sessionize shows counts. We show links: every talk carries the URL of the agenda page it was extracted from, so you can check a specific session without asking either of us to vouch for it.
Where we stop
Sessionize has 84,000+ profiles. We have a fraction of that. Their directory is global and general-purpose; ours is European AI/tech conferences, hand-sourced.
They also hold the organizer relationship: if a conference already runs Sessionize, the speaker data flows in automatically. Our pipeline is manual ingestion from public pages.
If you need breadth across all industries and geographies, Sessionize’s directory is the larger dataset. If you need cross-platform coverage of European AI conferences with per-talk source links, that is what we built.
Where each is stronger
Sessionize
- 84,000+ speaker profiles vs our focused European AI/tech dataset
- Global, all-industry coverage
- Automatic data flow from organizers already using the platform
speakerstrail
- Per-talk source links — check any claim yourself in one click
- Cross-platform coverage: agendas from any tooling, not just one CFP vendor
- Recency filter — when someone last spoke, as a first-class facet
Ready to shortlist?
You have just read how this directory differs from Sessionize. If cross-platform, agenda-verified records are what you need — 1205 speakers, each carrying the source link that proves it — the beta is open. We let agencies in ten at a time. Free, no card.