6 Best Apps for Running Anonymous Polls in Slack (In-Depth Look)

6 Best Apps for Running Anonymous Polls in Slack (In-Depth Look)

In this post, we compare 6 apps that let you run anonymous polls in Slack. We’ll start with Geekbot — our free tool for running one-time or recurring polls in Slack and MS Teams. 

Specifically, you’ll learn how Geekbot lets you create polls with different questions and response types (like multiple choice, plain text, and numeric), make them anonymous, schedule when they get sent, and more. 

Best Apps for Running Anonymous Polls in Slack

  1. Geekbot
  2. Simple Poll
  3. Polly
  4. Abot
  5. Super Poll
  6. Quick Poll

Note: Click here to create a free Geekbot account. All our features are free for teams with up to 10 active participants. For larger teams, pricing is $2.50 per user on the annual plan and $3.00 per user on the monthly plan.

1. Geekbot

Geekbot

Geekbot, our free tool, makes it easy to run polls (either anonymous or public) in Slack and MS Teams. 

Additionally, Geekbot can help you run asynchronous standups, retrospectives, and other remote check-ins. We’ll discuss these use cases later, but if you’re interested, check out this article on how we use Geekbot to manage a distributed team from Slack.

For now, we’ll go over how to run an anonymous Slack poll with Geekbot in 5 easy steps.

Note: Click here to create a free Geekbot account and follow along to create an anonymous Slack poll.

#1. Create a New Poll and Make it Anonymous

First, open our template screen and click on “Build your own”.

This will take you to a Custom Report screen, where you can build, customize, and schedule your poll. 

As you can see in the screenshot above, the “Basic” section is where you name the poll and select the channel it gets sent to. 

Notably, you can make the poll anonymous by turning the toggle on:

Toggle 'anonymous survey' on or off.

When voting in anonymous polls, participants’ names won’t appear in Slack or in their reports.

#2. Write Down Your Poll’s Questions

Next, write down your poll’s questions.

Note: There’s no limit to how many questions you can add.

To customize the questions and response type, select “Answer type”.

Geekbot takes you to a screen where you can select between four different response types.

  1. Plain text: Users can type their answers freely.
  2. Numeric: Users can only respond using numbers, e.g., “On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate last week’s conference?”
  3. Multiple choices: Users can select from predefined responses that you’ve provided e.g., “What would you like to get for lunch today?” with predefined answers like “Pizza”, “Sushi”, “Burgers”, etc.
  4. Random: Users receive a question at random from a list.

Additionally, Geekbot lets you include an Intro and Outro message for your poll:

Create a custom intro/outro message.

For example, you can prompt users to complete the poll by a certain date with the intro and thank them for doing so with the outro. Plus, you can even add emojis to make the poll friendlier and more engaging.

#3. Select the Poll’s Channel and Participants

When selecting who receives the poll, Geekbot lets you manually add participants or sync the poll to a Slack channel. 

If you want to send the poll to individual team members who aren’t grouped into a channel, simply add their names manually. Since Geekbot pulls all available names from your Slack workspace, the names will appear in alphabetical order when you click on the “Add participants” field.

As with the questions, there’s no maximum (or minimum) number of participants.

#4. Schedule and Send Out Your Poll

Next, it’s time to schedule your Slack poll.

For one-off polls, simply select the date and time. For recurring polls, alongside the date and time, you can choose the frequency at which they get sent:

  • Daily
  • Weekly
  • 2 Week Period
  • 3 Week Period
  • 4 Week Period
  • First week of each month
  • Last week of each month
  • Any other schedule
Choose your schedule.

Also, if you have team members in different time zones, it’s often useful to schedule the poll to their time. 

Say you have team members in New York, Sydney, and Paris, and you want them to receive a poll at 9:00 AM on Monday. With Geekbot, you can select 9:00 AM as the time and set the “Timezone” option to “User’s local timezone”. This ensures everyone receives the questions at that time in their respective time zones.

Select users timezone.

Once the specified date and time comes, participants will get a DM in Slack, asking them to complete the poll. If they received the poll at a bad time (e.g., while in a meeting), they can optionally set up reminders, so they don’t forget to answer the questions later on.

Personal reminders are optional.

Note: Reminders are completely optional so as to not be intrusive to people’s work.

#5. Review the Poll Responses

When you get your poll results, you can view them in two different ways.

First, you can view them directly in Slack. Here’s an example of an anonymous poll response: 

Geekbot

Also, here’s an example of public poll answers: 

Public answers to polls.

You can also view responses as a whole from your Geekbot dashboard and filter for past answers by date.

Reports dashboard.

As you can see, the dashboard provides useful stats and metrics about the poll, such as what percentage of team members participated, the total number of responses, and much more. Again, with anonymous polls, participants’ names won’t show up in this report.

Bonus: Run All Kinds of Remote Check-Ins with Geekbot

As a remote team, we run Slack polls in Geekbot to quickly gather feedback from team members. 

However, Geekbot is more than a polling app, so we and 170,000+ other users also use it to run asynchronous remote check-ins, such as standupsretrospectives, and more.

For example:

If you feel Geekbot is the right tool for your needs, click here to create a free account.

2. Simple Poll

Simple Poll homepage: Simple, native polls right within Slack.

Simple Poll lets you run native polls in Slack, meaning you can create and customize polls directly via Slack commands. You can hide who voted for a certain option by creating an anonymous poll. Additionally, there are options for limiting votes per person and creating recurring polls. 

3. Polly

Polly homepage: Goodbye Surveys. Hello Polly.

Polly is a tool for capturing feedback in Slack, Zoom, and MS Teams. It lets you customize polls and how they’re sent, for example, by making polls anonymous (or public) and sending them to channels or individuals. Besides that, Polly also offers different question types, real-time feedback, visualization, and API access. 

4. Abot

Abot homepage.

Abot is a Slack bot that lets you run Slack polls through a simple UI. You can choose target channels, make polls anonymous, and restrict access to certain users. Lastly, Abot also lets team members discuss poll results anonymously.

5. Super Poll

Super Poll homepage: Easy team decisions, clean integrated interface, and anonymity.

Similar to Abot, Super Poll allows you to create polls and capture feedback through a simple, minimalistic UI. Super Bot can also create anonymous polls, as well as polls where team members cast votes for multiple items.

6. Quick Poll

Quick Poll: The perfect polling app for Slack.

Quick Poll is another native polling app for Slack, which lets you create, customize, and send out polls using Slack commands. Besides its anonymity features, Quick Poll also allows you to set voting limits and make polls hidden, which prevents participants from seeing the results after they vote.

Create a Free Geekbot Account and Easily Run Anonymous Slack Polls 

Geekbot can help you run anonymous or public polls, as well as standups, retrospectives, surveys, and all other kinds of remote work check-ins in both Slack and MS Teams. 

Geekbot is free for teams with up to 10 participants. For larger teams, Geekbot is $2.50 per user (on the annual plan) and $3.00 per user (on the monthly plan).

Click here to create a free Geekbot account today.

Frequently asked questions

How do I create an anonymous poll in Slack?

Geekbot (our free tool) lets you easily create anonymous polls in Slack and customize who receives the questions, where the answers are posted, and more.

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