Belenios vs OpaVote

Belenios is a free, verifiable online voting system for elections and referendums, including scientific councils and sports associations. Its hosted web platform supports standard candidate selection and preferential elections using Condorcet, Single Transferable Vote, and Majority Judgment. Weighted votes are available for standard elections. Votes are encrypted to protect individual choices, subject to the election’s decryption-key setup. Voters can check that ballots appear in a public ballot box, and anyone can verify that the result matches those ballots. Authentication options include public accounts, Google login, and CAS. The hosted service supports up to 2,500 voters per election; larger elections are directed toward institutional hosting. Belenios is also self-hostable free software under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. Voters and email addresses cannot be changed after an election starts, and trustee key loss prevents tallying. The hosted plan is free.

OpaVote runs online elections and public polls, and can count ranked ballots gathered elsewhere. Election ballots use secret, single-use voter links, while supported methods include checkbox, ranked-choice, STV, Condorcet, Borda and approval voting. It also supports weighted voting based on factors such as shares or property surface. Managers can track email and ballot opens, submissions and delivery problems, then remind people who have not voted. Results can include charts, text, CSV and JSON, along with downloadable ballots and a recount link. Its API lets customers manage elections from their own servers and returns JSON. Interfaces and notifications support English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Slovenian and Finnish; voters can use phones, tablets, laptops or desktops. The service supports up to one million voters per election. The free plan allows three simultaneous elections, each with up to 25 voters and 10 candidates. Pay as you go costs $10, paid once for every 125 voters or 20 candidates. Polls rely on low-security cookie controls to discourage repeat voting, so the service recommends an election where higher security is needed.