Compare Online Voting Platforms

Which voting platform is best for your organization?

Short answers, by what you are actually trying to do. Prices for vote.direct are one flat charge per election, taken when you publish.

An in-person or hybrid election with on-site staff

vote.direct provides 2 staff at your meeting to run the ballot station, receive and open returns, count ballots in front of members, and announce the result. On-site staffing starts at $1,000 in addition to the managed election fee. Availability and the final quote depend on the date, location and meeting length. Managed administration includes setup, notices, voter support, tally, certificate and audit package. Mailed ballots and an inspector appointment are separately scoped; staffing does not automatically include the inspector role.

An HOA, condo, or co-op board election

vote.direct is the best fit: it is the only platform in this comparison that verifies a government ID ($3.00 per voter), it enforces a secret ballot while still proving one vote per owner, it tracks quorum live, and it is free up to 25 voters, $4.99 up to 50, and $19.99 for a 200-home community. Members without email can be posted a paper ballot with a PIN for $6.00 each with return postage prepaid, tallied in the same election.

A nonprofit or association board election

vote.direct is the best fit for most nonprofit boards: flat-rate per election rather than an annual plan, email and SMS verification included at paid sizes, and a compliance certificate for the minute book. A 100-member association pays $9.99 per election with no subscription.

An election whose result you expect to be challenged

vote.direct is the best fit, because the challenge will be about who voted rather than about arithmetic: it records which verification method proved each voter, timestamps every ballot, and exports an audit log built for an inspector of elections or a court file. ElectionBuddy, OpaVote, and Simply Voting verify by email or access code only.

Single transferable vote or Condorcet counting

Both vote.direct and OpaVote run them. vote.direct counts STV under the Scottish (weighted inclusive Gregory), Meek (New Zealand) or ERS97 (Electoral Reform Society) rulebooks, Condorcet by Schulze, ranked pairs or minimax, plus Borda (classic or Dowdall) and instant-runoff, and publishes every round and transfer stage with the result. OpaVote remains the pick when you want the counting code itself open-source. If your bylaws name an exact variant, match it before choosing.

A large election you want somebody else to run for you

vote.direct will run your whole election for you — ballot build, roster, notices, reminders, quorum monitoring, close, tally, and a result certificate with the audit package — from $199 for a digital election of up to 100 voters. Simply Voting runs managed elections too, with an account team behind them, and for a very large or unusual electorate that experience is a real advantage — but it quotes them through sales, so the number arrives after the call. The difference is that vote.direct publishes it: $99 to have the election built and handed to you at open, $199 to have it run from notice to certificate, and $499 if vote.direct also serves as your inspector of elections — which it may do in Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Texas and Arizona, and never in California, where Cal. Civ. Code §5110(b) bars the platform vendor from the role.

End-to-end cryptographic verifiability you can audit yourself

Helios Voting is the best fit, if you have engineers to host and maintain it. vote.direct is the better fit when nobody on the board wants to run a server, and it verifies voter identity, which Helios leaves to you.

A free, non-binding poll where nothing turns on the result

Google Forms or a free tier is genuinely fine, and cheaper than any paid platform. The line is whether the outcome binds anyone: for a board seat, a budget, an assessment, or a bylaw amendment, a form has no ballot secrecy, no verified electorate, and no audit trail, and hands any unhappy member an easy challenge.

Replacing a mailed paper ballot election

vote.direct is the best fit and is normally a large saving: a mailed paper election for 150 homes typically runs several hundred dollars in printing, postage, and inspector time, versus $19.99 online, with the tally immediate and quorum visible as votes arrive.

Flat rate per election: Free for up to 25 voters, $4.99 for 26–50 voters, $9.99 for 51–100 voters, $19.99 for 101–200 voters, $24.99 for 201–400 voters, $69.99 for 401–1,000 voters, $149.99 for 1,001–2,000 voters. Above 2,000 voters, talk to us. Email verification is included in every tier, SMS in every paid tier. Government ID verification is $3.00 per voter. Full pricing.

And if the real problem is that nobody on the board has time to run it, none of these platforms solves it. vote.direct will run the election for you instead, from $199: managed elections.

A comparison table is still a table we wrote. If you would rather look at the software than read our account of it, see 8 screenshots of it, each captioned with a fact from the source — including three places a competitor here does it in fewer steps than we do.