Doodle alternatives: what a free group poll actually gives you

Nothing is usually wrong with the tool you were using. Something in it simply stopped fitting: a sign-in page in front of a poll you wanted to send in two minutes, a limit you reached on the fourth poll of the month, or a field asking thirty people for their email address before they can tick a box.

That short list of complaints is also the only solid basis for a comparison. Feature lists and prices move every year, and any page that quotes them is out of date within months. What a tool asks of you before it works, and what it stops you doing once it does, changes far more slowly. So that is what this page compares: four tools people really use to find a date for a group, judged on the cost of entry rather than on the length of the brochure.

Before reading any comparison, including this one, settle what you are actually buying with your attention. Three questions cover almost every case.

The fourth question only matters to some readers, and matters enormously to them: where the answers end up, and what the service does with the addresses of the people who answered.

Four tools, described plainly first and then by their trade-off. None of them is a bad tool; each one protects something different.

• Doodle is what most people mean by “a date poll”: the organizer lists the options, participants tick a grid, and the answers gather in one place. It has paid plans alongside its free tier, and which features sit on which side has moved more than once over the years. That is the thing to check rather than to read about: whether creating and answering a poll still work the way you remember, and whether the free tier still covers the number of participants you need.
• When2meet takes the opposite approach. Instead of a short list of options, participants paint their availability over a continuous grid of days and hours, and you read the overlap as a heat map. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. The trade-off sits in that same grid: it is the better instrument when the question is “any time next week”, and more work than it needs to be when the question is four specific Saturdays, because what comes out is a picture to interpret rather than one row to act on.
• A Google Form is not a scheduling tool at all, which is precisely why people use one: a single checkbox question listing the dates, inside a service they already trust with the rest of their documents. The organizer needs a Google account; whether respondents need one depends on how the form is shared, so check that before sending it outside your own organization. What you get back is a spreadsheet of answers, which means the counting, the ranking and the tie-breaking are yours to do. Fine for eight people, tedious for thirty.
• Pollendar is the tool behind this blog, so read the description and verify it rather than trust the enthusiasm. It is a free availability poll: no account to create one, no account to answer one, and the organizer’s email is optional: asked for only if you tick the box to receive updates, used only to send you your own links, and never shared with third parties. A participant gives a name, and an email only if you asked for one when creating the poll. Three types cover the usual cases: “Date” for whole days, “Time slot” for precise hours, “Period” for several consecutive days. There is no paid plan, which is the whole of the answer to the question of what the free tier limits. What it asks of an organizer and of thirty participants is set out in more detail on its own page.

This is where the tools differ most, and where a comparison is easiest to run yourself: send the same four dates through two of them and look at what each one hands back. A Pollendar poll hands back a table, with the dates kept in calendar order so that you never lose your bearings.

Each participant answers “I am available”, “I might be available” or “I’m not available”, which the table shows as a green tick, an amber question mark and a red cross. Green marks a row every single voter said yes to. Amber marks the next best row after that one, or the leading row when nobody reached a unanimous date: a way of saying “this is the best you have so far”. Rows rank by the most yeses, then by the fewest nos. A row nobody said yes to is never highlighted, and with a single voter nothing is highlighted at all.

Two details matter when the group is spread out. Dates and hours are converted into each reader’s own time zone (the browser’s by default, or another one picked in the settings menu, with the time zone in use shown next to the table), so nobody is doing arithmetic on a phone at midnight. And the highlighted rows carry an add to calendar button, in iCalendar (.ics), Google Calendar or Outlook Web format; if you collected participants’ emails, the calendar event can invite the people who said yes.

A comparison in which the author’s own row has no weaknesses is an advert. Here are the four things people ask for most often and will not find.

• No automatic reminder. Nothing nudges the two people who have not answered. Chasing them is a message you send yourself, which is usually faster anyway: a name in a group chat works better than a notification nobody reads.
• No deadline, no closing. A poll stays open until you decide. Put the closing time in the message you send with the link, “I’ll decide on Sunday evening”, and then decide on Sunday evening.
• No recurring poll. Nothing repeats on its own. A weekly ritual means creating a new poll each week, which makes it a poor fit for a standing meeting.
• No integrations, no comment thread, no attachments. There is no Slack or Teams app. The link travels in whatever channel your group already reads, and the discussion stays where the group is.

A plain link wins when the people answering have no reason to invest anything in your meeting: a club, a family, a volunteer rota, thirty parents who will never create an account for one date in March. The lighter tool is not a compromise there, it is the point.

Moving a group to another tool costs one message, as long as that message does not ask anyone to learn anything.

1. 1

   Offer three to five options, not fifteen

   Whatever tool you pick, a long list spreads the answers out and no row comes out on top. A short list can be answered at a glance, which is the whole reason the answers arrive.

2. 2

   Send one link where the group already is

   The group chat, the thread, the newsletter. You can also send invitations by email from the poll itself, twenty addresses per send.

3. 3

   Announce your own deadline

   No free poll should be trusted to close itself, and this one does not try. Name the day you will decide, in the same message as the link.

4. 4

   Decide once, then let people add the date

   Announce the chosen date in one message rather than three. Participants add it to their own calendar from the highlighted row, in the format their calendar speaks.

If you want the shortest possible version of what the tool does before you commit a group to it, the overview of Pollendar covers the three poll types and the results table in about two minutes of reading.