Loomio - Make decisions together | WarmIndex

Loomio is a collaborative decision-making platform that enables distributed organizations, groups, and cooperatives to discuss ideas, vote with reasoning, and maintain a permanent record of decisions asynchronously.

🚀 Overview

Loomio is an online tool designed to help groups make better decisions together without the chaos of email threads, fleeting chat messages, or inefficient meetings. It provides a structured space for discussions, proposals, polls, and voting, ensuring transparency, accountability, and a searchable archive of outcomes.

The platform solves the problem of scattered and forgotten decisions in modern collaboration tools like Slack, email, or documents, where context is lost, not everyone participates, and there's no clear record. It's built for non-hierarchical, distributed teams who need inclusive, async decision-making.

Loomio was created in 2011 by activists from the Occupy Wellington movement and developers from the Enspiral network in New Zealand, who needed a better way to coordinate non-hierarchical groups. Recognizing a gap in tools for structured group decisions, they built it as open-source software, evolving it into a worker-owned cooperative in 2013 to sustain development while keeping it accessible.

✨ Key Features

Focused Discussions: Start threads with context, tag members, and keep conversations organized away from daily chat noise.
Reasoned Voting: Use polls and proposals where participants explain their agreement/disagreement, fostering understanding and better outcomes.
Permanent Records: Every decision is timestamped, searchable, and includes outcomes, next steps, and reasoning for institutional memory.
Flexible Templates & Workflows: Customizable for governance, budgets, hiring, etc., with multi-stage approvals and integrations.
Self-Hosting & Data Control: Full open-source code for privacy-focused groups like political movements.
Upcoming: Enhanced analytics and AI-assisted summaries (experimental).

🛠 Tech Stack

Frontend: Vue.js, JavaScript, SCSS
Backend: Ruby on Rails
Database: PostgreSQL
Auth: Custom (with email gateways)
Hosting: Self-hosted via Docker / Hosted on Cloudflare, AWS regions (USA, EU, AU/NZ)

👥 Who Is This For?

This project is useful for:

Developers who want to contribute to open-source collaboration tools
Teams looking for async decision-making in distributed setups
Indie makers building community-driven projects or co-ops
Nonprofits, boards, and membership orgs needing governance transparency

📸 Screenshots / Demo

Live demo: https://www.loomio.org
GitHub: https://github.com/loomio/loomio

🔥 Project Status

🟢 Actively building

Last updated: 2026-03-24

❓ FAQ

Is this project free?

Freemium — Free self-hosting for any group; hosted plans start low for communities (one-time payments), ethical pricing for businesses/nonprofits to sustain development.

Is the source code available?

Yes — https://github.com/loomio/loomio (AGPL-3.0 license)

Can I contribute?

Yes — Check open issues/PRs on GitHub, follow DEVSETUP.md for local setup, or provide feedback via community forums/contact form.

📬 Contact & Links

Built with ❤️ and kept warm on WarmIndex.

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