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 Hopin is very suitable for large events involving 100+ people where there are only a couple of people speaking. You can have a bunch of features such as networking and all in all, is quite a professional experience to use. For smaller groups, It takes too much effort to set up and isn't worth using over
Google Meet or Zoom.
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 Awesome for managing several sets of panelists Very easy to manage event attendees Love the chat functionality during the events, enabling the audience to connect with each other Hugely simple for anyone with little tech knowledge to design and run an event Cost effective for the volume of events we run, where we need scale and quality Live streaming an event is also very well catered for Branding across the platform is simple to implement 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 The biggest hangup we've encountered is from guest speakers who need to join us on either tablets or smartphones. Hopin doesn't play well with mobile devices for onscreen guests. I'd like to see the broadcasts in vendor booths be recordable in the way broadcasts in the sessions or on the stage are. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We most likely will, but with such a high annual renewal rate, we are forced to look at alternative solutions yearly when that license fee comes due
Read full review Usability I'm a pretty tech-savvy person but I still feel that Hopin was pretty user-friendly even for those of you who are less tech-savvy. Great thing is, you can play around and test the platform with the free version which allows you to get familiar with it before committing to the paid. I learned most of it on the free version which then made me more confident when deciding to use the paid version. Not only did it help me on the setup side, but it also proved to me that this was what we needed to do what we needed to do.
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 For the most part you're able to get a response from a support person within a few minutes, but there was a stretch when Hopin was reshuffling its staff that it sometimes took 24-48 hours, which is too long. However, as long as the staff remains stable - which seems likely - then its Support team is usually quite responsive.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We were with a company before Hopin - we explored elsewhere due to cost. Pros were design and custom look. We moved to Hopin, it was innovative at the time, although the design wasn't strong the features were. The majority now have the same features. So we did leave Hopin for another platform again because we wanted a custom look, and we were preparing for hybrid. Hopin wasn't ready. We soon realised other platforms we came across are complex, difficult to use. We left and came back to Hopin.
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 Without Hopin, it would have been impossible to host an event at the scale and user interface that we did, with the staff limitations we have. Hopin enabled us to execute a very high standard with limited resources. For example, before Hopin, we could only attract about 100-200 attendees. With Hopin, we 3x our registrations and attendees. The data collected from their system on attendees allows us to more accurately speak to our target market based on their tracked habits during the event. Read full review ScreenShots