Polls

What Polls does

Polls is a Nextcloud app for finding a date the way Doodle does: the owner lists candidate dates and times, invites people, and each participant answers for every option. It also handles ordinary text polls, so the same tool can ask “which venue?” as well as “which Tuesday?”. Once voting ends, the owner confirms the chosen options, and participants can follow the poll through comments and notification subscriptions.

Because it is a Nextcloud app rather than a separate service, Polls uses the accounts, groups, email settings and calendars already on the server. For a date option it can look at the participant’s Nextcloud calendar and flag events that might clash, which saves cross-checking by hand.

Access and privacy controls

Access control is where Polls goes further than most standalone poll tools. A poll can be limited to its members, shared with specific Nextcloud users, groups or circles (through the Circles app), or opened to anyone with a public link. People without an account can be invited by email and get their own access link.

The owner also has several ways to shape what participants see:

• Hidden results until the owner decides to reveal them, so early answers do not sway later ones.
• Obfuscated names, where participants cannot see who else voted, or a stricter anonymous mode.
• Vote limits, capping how many “yes” answers an option can take or how many a participant can give, which turns a poll into a simple sign-up sheet for limited slots.
• Proposals, letting participants add options the owner did not think of.

An automatic expiry date closes the poll, and reminders can go to invitees who have not answered. Results can be exported to spreadsheet formats or HTML, and a REST API is available for scripting. Polls also connects with the Contacts and Activity apps.

Self-hosting Polls

There is nothing separate to deploy. An administrator installs Polls from the Nextcloud app store in the web interface, with the occ app:install polls command, or from the Git source for development. Version 9.3.0 declares support for Nextcloud 31 to 35 and needs PHP 8.1 or later; the README badge shows a narrower range, so check the app store listing for your server version before upgrading. Nextcloud’s background jobs must run for notifications, reminders and cleanup to work. The project’s wiki documents occ commands for tasks such as transferring poll ownership and maintaining the database.

Hosted version

The developers do not run a hosted service. You can use Polls wherever a Nextcloud provider or administrator has enabled the app.

Limitations

Polls only makes sense if you run Nextcloud or use a provider that does. It is a polling tool, with no booking pages for one-to-one appointments. The README is candid that it is not maintained by Nextcloud itself but by community developers, with a lead maintainer who took the project over; its future depends on that small group. Its GitHub community is smaller than standalone tools such as Rallly.

Who it suits

Polls fits organizations, schools, associations and families that already run Nextcloud and want scheduling polls under the same login and on the same server, with tight control over who can see and answer. Teams without Nextcloud will find Rallly or Timeful easier to adopt. The Doodle alternatives page compares the options.