Showrunner review
A live-event command center for scheduling, monitoring, and coordinating conference operations.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
Showrunner is conference-operations software for operations leads, production managers, program managers, and room volunteers. It targets mid-size events of roughly 500 to 10,000 attendees and 50 to 300 sessions, combining schedule planning with live operational coordination. Teams can manage multiple venues and rooms, configure capacities and AV profiles, publish attendee schedules with track filtering and personal schedules, and coordinate room leads through a mobile browser dashboard.
The operational centerpiece is its real-time command center, which monitors session status and brings incident reporting, triage, and automated alerts into the same workflow. A drag-and-drop schedule builder supports session tracks and room scheduling, while conflict detection helps prevent overlapping assignments. Speaker check-in tracking and alerts for delays or missing speakers address common show-day tasks. Intelligent slot recommendations and auto-scheduling are available in beta, so teams should treat those functions as an assisted workflow rather than a finished replacement for schedule review.
Showrunner uses contact-sales pricing and invites prospective customers to book a demo; getting started requires no credit card. It runs as a cloud, web-based platform, with calendar exports to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Outlook. That ecosystem fit is useful for attendees and staff who want schedules in familiar calendars, while the public schedule and room-lead dashboard extend access beyond the core operations team. Showrunner suits mid-market event teams that need centralized control over sessions, rooms, speakers, and incidents. Teams primarily seeking registration, ticketing, or a dedicated attendee app should compare products whose scope explicitly includes those workflows, and organizations requiring native mobile deployment may prefer a platform beyond web access.
Showrunner pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Real-time command center tracks session status and incidents
- Conflict alerts, speaker check-in, and delay notifications
- Calendar exports plus public schedules with track filtering
- Where it doesn't
- Pricing is handled through sales rather than published plans
- Auto-scheduling and slot recommendations are in beta
- Web-only deployment may limit teams needing native apps
Showrunner fact sheet, pricing and score →
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