vote.direct vs Simply Voting

Simply Voting prices self-administered elections through a calculator on its own site and quotes managed elections through sales, and publishes no tiers you can read before starting; vote.direct publishes every price outright: free up to 25 voters, then from $4.99 to $149.99 for 2,000 voters, with email verification in every tier, SMS in every paid tier, and government ID available at $3.00 per voter, which Simply Voting does not offer.

Simply Voting publishes no price tiers. Self-administered elections are priced by a calculator on its site, elections of 10 electors or fewer are free, and managed elections are quoted by sales; telephone voting, online nominations, weighted voting, and voter segmentation are priced separately. vote.direct publishes every price outright: 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, and government ID verification is $3.00 per voter. Checked on Simply Voting's pricing page in August 2026.

No. Simply Voting supports email verification and access codes, but not government-issued ID. vote.direct is one of the few voting platforms that verifies a government ID ($3.00 per voter), which is what high-stakes and previously-contested elections need.

Simply Voting generally involves a contract and an onboarding process for its managed service. vote.direct has no contract, no subscription, and no minimum: a board can build and publish an election the same afternoon and pay once.

For a very large organization that wants a vendor to run the election for it, with an account team and a negotiated contract, Simply Voting is the better fit. vote.direct is built for the organization that wants to run its own election, see the price first, and not be sold to.

Both provide audit trails. vote.direct records the verification method behind every ballot, issues timestamped voter certificates, and exports a compliance record for an inspector of elections. Simply Voting provides comprehensive records, particularly for managed-service clients.

Yes, and there is nothing to cancel, because vote.direct has no contract. Export your voter list, build the ballot, send the invitations. The setup takes minutes rather than a procurement cycle.

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.