6 Best Polly Alternatives in 2023

For many teams, Polly is a great way to collect poll and survey responses. But some customers may want a different solution (for a wide variety of possible reasons).

In this post, we’ll cover the 6 best Polly alternatives, starting with our own tool — Geekbot.

Best Polly Alternatives

1. Geekbot
2. Simple Poll
3. PollUnit
4. Poll Everywhere
5. Quick Poll
6. Advanced Poll

1. Geekbot

Geekbot lets teams run polls in Slack or MS Teams. But it can also be used for other purposes, such as running daily standups, retrospectives, and more. 

Our tool is free for smaller teams with less than 10 users. And we also offer a paid option for larger teams which you can try out free for 30 days.

In this section, we’ll give you a high-level view of what it looks like to set up a Slack poll with Geekbot and highlight some of the key benefits of using our tool.

From our template screen, click on “Build your own.” (As we mentioned earlier, you can see we also help teams run daily standups, retrospectives, and more.)

After you click “Build your own,” you’re taken to our Custom Report screen. 

With Geekbot, polls are highly customizable. You can name your Slack poll, select whether your poll is anonymous or public, write your questions, select participants, and schedule when the poll will go out to the team. 

Sending a Slack poll with Geekbot is that simple. But let’s take a deeper look into three core aspects of creating and sending a poll, so we can show you the level of customization you get with Geekbot.

Editing Your Poll’s Questions 

With Geekbot, there is no limit to how many questions you can have in your Slack poll.

Note: You can also add an intro message (greeting your team and contextualizing the poll) and an outro message (i.e., thanking your team for their time).

You can also customize how your team can respond to each question.

We offer four unique responses types:

1. Plain text: This lets the user write their answer freely.
2. Pre-defined: This is when you’re providing possible answers for your team to select from.
3. Numeric: For when you want your team to respond using numbers only.
4. Random: Users receive a question at random from a list. 

Selecting Participants  

Because Geekbot integrates with Slack (or your Microsoft Teams workspace), you can manually add participants or sync the poll to a specific channel.

Scheduling Your Poll

With Geekbot, you can send out your poll at a frequency that works for you, from a one-time poll to weekly to a 2-week/3-week/4-week period or at the last or first week of every month.

Plus, Geekbot makes it easy to send your poll at a time that’s convenient for everyone, no matter what timezone they’re in. This is because Geekbot can factor in each user’s time zone.

For example, if you set the scheduled time for 9:00 AM then your employees in Athens get the poll at 9:00 AM their time, while your employees in Los Angeles get the poll at 9:00 AM their time. 

Want to learn more? Here’s a more detailed step-by-step guide on how to do a poll in Slack with Geekbot.

Bonus: Geekbot is More than Just Slack Polls

Geekbot is an asynchronous software that integrates with Slack and MS Teams. 

With Geekbot, besides polls, you can also run:

1. Daily standups
2. Sprint retrospectives 
3. Daily Check ins 
4. Monthly 1-on-1’s
5. And more.
   
   See our post on How We Use Geekbot to Manage Our Distributed Team from Slack. 

Note: Interested in signing up? Geekbot is free for smaller teams with less than 10 users. We also offer a paid option for larger teams which you can try out free for 30 days.

2. Simple Poll

Simple Poll is a Slack app that lets you do native polls — that means the poll is created, modified, and sent all through Slack. Simple Poll lets you do anonymous polls and limit votes (making sure only one person votes once) and set up recurring polls.

Simple Poll Pricing

Simple Poll has four different pricing tiers:

1. Hobby (free): You can send unlimited polls but are capped at 100 votes each month. You get one recurring poll per month.
2. Manager ($40 a month): You can send unlimited polls, collect unlimited polls, get advanced poll customization and limited extra benefits for one user (such as survey reminders and up to 10 questions per survey).
3. Director ($75 per month): You get all of the features of the Manager tier, plus you can now have 20 questions per survey and 100 respondents per survey.
4. Analyst ($200 per month): You get all of the features we’ve discussed so far, plus 45 questions per survey and up to 500 respondents per survey.

3. PollUnit

PollUnit is different from the options we discussed above, because it’s not a Slack-integration polling app. 

Instead, PollUnit works by letting you create polls that are then sent out to participants by an email link or a QR code.

This means you can use PollUnit for internal polls and external polls, such as asking your customers to vote on a new logo (just as an example).

PollUnit Pricing

PollUnit has four different pricing tiers. 

1. Free: You get 40 participants, 20 files per voting (for when participants vote on a file attachment like a PDF or Word document), 20 photos per contest, 5MB for files, unlimited polls.
2. Premium (From $4.00 per month): You get 200 participants, 50 files per voting, 100 photos per contest, 50MB for files, unlimited polls.
3. Business (from $12.00 per month): You get 2,000 participants, 100 files per voting, 500 photos per contest, and 50 MB per file.
4. Enterprise (from $36 per month): You get 20,000 participants per PollUnit, 100 files per voting, 1,000 photos per contest, 50MB per file, and unlimited polls.

4. Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is unique in that it lets you gather a large number of responses from a live crowd (such as during a conference or webinar).

Poll Everywhere Pricing

Poll Everywhere has four set pricing tiers:

1. Intro (Free): You get unlimited users, unlimited questions, 25 max audience size, and access to a support center with webinar tutorials 
2. Present ($120 per Year, Annual Only): This plan increases your max audience size to 75 and lets you show live results to participants.
3. Engage ($79 per Month): You get everything in the Present Plan, plus you can create reports, access archive poll responses, restrict responses to registered participants, and moderate responses.
4. Teams ($199 per Month): You get everything in the Engage plan, plus phone and email support during business hours, pinned questions during presentation, and custom branding on polls.

Poll Everywhere also offers an Enterprise plan where they will work with your organization for a custom quote.

5. Quick Poll

Quick Poll is another Slack integrated polling app that lets you make polls directly in Slack, using simple commands.

For example, if you want to create a poll you’d type into a Slack channel:

/quickpoll “Poll question?” “Option 1” Option 2” “Option 3”

So if you wanted to ask your team what they wanted for lunch, you’d type:

/quickpoll “What should we get for lunch?” “Pizza” “Sandwiches” “Hamburgers”

In this way, Quick Poll is simple but also limited. You can create anonymous polls and recurring polls, but it’s difficult to schedule polls around people’s timezone and it’s difficult to customize your polls based on the responses you want from your team.

Quick Poll Pricing

Quick Poll has two pricing options:

• Free: The free plan comes with anonymous polls, 10 options per poll, but you’re capped at 100 monthly votes.
• Business ($40 USD a month): With the Business plan, you get all the free plan features, but you get 70 options per poll, hidden polls, unlimited monthly votes, and you can limit the number of times a user votes. 

6. Advanced Poll

With Advanced Poll, you can create anonymous polls, closing polls, scheduling and recurring polls, and use Advanced Poll’s templates to get started. 

Advanced Poll Pricing

Advanced Poll has two pricing tiers:

1. Free: You get 5 users, unlimited votes, anonymous polls, emoji support, polling templates, schedule polls, and recurring polls.
2. Paid (€20/ month): The paid plan has the same features but you are not limited on users or polls.

Final Thoughts

In the list above, we covered 6 popular alternatives to Polly, including our own software, Geekbot.

Geekbot is an asynchronous software that integrates seamlessly with your team’s Slack or MS Teams account.

Geekbot lets you:

• Schedule recurring polls (or create a one-time poll)
• Automatically account for every user’s time zone
• Customize the types of responses your team can provide
• Ask as many questions as you want

Plus, Geekbot is ready-made for other types of meetings, such as daily standups, retrospectives, and more. 

Note: Are you ready to start running polls in Slack? Geekbot is free for smaller teams with less than 10 users. We also offer a paid option for larger teams which you can try out free for 30 days.