DISCLAIMER: This page is for information only. It is not legal, financial or procurement advice and does not replace your own due diligence. Licenses, ownership, features and certifications can change: confirm what your decision rests on with the official sources.
🩺 Vitals
- 🟢 Last active: 2026-10-26
- 📦 Latest release: v3.13.1 (2026-10-24)
- 🐞 Open issues: 69
- 🌟 Stars: 2.6k
What do these metrics mean?
- Last active: when code was last pushed, as of our last check. The dot is green when that was recent, grey otherwise. A long gap can mean a tool is finished and stable, not only unmaintained.
- Latest release: the most recent stable version the maintainers published as a release on the forge. Some healthy projects publish only tags, or publish their versions elsewhere.
- Open issues: unresolved reports and requests. A high number is normal for a popular project and is not a warning on its own.
- Stars: how many people bookmarked the project on its forge. A rough popularity signal, not a measure of quality.
🏗️ Profile
- Official: loomio.com
- Source: github.com/loomio/loomio
- License: AGPL-3.0-only
- Deployment: Docker Container
- Jurisdiction: New Zealand 🇳🇿 (Loomio Limited)
- Compliance (SaaS): loomio.com security and compliance page
- Compliance (Self-Hosted): Self-Hosted (User Managed)
- Complexity: High (4/5) - Eight containers on one node: app, worker, PostgreSQL, Redis, a reply-by-email server, a live-editing service and a TLS proxy with its certificate companion
- Maintenance: High (4/5) - Frequent release series, some with irreversible migrations or stepping-stone versions; security fixes only for the current series
- User Management: High (4/5) - SAML, OIDC and OAuth sign-in, group roles and permissions, TLS through the bundled proxy and an edit history with author and time in the free build; no SCIM
What the scores mean: Reading the Scores
1. The Executive Summary
What is it? Loomio is a decision-making tool where groups share context, discuss proposals, vote and record outcomes without having to meet. Its polls cover proposals, rankings, scores, time polls and single transferable vote elections, with quorum, weighted voting and anonymous ballots, and members can reply by email. Cooperatives, nonprofits, boards, unions and member organisations use it.
The Strategic Verdict:
- 🔴 For teams that cannot upgrade often: Caution. Security fixes come only for the current release series, and some upgrades carry irreversible migrations (Maintenance).
- 🟢 For boards, cooperatives and member organisations: Strong Buy. Proposals, elections and weighted voting, single sign-on and an edit history all come in the free build, with no license fee (What is it?, User Management, Cost of Ownership).
2. Cost of Ownership
| Cost Component | Loomio (Self-Hosted) |
|---|---|
| Pricing Model | No license fee |
| Operations | Single VM, several services (app, worker, PostgreSQL, Redis, mail and editing services); plus your team's time to run it (Maintenance, in the Profile) |
| Support | From the vendor: loomio.com, a managed service, and paid support for self-hosted installs (enterprise support); elsewhere, a paid service provider |
| Exit | Group data export (JSON, CSV, HTML); files are referenced, not bundled, and direct threads are left out |
What each row covers: Total Cost of Ownership
3. Risk Assessment
- Jurisdiction: Loomio Limited, the project's vendor, is registered in New Zealand, under that country's law. The vendor is controlled by Loomio Cooperative Limited, based in New Zealand. The vendor runs loomio.com, a hosted service where your data can live; its hosts include a party domiciled in or controlled from the US. Data that party holds for loomio.com is within reach of the US CLOUD Act, wherever it is stored, if the party is based in the US or its US parent controls the data.
- The Compliance Shift: Its notification emails load members' initials avatars from a third-party service, which sees each reader's IP address; no setting turns this off. Self-hosting moves the security and compliance duties of running the software to the operator (the operator's compliance checklist). Any audit of loomio.com (such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001) covers the vendor's own systems, never your install.
- License Risk: Loomio is under AGPL-3.0-only, an OSI-approved network copyleft license (what it allows and requires). The project moved to these terms from MIT in 2012. Contributors keep the rights to their code and no agreement transfers them, so moving future versions to terms without copyleft would need every holder's consent.
4. Market Landscape
🏢 Proprietary Incumbents
- Diligent Boards: Diligent Boards is a hosted portal where boards share papers, meet and vote.
Data held by: Diligent Corporation, United States 🇺🇸, subject to the US CLOUD Act for the data it holds, wherever it is stored.
Why teams leave: Its terms let it use client data to develop products; AI training needs written consent.
Exit: Board books exported one at a time as PDF (minutes as Word), no bulk export
With Loomio: The group's data stays on servers the organisation runs (Deployment, in the Profile).
🤝 Open-Source Alternatives
- OpenSlides: Self-hosted assembly and voting platform for parliaments, parties and associations: agendas, motions, elections and live secret ballots. SAML SSO and every feature ship under MIT, no paid tiers.