Likelihood to Recommend I can't provide a scenario where Dryfta could be well suited. I guess it's a matter of delivering what has been promised on time, and without having to invest thousands of hours in extra work, as it was in our case. If it worked properly it could be a good tool for any conference.
Read full review Most of our meetings are too small to bother using it but it is great for our larger workshops. If you have a complex schedule or agenda it is better than a paper agenda and allows you to adjust changes live in the agenda during the meetings. We only use it a few times a year because we only have a few larger meetings.
Read full review Pros It has a lot of functionalities (website and administration) all included in the same platform. If it worked properly, it allows you to organise a conference paper-free. Help desk responds quite quickly They consider making improvements when asked for. It’s not too expensive. Read full review Provides live agendas Allows attendees to communicate through mobile phones with event staff Allows attendees to check in to break out sessions of their choice Read full review Cons Multilingual issues. Although it is advertised as multilingual, it didn’t really work as such. The many issues that popped up throughout the conference preparation were fixed little by little at a cost in time, from help desk emails and to struggles with the unfriendly UX. Admin pages reloaded every time you clicked on a button (their developers seem to ignore Ajax technologies). It was time-consuming and required constant page searches. Inflexibility in many of the supposed functionalities it offers. Certificates were not modifiable nor custom when we had to send them (it was solved months after the conference finished when we were surprisingly contacted by the help desk). Problems with the size of images to be displayed on the site, very small fonts and limited options to display content. We had to hire a professional developer in order to get a graphically consistent and presentable website. Very poor mobile version. Too big margins, unreadable text, endless text blocks and lists, distorted pictures, etc. Issues with the ordering of the authors’ names for different proposals (authorship being so important in research). Fixed, inflexible fields in the contact sheets, speakers info, and so on. Special character issues (due to Latin characters and other types used in linguistic research). Not being able to include links in the HTML editor due to Dryfta's inadvertent decisions to block them. Only one Superadmin user allowed to access the full functionalities of the platform, so we had to share it (consequently not knowing who did each action). Problems with the generation of reports and the high complexity of their interface. Some issues on the mandatory anonymity. The double-blind review process not fully respected due to unclear user info and options, with other issues coming up on the go such as unwanted info in automated notifications and messages in the Welcome dashboard. Not being able to use the other payment methods on the platform because they were incompatible with the conference country. Missing information and time wasted when creating events for sessions with info that already existed in the server that randomly failed to be selected. These issues were reported even with video proofs (help desk didn’t believe us), and were never solved. We had to repeat the same processes again and again, never knowing what was going on Read full review Sometimes we have had issues with it not updating our changes very quickly and while at a conference that can be problematic. I have had difficulty making edits or changes from the mobile app so I have to go grab the computer to fix something. Some attendees have had issues downloading and logging in depending on which mobile phones that they are using. It may be operator error. Read full review Support Rating It was quick, that's all we can say. Quite a few times they sorted out the problems and issues. But, sadly, sometimes their answers were useless and irritating (not addressing the problem or simply ignoring it, "passing the buck"). In some cases, they pretended the problem didn't exist and we had to send them videos as proof. No response to that.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We use both but for completely different reasons. We use Guidebook to manage our attendees and communicate with them during large workshops. We use
Airtable as a spreadsheet type database for tracking things.
Read full review Return on Investment The overall performance was okay in the end, but it was due to our team's commitment and effort. Without that extra work, the results would have been awful. Read full review None really as we are a non profit and these meetings we use it for are free Read full review ScreenShots