Who this is for
You're a city engagement lead, clerk, or budget officer. You've been told to run a participatory budgeting cycle. You have a modest budget (real dollars, not "vote on ideas"). You have somewhere between one month and one quarter. And now you have to pick a tool.
This post is a practical, non-exhaustive comparison of the participatory budgeting tools available in 2026, written from the perspective of what actually matters when you're running a PB cycle — not what looks good on a landing page.
Full disclosure: we make one of the tools listed. We'll try to be honest about where the others are better fits.
What "participatory budgeting" actually requires
Every PB cycle has the same four stages:
1. Idea generation. Residents propose projects.
2. Deliberation. The community discusses tradeoffs, feasibility, values.
3. Prioritization. Some form of ranking or voting narrows the list.
4. Implementation & feedback. The winning projects get funded; residents want to see what happened.
Different tools optimize for different stages. The mistake is picking one tool for stage 3 and then discovering it can't do stage 2, or vice versa.
The landscape
Decidim
What it is. Open-source (Ruby on Rails, GPL) participatory-democracy platform built in Barcelona. Runs the entire lifecycle — idea submission, debates, assemblies, proposals, voting, initiatives. Hundreds of deployments across the EU and Latin America.
Where it shines. End-to-end coverage. If you want a single platform that handles idea generation and deliberation and prioritization and the public record of implementation, Decidim is the incumbent. The governance layer (how decisions get made, who has voting power, quorum rules) is unusually explicit.
Where it doesn't. Self-hosting or a specialized vendor is expected. The deliberation stage is discussion-thread-shaped (comments, proposals) — which works, but doesn't surface latent agreement the way structured deliberation tools do. Written participation only.
When to pick it. You're running a program (not a one-off cycle), you have technical capacity, you want a platform that will hold the entire lifecycle for years, and you're comfortable with written-participation access bias.
CitizenLab
What it is. Commercial SaaS engagement platform. Idea submission, surveys, budgeting, AI-summarization of responses. Used by ~350 municipalities globally as of last public census.
Where it shines. Fast to deploy. Sales, support, and onboarding shaped like enterprise SaaS — familiar to procurement. Multilingual out of the box. The AI Copilot summarization is genuinely useful for large idea pools.
Where it doesn't. Summarization-of-comments is a different thing from structured deliberation. If your residents disagree in complicated ways, an AI summary can hide that in ways an LRD wouldn't. Pricing scales with population.
When to pick it. You need the fastest path from purchase order to launched cycle, you have a mid-to-large population, and your PB question is well-suited to idea-collection-plus-summary rather than deep deliberation.
Consul Democracy
What it is. Open-source, originally built for Madrid, now maintained internationally. Purpose-built for the Madrid model of participatory budgeting — idea submission, feasibility review, prioritization voting.
Where it shines. Direct match to the "Madrid model" PB workflow. Multilingual. Very clear voting and budgeting UIs. Large existing deployment community.
Where it doesn't. Development pace has slowed compared to Decidim. Deliberation is minimal — the model assumes stage 2 happens elsewhere.
When to pick it. You're explicitly running a Madrid-style PB cycle and you want a platform that reflects that shape natively.
Stanford PB Platform
What it is. Academic/nonprofit tool from the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team. Focused on the voting stage — comparing knapsack voting, ranked, approval, and other allocation methods.
Where it shines. If you want to run real experiments with different voting rules — which affects PB outcomes in nontrivial ways — this is the most academically rigorous option.
Where it doesn't. Stage 3 only. You need other tooling for ideation and deliberation.
When to pick it. You're a researcher, you're running a pilot that includes methodological comparison, or you're a large city willing to instrument your own PB cycle.
Civic Filament (us)
What it is. LLM-native structured deliberation, currently in beta. The AI mediator conducts one-on-one interviews with residents about proposed projects; clustering on value profiles surfaces where values align across the community; the Living Requirement Document becomes the deliberation artifact.
Where it shines. Stage 2. If your PB cycle keeps producing "top ten most popular ideas" without any signal about why residents value them or what conditions unlock support for the harder tradeoffs, structured deliberation over interviews is designed to close that gap. Also: the interview format is designed to reach residents who don't participate in written-comment tools (see our post on town hall alternatives). We don't yet have deployment results to show it does.
Where it doesn't. We don't run stage 3 as a first-class feature yet — no ranked voting, no knapsack allocation UI. A cycle using us today would pair Civic Filament for stage 2 with Consul or a lightweight vote runner for stage 3. No identity or voter-roll verification either, so we're not the tool for binding votes.
When to pick us. You're running PB in a community where written-participation bias has been a real problem, you want structured deliberation (not just comments), and you're willing to compose two tools rather than force one to do everything. Free pilot for the first cycle.
The right way to shortlist
Do not start with "which tool has the most features." Start with:
1. Which stage of PB is the weakest in your current process? If it's ideation, Decidim or CitizenLab. If it's deliberation, Civic Filament or a structured facilitator. If it's voting mechanics, Stanford PB. If it's the artifact of record, Decidim or Civic Filament.
2. Who are you failing to reach today? If the answer is "written-comment participants only, and I need to reach more of the community," lean toward tools with conversational or in-person modalities.
3. How much composition can you handle? One integrated platform vs. two well-scoped tools glued together is a real tradeoff. Municipal engagement teams with staff bandwidth can compose; small teams often can't.
What we won't tell you
We won't tell you the market share of each tool. Vendors publish numbers that mean different things — "deployments" can mean anything from a single pilot to a mature multi-city program. Ask each vendor for live customer references you can email, then email them. That's the reference class of due diligence PB tools deserve.
We also won't tell you Civic Filament is the right answer for every PB cycle. It's not. Some cycles are pure ideation + voting; you don't need a deliberation layer for those.
---
Questions we didn't answer? Procurement FAQ. Want to see the deliberation layer on a real issue? Try it live. Want to talk it through with a person? Book a walkthrough.