COMPARED
Pol.is and True Causes are both built for many people thinking about one question, and both keep participants unnamed. They answer different questions. Pol.is asks what does this crowd think, and where do its groups agree? True Causes asks what causes what, and which causes are deepest?
In Pol.is, people write short statements and vote agree, disagree or pass on other people's statements, shown one at a time. It then groups participants by how they voted and shows which statements each group holds and which statements win agreement across groups. There is no reply button. It is open source (AGPLv3), run by the nonprofit Computational Democracy Project since 2012, and is best known from vTaiwan, where it helped find the common ground behind Taiwan's rules on ride-hailing.
| Pol.is | True Causes | |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | What does this crowd think? Where do its opinion groups agree? | What causes what? Which causes are deepest? |
| What people do | Write short statements; vote agree / disagree / pass on others' | Everyone writes causes alone; the group then judges one pair at a time: does this cause significantly influence that one? |
| What comes out | Opinion groups, and statements with broad agreement | A map of causes, deepest first, with every disagreement kept on it |
| Disagreement | Shown as opinion groups | A link counts at three quarters of the votes cast; a split is published as disputed |
| Scale | Tens of thousands in one conversation | Rooms of up to 100 people free; any number of rooms on one question, their maps merged |
| Anonymity | Anonymous; no replies | Nobody is named inside a room |
| Open source | Yes (AGPLv3) | Hosted, not open source. The results are open: a public room’s map, every claim (JSON) and every judged pair with its vote counts (CSV) can be read and downloaded without an account, and each room records the rules it ran under |
When you need to know where a large public stands, and where its camps overlap, before deciding something: a policy consultation, a contested local question, a sense of what a population can live with.
When a problem keeps coming back and the question is why. Agreement on a statement does not tell you whether it is a cause or a consequence; a pairwise map of influence does.
They fit end to end. Pol.is can show which problems a population cares about and agrees on; True Causes can then work out, with the people involved, which of those problems drive the others.
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.