Introduction
Leconfe is an academic conference platform designed to simplify the entire workflow of scholarly events. Many institutions have chosen Leconfe as their primary tool due to its open-source nature, in-house hosting flexibility, and continuous development.
Since its initial release in early August 2024, version 1.0.0, Leconfe has offered a comprehensive system that can help meet conference event needs. Several key features, such as conference page management, workflow submission, and proceedings publishing, are now available in this version.
The release of this initial version has also been well-received by several clients, such as Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia and Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta. They are committed to using and providing feedback on the platform, ensuring its compatibility with general academic conference management.
Over the months, new clients have become interested and adopted Leconfe as their academic conference platform. These clients come from various universities, including UIN Raden Mas Said Surakarta, the Islamic University of Indonesia, the Politeknis Negeri Bali, Konferensiyalar (Uzbekistan), and Tun Hussein Onn University (Malaysia).
All of the clients currently using Leconfe told us that before deciding to migrate to Leconfe, they had used other platforms such as Conftools, Edas, and Easychair. When they initially adopted Leconfe, they noted that many of the features of their previous platforms were not covered by Leconfe.
With enthusiasm and as a demonstration of our team’s commitment to ensuring Leconfe meets the full needs of an academic conference platform, we gathered all the feedback and integrated it into Leconfe. As a result, in the current final version of Leconfe, we have successfully developed and integrated several essential features from the three previous platforms.
Leconfe conference platform
Since the release of this post, the latest version of leconfe is version 1.3.0-beta 4, there are several bug fixes, improvements, and additional features in this final version, including:
- Submission workflow system improvements
- Payment system improvements
- Invoice integration
- Addition of reviewer form feature with automatic scoring
- Addition of CrossRef XML Export Plugin feature
- Addition of 3 exclusive themes
- Update of proceedings metadata to align guidelines with Google Scholar
- Specific file submission for each presentation (soon)
- Multi-language integration (ongoing)
- Receipt integration (soon)
- Conference feature list integration on the index page
Key Benefits of the Leconfe Academic Conference System?
Leconfe is the only free and open-source academic conference platform available today. Built with direct input from real conference organizers, its structure and workflow have been carefully designed to align with the standard needs of academic conferences. With just a single installation, Leconfe allows you to manage all conference information pages and publish proceedings in one centralized system significantly saving time and reducing operational costs.
Leconfe is also designed to ensure that all published papers in the proceedings are indexable by Google Scholar. In the near future, Leconfe will also support Open Archives Initiative (OAI) integration, which means the platform will offer metadata that is compatible with several reputable indexing services that rely on OAI for harvesting and archiving.
If you’re a prospective user of a platform other than Leconfe, you don’t need to worry about migrating your previous content to this platform, as many features available on other platforms have been successfully integrated into Leconfe. Furthermore, because Leconfe is released as open source, we open up opportunities for third parties to improve or provide services or create plugin/theme products. And the good news for those of you who encounter problems or those who don’t have technical knowledge, you can freely and openly report any issues on the Leconfe forum.
How do we make Leconfe the right choice as an Academic conference platform?
We believe that a platform can only be considered truly complete when it effectively meets the real needs of its users. For this reason, we continuously engage with every client who uses Leconfe actively seeking feedback and encouraging them to report any issues they encounter. Throughout the development and refinement process, we have consistently involved multiple stakeholders to help validate the platform. The purpose of involving these parties is to ensure that Leconfe is shaped not just by our vision, but by the actual requirements of the wider academic community.
As part of this collaborative approach, we have held discussions with organizations such as PKP and Crossref, and we have received valuable input from many conference users. Some of the key suggestions and feedback include:
Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM)
The editorial team shared that ever since the Open Conference Systems (OCS) platform developed by PKP was no longer maintained, they have struggled to find a suitable replacement. Although there are several platforms available such as Conftool, Edas, and EasyChair, most of these are not free, and more importantly, they do not offer the option to be installed in-house on the university’s own hosting environment.
The editors also mentioned that they had once considered using Indico, but the platform’s workflow was significantly different from OCS, making it difficult for the organizing committee to operate and manage the system effectively. For these reasons, Leconfe which is built specifically as an Academic Conference Platform has become an ideal and much-needed alternative for USIM to replace the now obsolete OCS platform.
Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta (UMS)
Each year, UMS organizes approximately 20–30 academic conferences. To manage these events, the university has explored various platforms, each chosen for its specific strengths. WordPress was used for its flexibility in designing customizable conference landing pages. For managing submissions, reviews, and scheduling, Conftool was adopted. Meanwhile, tools like Google Forms were relied upon for handling user registration including authors, participants, and presenters.
To support hybrid events, Zoom was used as the virtual conferencing tool of choice, offering both free and paid plans with essential features. Lastly, for publishing proceedings especially since Conftool lacked this functionality, UMS turned to Open Journal Systems (OJS) to ensure formal publication and indexing of conference papers.
However, due to the complexity and fragmentation of using multiple separate platforms, UMS began searching for an integrated solution that could effectively replace WordPress, Conftool, Google Forms, Zoom, and OJS all in one system. That need was met with the introduction of Leconfe, a unified platform capable of addressing their end-to-end conference management workflow.
One feature that UMS particularly appreciated was Leconfe’s ability to easily create, manage, and archive completed conferences in one centralized environment. UMS has also contributed significantly to the development of Leconfe, suggesting valuable features such as reviewer scoring and invoice generation many of which have since been implemented into the platform.
Politeknik Negeri Bali (PNB)
Edas has been one of the familiar platforms used by Politeknik Negeri Bali (PNB) for managing academic conferences, while Atlantis Press has served as the primary outlet for publishing their proceedings. However, starting with their 2025 conference, PNB began migrating to the Leconfe platform.
The reason for this migration was straightforward yet significant they wanted a platform that could be installed on their own server or hosting, giving them full control over their data and systems. In addition, certificate management was one of their key priorities a feature that Leconfe delivers exceptionally well.
Through our discussions with the PNB team, we learned that an ideal conference platform should offer flexibility in generating various types of certificates. Based on this input, we developed and released the Certificate Generator feature, allowing conference organizers to independently create and customize multiple certificate types.
Key Features of Leconfe’s Certificate Generator:
- Generation of Letters of Acceptance (LoA)
- Certificates for reviewers and keynote speakers
- Certificates for participants, presenters, and other custom formats tailored to specific conference needs
Why Staying Updated with the Latest Leconfe Version Matters?
We released Leconfe as a free and open-source platform to ensure broad accessibility for the academic community including institutions or individuals who may not be directly known to us as the developers. We are aware that beyond our formally registered early adopters, there are active users of Leconfe operating independently, without formal affiliation or notification.
As usage expands and feedback from diverse users continues to grow, we regularly release updates to:
- Fix bugs and improve overall system stability
- Add new features based on the evolving needs of conference organizers
- Strengthen security through regular patches
- Enhance the overall user experience
🚀 Some of the key features added in recent versions include:
✅ Certificate Generator for creating multiple types of certificates
✅ Crossref integration for assigning DOIs to proceedings
✅ Support for Google Scholar indexing
✅ Payment system for presenters and general participants
✅ Performance improvements for managing multi-event conferences
🔧 We strongly encourage all Leconfe users, including those managing the system independently on their own servers or private hosting, to upgrade to the latest version to benefit from enhanced features, better performance, and improved security.