Genchi vs Polly
Polly can ask your team a 1-to-5 confidence question in Slack on a schedule, and it has a ready-made template that does almost exactly that. The difference is what happens after the vote. Polly gives you poll results. Genchi gives you a project delivery prediction: votes from the people doing the work, combined by project, tracked over time and rolled up across your portfolio, with the individual votes still visible.
What Polly does well
- Flexible. Polls, surveys, Q&A, quizzes, pulse surveys and standups in one tool.
- Everywhere your team works. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet.
- A ready-made confidence template. Its Mid-Sprint Check-In asks team members, on a 1–5 scale, how confident they are that they, and the rest of the team, will hit their sprint deliverables.
- Recurring and scheduled. Set a question to repeat, with reminders for people who haven't answered.
- Priced per creator. Participants are unlimited.
Where it differs
- Not systematic. Each poll stands alone, set up by whoever owns it, so different owners ask different questions on different schedules. The signal is only as consistent as the people running the polls. Genchi asks the same question, on the same scale, for every project.
- No cross-project view. Polly doesn't know what a project, a deadline or a portfolio is, so there's no view showing every project's confidence side by side, or which way it's trending. In Genchi, that's the portfolio view: a color-coded card for every project, with the trend and individual votes behind each one.
- A sprint question, not a deadline question. Polly's template asks about this sprint's deliverables. Genchi asks whether the team will achieve the project's goal by its deadline, which is the question a leader running several projects actually needs answered.
- Anonymity is optional. Pollys are named by default, and anonymous responses need a paid Pro plan. In Genchi, every vote is anonymous by design, so each one is independent, while comments and blockers are attributed so someone can follow up.
- You operate it. Someone has to set up each poll, keep it running and interpret the results. Genchi sends the confidence vote on each project's cadence and keeps the score, the trend and the portfolio view current without anyone assembling them.
Could you use Polly to run a cross-team confidence vote, grouped by project?
You could approximate one: a recurring anonymous poll for every project, audiences kept current as people join and leave, and results exported and combined in a spreadsheet to see projects side by side. It takes ongoing effort, and the result depends on every poll owner asking the same question on the same schedule. That's the point: Polly is a flexible polling tool, and Genchi is built for one job, a consistent project delivery prediction across every project. They do different jobs.
What it costs
The two are priced differently. Polly charges per creator license: anonymous responses need Pro, at $29 a month per creator, billed annually, with unlimited participants and responses. Genchi charges per user: it's free for teams of up to 10, and larger teams pay $2.50 per user per month, billed in blocks of 10, which comes to about $250 a month for 100 people.
On license cost alone, Polly is cheaper. The difference is paid in someone's time: setting up and maintaining a poll for every project, keeping audiences current, and assembling the results into a view a leader can read.
Side by side
| Polly | Genchi | |
|---|---|---|
| Question it answers | Whatever you ask. The template asks about sprint deliverables. | Will we achieve the goal by the deadline? |
| Source of the signal | Whoever you send the poll to | Everyone working on the project |
| Direction | Forward-looking, if you ask a forward-looking question | Forward-looking by design |
| Effort per person | A click or two to answer; setup and analysis for the owner | One click, about two seconds; no assembly |
| Consistency | Consistent if you keep the same poll running | The same question on the same scale, every time |
| Independence | Named by default; anonymity on paid plans | Each vote anonymous and cast independently |
| Unit scored | A poll | A project, from the combined votes |
| Output | Poll results | Score, trend and individual votes, across a color-coded portfolio |
| Who sees it | Whoever you share results with | Leaders and the team, including teams that depend on the project |
| Price | Per creator. Anonymity from $29/month (Pro, billed annually); unlimited participants and responses. | Per user. Free up to 10; $2.50 per user per month. |
When to use which
- Use Polly if you want an occasional confidence check for one team, or a general-purpose tool for surveys, Q&A and all-hands.
- Use Genchi when you need a standing project delivery prediction across many projects, one that leaders can read at a glance and that tells them which teams to leave alone.
- Use both. Many teams will keep Polly for everything else it does. Genchi does one job.
What Genchi won't do
- Tell you the truth if the whole team is confidently wrong. Genchi measures belief, not reality.
- Work without a clear goal. If people can't say what "done" means, their confidence can't mean much either.
- Work as well without a deadline. Without a date, confidence has less to anchor to, though the trend still shows whether it's rising or falling.
- Replace a general survey tool. It asks one question, about each project.
Genchi is our product. Polly is an excellent general-purpose polling tool, and the two do different jobs.
One confidence vote, every project, side by side
Set up a project, invite the team, and your first confidence vote goes out tomorrow.
START FREE TRIAL2-week free trial. Teams of up to 10 stay free; larger teams pay $2.50/user/month for every billed user (~$250/month for a 100-person org). No credit card to start.