A Moderator is a role that can be assigned to any registered attendees at an event. The Moderator role is assigned by the Organisation Admin which will allow them to control participants to go on and off-screen inside a Session or an Expo Session. Moderators are also able to mute attendees on a moderated Session or Expo Session and create/manage Polls for a Moderated Session or Expo Session.
Tip: Find out more about roles and permission here.
A Speaker is a role that is also assigned by the Organisation Admin to a registered attendee who will be speaking at an event. Speakers would normally be presenting on the Stage (using the Backstage link), Sessions and Expo segments.
Note: A speaker behaves as an attendee, with no additional privileges unless they are made a moderator by the event organizers, more on this below.
Attendees who have been assigned the Speaker role will appear on the Registration page under the Speakers tab as shown below:
They will also appear under the Reception page under Schedule if they are added to a particular Segment tied to a schedule.
Technically they can play the same role. You could have a moderator of a session who is also a speaker of the same session. However, someone who is assigned the speaker role, will not have the moderator abilities to manage moderated sessions. Only speakers assigned as moderators will be able to do this.
If speakers will be speaking at their own designated sessions, we recommend making them moderators to their session so they will be able to manage the said session. This is especially helpful when attendees would like to interact with the speakers on screen. Attendees simply need to request to share their audio and video, and then the moderator approves it through the moderation panel.
To sum this up, assigning someone the speaker role will not grant them the ability to control a Stage, Session or Expo Session segment. Only speakers assigned with the moderator role will be able to control the Session and Expo Session segments.