Quo Review 2026

QuoVote is a free, open-source tool for running live Q&A sessions at events, conferences, and workshops. Audience members submit questions, vote on the ones they care about most, and the presenter sees the top-voted questions in real time. That is the entire product. No polls, no quizzes, no word clouds. Just Q&A with voting.

How It Works

The organizer creates an event on quo.vote, sets a title and description, and gets a short event code (3-8 characters). Share that code with your audience, and they join from any browser on their phone or laptop. Attendees type their questions, see what others have asked, and upvote the questions they want answered. The system enforces one vote per person per question using email-based registration.

On the presenter side, you get a dashboard showing all submitted questions sorted by popularity, chronological order, or randomly. You can pin the current question you are answering, which displays it in a large presentation-mode overlay designed for projection on a screen. Answered questions get archived to keep the active list clean. Everything updates live through WebSocket connections, so there is no refreshing or waiting.

Completely Free and Open Source

This is what makes QuoVote unusual: there are no paid plans. No premium tier, no per-event fees, no participant limits. The hosted version at quo.vote is free to use, and the source code is available on GitHub under the MIT license. If you want full control over your data, you can self-host it using Docker Compose on your own server.

The project was built by Nimble Turkiye, a Turkish software community organization. The tech stack is Vue.js on the frontend, Express.js and MongoDB on the backend, with Socket.io handling real-time communication. The GitHub repository has 55 stars and 15 contributors, with the most recent activity in August 2024. This is a community project, not a venture-backed product, and the development pace reflects that.

Self-hosting gives you some advantages beyond data control. You can customize the interface, modify the question handling logic, or integrate it with your own authentication system. The MIT license means you can do essentially anything with the code. For developer-heavy organizations or conferences that already run their own infrastructure, this is genuinely appealing.

What You Do Not Get

The feature list is intentionally minimal, and it is important to understand what QuoVote does not do before you commit to using it for an event:

• No live polls or surveys: You cannot run multiple-choice polls, rating scales, or surveys. Q&A with upvoting is the only interaction type.
• No presentation tool integration: There is no PowerPoint or Google Slides plugin. The monitor/presentation view works as a standalone browser window you project separately.
• No analytics or reporting: No post-event reports, engagement metrics, or exportable data dashboards.
• No mobile app: Everything runs in the browser. This works fine on mobile browsers, but there is no dedicated app.
• No commercial support: If something breaks, you are on your own with GitHub issues and the community.
• No enterprise features: No SSO, no admin controls, no custom branding options.

How It Compares to Paid Alternatives

The Q&A and audience engagement space is dominated by well-funded tools with much broader feature sets. Slido (now owned by Cisco) starts at $12.50/month and includes polls, quizzes, word clouds, analytics, and PowerPoint integration. Mentimeter starts at $11.99/month with similar breadth. Poll Everywhere starts at $120/year. Vevox is popular in higher education. All of these offer mobile apps, enterprise SSO, detailed analytics, and integrations with major presentation tools.

QuoVote cannot compete on features. It is not trying to. Its positioning is simple: if you need a Q&A tool that is completely free, open source, and self-hostable with no vendor lock-in, QuoVote is one of the few options available. No participant limits on the free tier (unlike Slido's 100-person cap on free events), no watermarking, no time restrictions.

There are no user reviews on G2, Capterra, or Product Hunt. The tool has essentially zero commercial presence. This is not necessarily a red flag for an open-source community project, but it means you cannot reference other users' experiences to gauge reliability at scale. If you are running a 500-person conference, test it thoroughly beforehand. If you are running a 30-person meetup or team workshop, the risk is minimal.

Who Should Use QuoVote

QuoVote fits three scenarios well. First, developer meetups and tech conferences where attendees are comfortable with a simple, no-frills tool and the organizers appreciate open-source principles. Second, organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements who need to self-host their audience interaction tools. Third, anyone who just needs basic Q&A with voting and does not want to pay $10-15/month for features they will never use.

If you need polls, quizzes, analytics, presentation integration, or commercial support, QuoVote is not the right tool. Use Slido, Mentimeter, or AhaSlides instead and budget for the subscription. But for pure Q&A at zero cost with full source code access, QuoVote does exactly what it promises.

How Quo works

Quo (formerly OpenPhone) is a business phone system that puts calls, texts, voicemails and contacts into a shared team workspace instead of on individual handsets. Teams share phone numbers, so any member can see the full conversation history with a customer, and calls route automatically to the right person. It runs on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and the browser.

You buy per user, and each user gets one phone number included, with extra numbers at $5/month each. Setup means configuring shared numbers (so a whole team works one line), call routing rules, phone menus and IVR, and automatic call recording. Note that phone menus, call transfers, group calling and automatic recording only exist from the Business tier up.

CRM integration is the main configuration work. Quo ships native connectors for Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, Attio and Clio, plus Slack notifications, Google Contacts import, and Gong and Fireflies for conversation data. Webhooks and a public API cover anything custom, and Zapier (7,000+ apps) and Make (3,000+) handle the rest. Several listed connectors (DripJobs, LegalMate, Relay.app, Pipedream, Fireflies) are partner-built rather than maintained by Quo, which is worth knowing before you depend on one.

The AI layer transcribes and summarises calls and tags them. An agent called Sona answers calls 24/7 when nobody is available. Sona is configured separately and metered in credits on its own five-tier ladder, on top of seat pricing. MCP access for ChatGPT and Claude is offered on all plans.

Where Quo wins

• The shared-number model is the core design, not an add-on: the whole team sees one thread of calls and texts per contact, which is exactly what most per-seat PBX products don't do.
• Cheap entry point for the category: $15/user/month annual on Starter, $23 on Business, $35 on Scale, with a 7-day trial.
• A genuinely broad native CRM list for a phone tool: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, Attio, plus the vertical-specific Clio and Jobber, with webhooks and a documented API on every tier including Starter.
• Sona AI answering is included at every tier with 1,000 free credits, so you can test AI call handling without an upsell conversation.
• MCP access to ChatGPT and Claude on all plans, which is unusual for a phone system.

Where it falls short

• Numbers are US and Canada only. Calling and messaging outside US/Canada is a per-minute and per-message add-on, so non-North-American teams are poorly served.
• CRM integrations (HubSpot, Salesforce) are locked behind the Business tier at $23/user/month annual. Starter is effectively a standalone phone app.
• Starter is heavily gated beyond CRM: no group calling, no call transfers, no phone menus, no automatic call recording, AI summaries only for Sona-handled calls, shared numbers capped at 10 paid users, and 10 open tasks.
• Sona AI is metered on top of seat cost: 10 calls free, then $25/mo for 40 calls up to $199/mo for 600, with overages of $0.45 to $1.00 per call. Heavy AI answering gets expensive fast.
• "Unlimited" US/Canada calling and messaging is subject to a Fair Usage Policy, and automated SMS sent via API, Zapier or Make is billed at $0.01 per message segment.

Who should use Quo

Quo fits US and Canadian small-to-mid teams: sales, support, home services, legal and agencies that want one shared line per team with CRM logging and don't need a full contact centre. If your model is "customers call the company, not a person", the shared-number design does the work other tools bolt on awkwardly.

Skip it if your customers or staff sit outside North America, since international is add-on metered rather than native. Skip it if you need phone menus and call transfers on the cheapest plan, because those start at Business. And price it carefully if you expect to route high AI call volume: the Sona credit ladder, not the seat price, becomes the real bill.