vote.direct vs OpaVote

This is not a price comparison: both are free to 25 voters, and above that OpaVote's $10 per 125 voters is often cheaper than vote.direct, which is $4.99 to 50 voters and $19.99 for 200. Both run the standard ranked methods — instant runoff, STV (Scottish, Meek, ERS97 rules), Borda and Condorcet. Pick OpaVote when you want the counting code itself open-source, and pick vote.direct when the electorate has to be proven rather than the arithmetic: OpaVote verifies with emailed access codes only, where vote.direct includes email on every election, SMS on paid elections, and government ID at $3.00 per voter, with an audit record built for a challenge.

Free for up to 25 voters and 10 candidates per election, with up to three elections running at once and data kept for ten weeks. Beyond that it is $10 for every 125 voters, which makes it cheaper than vote.direct at many sizes. What the price does not buy is end-to-end election management: no SMS or government ID verification, no live quorum tracking, no reminders, and no compliance certificate. Prices checked on OpaVote's pricing page in August 2026.

Yes — STV, Condorcet, and instant-runoff counting with open-source algorithms. vote.direct also runs STV under three published rulebooks — Scottish (weighted inclusive Gregory), Meek (the New Zealand method) and ERS97 (the Electoral Reform Society's 1997 hand-count rules) — plus Condorcet (Schulze, ranked pairs, or minimax), Borda (classic or Dowdall points), and instant-runoff, publishing every round and transfer stage with the result. The remaining difference is that OpaVote's counting code is open-source; if your bylaws name a variant neither page lists (such as Warren STV), check which platform runs exactly it.

OpaVote relies on emailed access codes. It does not offer SMS verification or government ID checks. vote.direct includes email verification in every tier and SMS in every paid tier (free to 25 voters, from $4.99 above), plus an optional $3.00 per voter government ID add-on. That, rather than price, is the reason to choose vote.direct here: OpaVote's $10 per 125 voters is often the cheaper option.

Both run the methods academic elections usually name: STV (including Meek and ERS97 rules) for multi-seat races, Condorcet, Borda, and instant-runoff. OpaVote is better when you want open-source counting code; vote.direct is better when the integrity of the electorate is the requirement: configurable verification, one accepted ballot per eligible credential, an audit trail, and a branded ballot that works on a phone.

OpaVote provides results and vote tallies. It does not produce the per-voter audit record vote.direct does — verification method, timestamp, and a certificate per voter — which is what a challenged election actually turns on.

OpaVote ballots use its standard interface, without your logo, colours, or domain. vote.direct supports full custom branding, embeddable voting widgets, and your own domain for a single election ($50.00).

vote.direct publishes this comparison and sells one of the products in it, so read it as a vendor making its case rather than as independent research. Everything below about a competitor was read off that company's own public pricing and documentation pages in August 2026, and where a competitor is the better choice this page says so and says why. Competitors change their pricing and features without notice. If you work at one of these companies, or you are a customer who finds something here that is out of date or wrong, email [email protected] and it will be corrected.

vote.direct has 6 public third-party reviews: one on Capterra and 5 on Trustpilot, all of them 5 out of 5. Trustpilot's profile displays a TrustScore of 4.1 rather than 5.0, even though its own histogram reads 100% five-star, because a TrustScore is a weighted average that starts a new profile near 3.7 and only moves to the real mean as reviews accumulate. Both numbers are honest; that one is theirs and we do not get to change it. 6 reviews is not a track record either, and no board should choose a voting platform on the strength of it. ElectionBuddy, Simply Voting, and OpaVote have all been running elections far longer and have the independent reviews to show for it. If review volume is your deciding factor, they win it outright and this page will not talk you out of that. What we can do is show you every review we have in full, including the parts that are critical of us, and link them so you can confirm we did not edit them. Both halves of that come from the same fact: vote.direct is small and founder-run. It is why there are only 6 public reviews, and it is why you can get the founder on the phone. A large organization buying on vendor track record should weigh the first. A volunteer board that needs a real person when a vote is live on a Sunday should weigh the second. Which matters more is a judgment this page cannot make for you.

What vote.direct has instead of a review history is direct access. The support number, (512) 222-8191, reaches the founder, Oday Brahem, who is also the engineer who builds the product. Call it, text it, or email, any day of the week including weekends, and the reply comes from the person who can change the software rather than from a first-line queue that has to escalate to find out whether something is possible.

vote.direct is operated by Syft8, Inc. and is 100% owned by its founder, Oday Brahem, with no outside investors. Who owns a voting platform is worth knowing before you trust it with an election, so this one is on the record: the person who owns the company is the person who builds the software and answers (512) 222-8191. The founder has a name and a checkable record: Oday Brahem, based in Vancouver, BC, Canada, spent eight years in regulated enterprise software at Collabware and VersaFile — QA engineering on a product serving US federal customers under FedRAMP High controls, then customer success, then sales engineering — and served as an intelligence operator in the Canadian Armed Forces reserves. He builds vote.direct and answers its support line himself: there is no call center and no outsourced support team, so the person who picks up is the owner and the engineer. Background with sources: https://vote.direct/about/oday-brahem

If vote.direct does not yet offer a capability and you cannot find it elsewhere in the market, call or text the founder. When the requirement fits secure, compliant elections, the same team that hears it will work with you to understand it, design and build the capability, and support its rollout. We want to earn your business by closing that gap, not by asking you to settle for a fixed feature list. Scope, timing, and cost are agreed before custom work begins.