The Slack polling app market: what you're actually choosing between
Slack polling apps split into two meaningful categories, and the distinction determines nearly everything about how well each tool works for real decisions. The first category is native Slack bots, Polly and Simple Poll are the clearest examples, which live inside your workspace and generate polls directly inside channels. The second is link-based tools like Chooseday, which work seamlessly from Slack but aren't architecturally limited to it.
Native bots have one major advantage: zero context switch. The poll appears in the channel, people react or click inline, and the result surfaces in the same thread. That frictionlessness is real and genuinely useful for lightweight, low-stakes questions. But native bots inherit all of Slack's structural constraints: polls scroll out of view as the channel fills up, results live in a thread and nowhere else, the voting pool is hard-limited to Slack workspace members, and anonymous voting typically costs extra because the bot has to deliberately obscure data it can technically see by default.
Link-based tools trade the native experience for significantly more capability. Voters open a browser tab, one click, no account required, and the tool can provide ranked choice, enforced anonymity, deadline-based closing, and a permanent decision archive that doesn't vanish when someone clears the channel history. For a quick pulse check on a low-stakes question, a native bot is perfectly adequate. For a decision that matters, has more than two options, or involves personnel or budget, the link-based approach gives you more control, cleaner anonymity, and results that persist.