COMPARED
Decidim is a free, open-source participation platform, started by Barcelona City Council in 2016 and now used by cities, regions and organisations around the world. It hosts whole participatory programmes: processes, assemblies, initiatives and consultations, participatory budgets, meetings, and tracking whether approved proposals are carried out.
True Causes is much narrower: one method, done well. It answers one question inside a participatory process, what causes this problem?, with a map the participants certify themselves.
| Decidim | True Causes | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A platform for running participation programmes | A tool for one step: finding causes |
| What people do | Propose, comment, vote, attend meetings, allocate budgets | Everyone writes causes alone; the group then judges one pair at a time: does this cause significantly influence that one? |
| What comes out | Proposals, votes, budgets, and their follow-up | A map of causes, deepest first, with every disagreement kept on it |
| Who runs it | Usually an institution, on its own server | Any group; hosted, nothing to install |
| Open source | Yes (AGPLv3) | Hosted service; not open source |
| Cost | Free software; hosting and setup are yours | Free up to 100 people per room; nonprofits free on approval; paid plans for organisations |
When an institution wants a permanent home for public participation, with many kinds of process under one roof and a record of what happened to each proposal.
As the diagnosis step of a process: before a city asks residents for proposals, let them map what causes the problem. A room's map can be embedded in any page, a Decidim process page included, and its data exported for the record.
Checked in September 2026. Product names belong to their owners. If anything here about another product is out of date or unfair, write to hello@mg.truecauses.org and we will correct it.