Best UK Public Consultation Software for 2026

The best UK public consultation software combines four things: an audit-ready record of every response, GDPR-safe data handling, WCAG accessibility and UK hosting with the accreditations procurement will ask for. Eight platforms appear on most UK shortlists in 2026. This guide compares them on the criteria that decide public-sector procurement. Tractivity is listed first because it is the platform we build, so we have kept our own entry spec-level and described every alternative from its own published material, with sources you can check.

A consultation is rarely judged on how it was run. It's judged on what you can evidence afterwards, under the Gunning Principles, an FOI request or a judicial review. That's why this comparison weighs defensibility as heavily as features. Research by Professor Ray Panko at the University of Hawaii found that 94% of the spreadsheets audited contained at least one error, so 'we'll manage it manually' is the riskiest option on any shortlist.

The eight platforms at a glance

Based on publicly available information, reviewed August 2026, taken from each supplier's own website and its own Crown Commercial Service G-Cloud 14 listing where one exists. Positions change, so check the supplier's current material before you shortlist. Published by Tractivity.

1. Tractivity

Tractivity manages the whole consultation lifecycle: the stakeholders you engage, the surveys and events you run, the responses and issues that come back, and the reporting that evidences all of it. Tractivity has been developing SRM software since 2002, for more than 20 years, and supports 112+ named UK clients across eight sectors, including HM Treasury, the Welsh Government and NHS organisations from trusts to integrated care boards.

The consultation record is the core of it. Every email, meeting, survey response and comment is logged against the stakeholder it relates to, date-stamped and exportable, with 150+ pre-built reports for boards, regulators and FOI responses. On EDF’s Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C consultation programmes, around 30,000 issues were logged and tagged with a 100% response rate. Anglian Water manages 13,000+ stakeholders on the Cambridge Wastewater Treatment Plant Relocation, a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project examined by the Planning Inspectorate. Transport for the South East reports spending less than a quarter of the time on stakeholder management compared with spreadsheets.

The platform flexes around how your team runs a consultation rather than imposing a method: your fields, your taxonomy, your reporting style. On procurement, Tractivity holds ISO 27001:2022, Cyber Essentials Plus and the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit, audited annually, is listed on G-Cloud 14, supports English and Welsh as standard, and hosts on Microsoft Azure with UK South as the default region and EEA and other regions available on request.

On accessibility, Tractivity currently meets WCAG 2.2 Level A, with Level AA on track for 2026; the UK Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 require WCAG 2.1 Level AA, so ask us, and every vendor on your shortlist, for a published conformance level and roadmap in writing.

Pricing starts from £9,495 a year plus £500 per additional user, with all core functionality included, no record caps, no paid modules and no onboarding fee, and implementation takes four to six weeks.

If you only need to publish a one-off consultation page with no stakeholder record behind it, you may want to consider a different platform.

2. Citizen Space (Delib)

Citizen Space, owned by Delib, is a consultation portal with a strong record in UK central government, regulators and councils.

It focuses on publishing consultations, capturing responses and reporting on them, and does that job well. Delib publishes full WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance, along with ISO 27001, and is listed on G-Cloud 14.

The design focus is the consultation itself: publish, collect, analyse, report. Delib's G-Cloud 14 listing names "Tools for citizens and residents panels, stakeholder and expert groups", and as at August 2026 we found no published feature for logging individual interactions against a named stakeholder record, and no commitment or obligation tracker; the nearest published mechanism is the public "We Asked, You Said, We Did" loop. Respondents take part without creating an account, so the record sits with the activity rather than with the individual resident, councillor or community group who reappears across projects and years. If you need engagement history that follows the same people across projects and years, ask Delib what Citizen Space holds and what would need a second system.

Best for organisations whose primary need is formal consultation publishing.

3. Commonplace

London-based Commonplace, now powered by Zencity, specialises in map-based community engagement for planning, housing and place-shaping projects, with UK case studies including Westminster City Council, Waltham Forest and Cairngorms National Park. Residents drop comments on an interactive map, which suits highly local, visual feedback on physical schemes.

Its published design is around inbound community feedback and insight rather than a private staff-side stakeholder record. Zencity states plainly that "our analysis of the data is always done on an aggregate basis and is not designed to identify or pinpoint any individual", and their G-Cloud 14 listing answers "API: No". Their "Commonplace Select" feature does engage a predefined list of stakeholders for statutory engagements. If your consultation also has to hold regulator engagement, political stakeholders, event attendance and an exportable audit trail against named records, ask them which of those they cover.

Best for councils and housing associations running visual, place-based consultations.

4. Govocal (formerly CitizenLab)

Brussels-based Go Vocal is a community engagement platform built around idea crowdsourcing, voting and participatory budgeting, with a published participation ladder, strong multilingual support and real UK traction: Southwark, Cambridge City Council, Newham, Wokingham and Havant all appear as named case studies. It acquired Open Source Politics in March 2026 and is a certified B Corp.

Its published focus is community participation rather than a private stakeholder record. Their G-Cloud listing describes the CRM feature as profiling users "and target them with relevant content & mails", and as at August 2026 we found no published feature for logging interactions against a named stakeholder record and no commitment tracker.

On procurement, they hold a G-Cloud 14 listing with UK and EEA data locations, ISO 27001:2013 certified by BSI with hosting and home offices explicitly out of scope, and Cyber Essentials. Companies House shows no UK-incorporated Go Vocal entity, so ask which legal entity would contract with you and under which law.

Best for councils prioritising open community participation, ideation and participatory budgeting.

5. Granicus EngagementHQ

EngagementHQ is the Sentiment and Feedback capability inside Granicus Engagement Cloud, from US-headquartered Granicus, which contracts in the UK as GRANICUS-FIRMSTEP LIMITED and has a London office. Granicus states that over 400 public sector organisations in the UK and Ireland work with it, naming the Met Office, Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council, Durham County Council and the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. The toolset is wide: surveys, quick polls, discussion forums, ideation, interactive mapping, 24/7 moderation, email campaigns and newsletters.

Granicus publishes no price on its own site, but its G-Cloud 14 listing prices EngagementHQ at £12,000 a unit a year with an established range to £32,000. Welsh is explicitly supported, with moderation "Available 24/7 in Spanish, English, Welsh, and French languages", so Welsh provision is a strength rather than an open question. Its G-Cloud listing declares UK data storage on AWS, answers "No" to both Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus, and records its ISO 27001 accreditation as reviewed in January 2021; all of its published accessibility material frames US law, the ADA and Section 508, with no reference to the UK Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Best for organisations wanting a broad civic engagement toolkit across many channels.

6. Syrenis SMART

SMART is Syrenis's stakeholder communication tool. Syrenis relaunched its brand on 21 April 2026 and retired the legacy product names, and SMART no longer appears in the syrenis.com navigation; their own Trust Center now describes it as "our stakeholder management capability, which forms a small part of the broader Syrenis platform". It remains listed and priced on G-Cloud 14 at £4,215 per user per year, so it can still be bought, but it should be assessed as a legacy product rather than an actively marketed one.

Syrenis's published security programme is one of the strongest in this comparison and should not be underestimated: ISO/IEC 27001 accredited by EY CertifyPoint on 18 November 2022, with the scope explicitly excluding services outside AWS; SOC 2 Type II; Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus; CSA STAR Level 2; a Home Office Approval to Operate and a connection to the Police National Network; and annual CHECK-approved penetration testing.

Their G-Cloud listing declares data storage and processing locations as "United Kingdom / European Economic Area (EEA) / Other locations", so an unqualified UK-only hosting requirement needs confirming in writing. And because the product is no longer branded or marketed, ask Syrenis directly, in writing, what its published support and development commitment for SMART is.

Best for buyers who already run SMART and want to understand where it sits, and for teams whose priority is a mature published security and consent-management programme.

7. Simply Stakeholders

Simply Stakeholders is a trading name of Darzin Software Pty Ltd, of Chatswood, New South Wales. It positions itself as "Stakeholder Intelligence for a Complex World". Its published features include a stakeholder register, Outlook and Gmail plugins that save email and meetings automatically, mapping on Google Maps, automatic sentiment and issue detection, commitments tracking, grievance management and an iOS and Android app. It publishes no prices; its three tiers are Core, Plus and Pro.

Three things to check for a UK public consultation.

On packaging, their pricing page places email sending, SMS, surveys, commitments tracking and grievance management on the Plus tier or above, and offline access and API access on Pro only.

On accessibility, their own published position is "WCAG compliance in progress", with no version or level stated, and we found no accessibility statement and no VPAT on their site as at August 2026.

On procurement, they publish ISO 27001 certification, with a Sensiba certification mark added in February 2026, SOC 2, a public Vanta trust page and Microsoft Azure hosting with a named UK region; we found no Cyber Essentials Plus claim and no G-Cloud listing when we checked in August 2026, and they publish no support hours or time zones, so ask for both in writing. Their privacy impact assessment is stated against the Australian Privacy Act 1988.

Best for teams that want stakeholder mapping, AI issue detection and sentiment analysis, and that do not need a G-Cloud route to market.

8. Jambo

Jambo, of Edmonton, Alberta and part of the Silvacom Group of Companies, describes itself as "Jambo Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) software", "purpose-built software for teams who need to prove they engaged". It is low-cost at the entry tier, with Jambo Professional published at $995 a month for five users, and covers contact and organisation records, interaction logging, issues with a visual risk matrix, commitments including recurring ones, a Jambo for Outlook add-in, Zapier, and Jambo Geospatial with embedded Esri map viewers as an Esri Gold partner.

As at August 2026, we found no published dedicated interest and influence stakeholder mapping module; segmentation is instead described through tags, custom fields and Esri maps. There's no native survey or consultation tool either; surveys are handled through Zapier connections to tools such as Typeform and SurveyMonkey, and there's no public-facing consultation website or engagement portal. In-platform mass mailing is marked "coming soon" on their pricing page.

On procurement, Jambo claims ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and ISO/IEC 27017:2015 certification, states it does not hold SOC 2 and relies on SOC 2-certified data centres, and was not listed on G-Cloud 14 when we checked the Digital Marketplace supplier index in August 2026, their own comparison page says an application is in progress and expected by September 2026, and a Cyber Essentials Plus application is underway.

Best for teams that want contact records, interaction logging, commitments and Esri mapping, and that can work with Alberta-hours support.

What is the best software for managing community consultations in the UK?

For UK community consultations, the question that decides it is whether the platform holds the whole record, who you engaged, when, how and what they said, and can evidence it under scrutiny.

If you have ongoing engagement duties across projects and years, that points to a full SRM platform, and Tractivity is built for exactly that; we would say so, and we publish our pricing, hosting region and conformance levels so you can check. If your need is a single formal consultation exercise, Citizen Space and Commonplace are both well-established UK specialists with strong published references, and either may be all you require.

The deciding questions are accessibility compliance, G-Cloud availability, UK data residency and whether the record survives beyond the individual consultation.

If your next consultation needs a record that will stand up to scrutiny, book a demo and see how Tractivity handles it, with your projects, your stakeholders and your reporting in mind.