Here are the best digital participation tools of 2025
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The latest edition of People Powered’s Digital Participation Tool Ratings goes live today!
The ratings provide an expert evaluation of the world’s leading digital participation tools in one convenient place. They’re designed to help democracy practitioners, from government reformers to civil society organizations, find the best tool for their context.
This year’s ratings highlight 30 comprehensive tools that have been used to support digital participation all over the world. We’re offering more information and insights on each platform to help you select one that suits your context and needs. We also researched how AI tools and features fit into the current digital participation landscape.
Whether you’re looking to support a deliberative process, public consultation, participatory policymaking, and more, these ratings are for you. We’ve developed them to help you select tools that are comprehensive, user-friendly, cost-effective, reliable, accessible, and ethical.
What’s new this year?
We have focused on actively incorporating feedback from both users and developers to improve the ratings. We’ve updated them to better reflect community needs, ensuring that they are more accurate, user-friendly, relevant, and insightful for users. While we didn’t make any revisions to the methodology and criteria for this edition, we revisited each platform's scores and added more information and guidance on each criterion. These changes aim both to help users understand the ratings and to provide richer, up-to-date information on each tool. Key updates include:
Reintroducing an overall score based on six key criteria, providing a clearer evaluation of each tool.
Insightful analysis including short and longer narratives and information to improve the depth of our ratings and help organizations, advocates, and practitioners looking for guidance understand what each tool offers.
Curated collections to spotlight highly rated, accessible, affordable, and reliable tools.
Detailed insights and explanations on how various tools leverage AI, along with guidance to help you consider key factors when selecting AI-driven tools.
Improved filtering and sorting options with categories and tags: Updated Airtable presentation to help users filter by languages, countries of use, features, participatory democracy (PD) processes, and sort the tools based on the criteria scores including overall platform score, cost, capacity requirements, features, and more.
New tools: We have also included additional tools that we found valuable, even though they haven’t been rated by our committee yet. They may be considered in the next rating process, but we wanted to share them now because we believe they’re worth exploring.
What to do:
Use the Ratings to find the best participation tools for you.
Apply for the Rising Stars Mentorship to receive expert guidance on digital participation and other participatory processes.
Take the free Digital Participation Online Training, which provides self-paced learning to run your own digital participation program. It includes guidance on using the ratings to select your platform and even walks you through the design and implementation stage of your program.
Watch the launch of the ratings at our recent AI for Digital Democracy webinar
We want to hear from you!
Tell us about your experience of using the ratings. We aim to continuously improve the ratings with better methodologies and a more comprehensive list of tools! Are you a developer or user of a digital participation tool in the Global South? We are expanding our list to include more tools from underrepresented regions. Email us at info@peoplepowered.org to have it considered for the next edition of the ratings.