Belenios review
A free, self-hostable voting system with strong verification and a technical focus.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
Belenios is an online voting system for elections and referendums, designed for scientific councils, associations, and other organizations. It is aimed at teams that need verifiable elections and are comfortable with an open-source product. Elections can run on the hosted Belenios platform or on a server managed by the organization. The platform supports web and API access, as well as self-hosted deployment under AGPLv3.
The hosted service is free and supports elections of up to 2,500 voters per election. Belenios focuses on election integrity through ElGamal-encrypted ballots, voter credentials, ballot signatures, public ballot tracking with smart ballot trackers, and end-to-end verifiability. Threshold decryption trustees add a shared decryption process. Voting formats include single-choice and multi-choice elections, ranked-choice voting with Condorcet-Schulze and STV, and score voting with Majority Judgment. That breadth makes it suitable for organizations whose election rules go beyond a basic single-choice poll.
Belenios also fits technical teams that want deployment control and standards-based authentication options. Its listed integrations include Google, CAS, and OpenID Connect, while self-hosting provides an option for organizations that prefer to operate the software on their own server. The tradeoff is operational: the hosted service is described as experimental and comes without an availability guarantee. Belenios is a strong choice for teams prioritizing open source, verifiability, trustee-based decryption, and flexible voting methods. Organizations that need broader verified export or integration coverage, or a hosted service with stronger availability assurances, should choose an alternative.
Belenios pros and cons
- Where it wins
- End-to-end verifiability with encrypted, signed ballots
- Supports ranked-choice, score, single-choice, and multi-choice voting
- Self-hosting under AGPLv3 with Google, CAS, and OpenID Connect support
- Where it doesn't
- Hosted elections are limited to 2,500 voters each
- The hosted service has no availability guarantee
- Less verified export and integration coverage than leading options
Belenios fact sheet, pricing and score →
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