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.
Try QuoVote for FreeCompletely 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.
Start a Free Q&A Session
