Decidim is a free, open-source platform for citizen participation, proposals, budgeting, and elections. Used by governments and institutions worldwide.
Decidim is a free and open-source digital platform for participatory democracy, letting governments, universities, and civil-society organizations run structured citizen-participation processes such as proposal collection, budgeting, and voting.
First launched by Barcelona City Council in January 2016 and rewritten as a modular Ruby on Rails framework in 2017, Decidim is now governed by the nonprofit Decidim Association and developed openly by a global community on the Metadecidim platform.
Decidim's participatory spaces (processes, assemblies, consultations, and initiatives) can be enriched with components including Proposals, Participatory Budgeting, Meetings, Surveys, Debates, Blogs, Accountability, and secure digital Elections.
Because it is self-hosted and released under the AGPL-3.0 license, any organization can deploy, customize, and extend Decidim on its own infrastructure without license fees or vendor lock-in, while remaining obligated to share modifications under the same open license.
Decidim itself is entirely free software with no licensing cost; organizations pay only for hosting and, optionally, implementation and support services from third-party agencies within the Decidim ecosystem.
This model appeals particularly to public-sector bodies with data-sovereignty or procurement requirements that favor open, auditable civic-tech infrastructure over proprietary SaaS subscriptions.
Yes, Decidim is entirely free, open-source software; organizations only pay for hosting and optional support.
Barcelona City Council launched the first Decidim instance in January 2016; it is now governed by the nonprofit Decidim Association.
Decidim's source code is released under the AGPL-3.0 license.
Yes, Decidim is designed to be self-hosted on your own infrastructure using Docker and Ruby on Rails deployment guides.
Participatory budgeting, proposal collection, public deliberation, surveys, assemblies, and secure elections.
The Decidim Association, a nonprofit, alongside a global community of contributors on Metadecidim.