Patreon Polls vs Discord vs Google Forms vs StrawPoll vs PatronVoice

Every Patreon creator ends up polling their members somewhere — the question is where. The short answer: native Patreon polls win for quick text questions, Discord wins when your community already lives there, Google Forms is a survey tool wearing a poll costume, StrawPoll is for fun public votes, and a dedicated tool like PatronVoice wins when pictures, tiers, or fairness are on the line. The long answer follows.

The comparison at a glance

Patreon’s built-in polls

The default for a reason: the poll sits in the feed your members already read, visibility follows the post’s access settings, and results export to CSV. If the question is text-shaped — “which stream time works?”, “should the next episode be A or B?” — nothing beats zero extra tools.

The ceiling: options are text-only (up to 20 of them, no pictures — see how creators work around image polls), every vote counts the same regardless of tier, and patrons watch raw counts, so if you weight results afterwards in a spreadsheet, the visible “winner” may contradict your announcement.

Discord

If your community’s real home is your Discord server, polls there meet people mid-conversation — the built-in poll command is fast, and Patreon’s Discord integration hands paid members a role, so a role-gated channel gives you patron-only voting for free.

The ceiling: only the fraction of patrons who joined your server can vote at all, which biases every result toward your chattiest members. Options are text with an emoji at best, one member is one vote, there’s no per-tier weighting or breakdown, and results scroll away with the channel. It’s an engagement feature, not a decision system.

Google Forms

The most flexible of the free options: you can add images to questions, branch logic, and collect long-form answers. For an actual survey — “what should I change about the membership?” — Forms is genuinely the right tool, and even Patreon’s own help docs point creators to it for complex cases.

The ceiling: it verifies nothing. Anyone with the link can submit, an email field only proves someone typed an email, and mapping responses to patrons and tiers means manually cross-referencing your member CSV — for every poll. There are no live results for voters, so the “event” feeling of a vote is gone. As a recurring poll system it’s the highest-effort option on this page.

StrawPoll and generic poll makers

StrawPoll, Polltab and friends are the fastest route to a real image poll: pictures as options, clean voting UI, shareable link in under a minute. For a public, low-stakes vote — “which logo do you like, internet?” — they’re exactly right.

The ceiling is the same public-ness: the link is the only gate, so the moment it escapes your patron post, non-patrons vote. Duplicate protection by cookie or IP is trivially beaten, which matters the moment a vote gets heated. No membership check, no tiers, no weights.

PatronVoice

PatronVoice is the only option on this page built specifically for the Patreon membership model. Voters sign in with their existing Patreon account; membership and tier are verified through the official API before a vote counts. Polls are image-first (duel, grid, and list layouts), each tier carries the voting power you assign, and everyone watches the weighted result live with the raw count beside it. Closed polls export to CSV, weights included.

The honest ceiling: it costs money (plans from $3/month, billed as a Patreon membership), and if you only ever ask text questions where every vote should count equally, the native poll already does that for free.

The decision guide

• Quick text question, flat vote → native Patreon poll.
• Casual pulse-check where your community chats → Discord.
• Long-form feedback and branching questions → Google Forms (it’s a survey — treat it as one).
• Public vote, stakes near zero → StrawPoll.
• Pictures as options, patron-only, tiers with different weight → PatronVoice.

And if you’re deciding what to ask before deciding where to ask it, start with 12 Patreon poll ideas that give patrons a real say.