You want a quick vote from your team: which sprint goal to commit to, which name to give the release, which Friday works for the offsite. The discussion already lives on a Confluence page, so the vote should go there too. You type /poll, find nothing, and start to wonder whether your admin switched something off. You check the macro list, ask around, and lose half an hour before someone tells you the real answer.
The answer is that Confluence Cloud has no poll macro, on any plan. For a tool that holds your specs, sprint plans and retro notes, that's a strange gap. Confluence can't ask the team a yes-or-no question, so the vote moves to a chat thread, and the page loses the record of how the team decided. The other route is an app, and paying for one is hard to justify when a small team votes a few times a month.
You still have options. I'll go through three of them, and two don't involve buying anything.
Option 1: Vote with comment reactions
Post each choice as its own page comment and ask people to react with a thumbs up on the one they like. Each comment shows its reaction count, so you can see the leader at a glance.
This works for a quick question with three or four choices. The trouble is control. Nothing stops someone from reacting to every comment, you can't close the vote on a date, and everyone who votes later sees the early reactions.
Option 2: Keep a voting table on the page
Add a table with one row per choice and a "Votes" column. People open the editor, add their name or an @mention to a row , and publish the page again.
You get a record of who voted for what, which helps when the decision needs a paper trail. Every vote is a page edit, though, and nobody votes without seeing how the rest of the team voted first. For a team of six deciding on a lunch spot, that's fine. For a retro where you want honest scores, it isn't.
Option 3: Add a poll macro from the Marketplace
A Marketplace app, Team Voice (polls, votes, surveys) for Confluence, puts the poll on the page itself. People vote while they read, and the results show up in the same place. Here's how to set it up.
Step 1: Install the app
A site admin installs Team Voice from the Atlassian Marketplace. The app runs on Atlassian Forge. If your security team asks where the votes go: polls and votes stay in Forge storage in your Atlassian Cloud site, and the app doesn't send data to external servers.
Step 2: Insert the poll
- Open the page in edit mode.
- Type
/ and search for Team Voice. - Fill in the poll form: a title and the answer options. Drag the options to change their order, or start from a template.
You need edit permission on the page to add, change or delete a poll. Anyone with view permission can vote, as long as they're logged in.
Step 3: Pick a poll type
The listing names these formats:
- Yes/No, for a go or no-go decision
- A 1 to 5 rating or a star rating, for feedback on a talk, a release or a process
- Emoji or hearts, for a quick mood check
- Custom options, for a choice between named options such as dates or release names
Step 4: Set the voting rules
This is where the poll beats a table or a row of reactions. In the poll settings, you can allow more than one answer per person, let people change their vote, set an end date, and choose when voters see the results. That last one matters for retros: if people can't see the running count, early votes don't sway the late ones.
Step 5: Publish and read the results
Publish the page, and people can vote right away. Results update as votes come in. You can show them as a table, a bar chart or a pie chart, with totals and averages. Space admins also get an audit log of poll changes in the space settings, which helps when someone changes the options halfway through a vote.
Example: a sprint retro score
A sprint retro is a good fit for a poll, so here is how one looks with Team Voice. On the retro page, add a 1 to 5 rating poll titled "How did this sprint go?". Set the end date to the end of the retro, and pick a results setting that hides the running count while the vote is open. Everyone votes from the page in the first five minutes of the meeting. The average gives you one number to compare with last sprint, and the bar chart shows whether the team agrees or splits.
Which option fits your team
- Use comment reactions for a one-off question with a few choices.
- Keep a voting table if you need a visible record of who voted for what.
- Try Team Voice if you run polls every sprint and want an end date, control over when results show, and charts on the page. It makes single-question polls, so for a longer survey you add several polls to the page.
If you've solved this a different way, I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
Disclosure: I work at Apportunity, the company that makes the app mentioned in this article.
