Citizen Engagement Platform

Mapsurvey is a citizen engagement platform for councils, cities and counties that asks residents the question every local decision comes down to: where? Residents pin the places, draw the routes and outline the areas their answer is about, then answer the questions attached to each one. The council gets a map and a table of every response, exportable to its GIS, instead of a mailbox of free text. Free for a real project, one flat price when you need more, open source and self-hostable when the data has to stay in your jurisdiction.

Start free Try a live demo
Free plan, not a trial No per-resident or per-seat fees Export everything, any time Open source, self-hostable

What it is

What a citizen engagement platform is, and what the map adds

A citizen engagement platform is the software a local government uses to involve residents in its decisions online: a consultation on a road scheme, a survey about a park, a call for ideas for the town centre, a participatory budget. Vendors also call it a citizen participation platform, citizen engagement software for local government, or a resident engagement platform; the job is the same. Residents are invited, they respond, and the council turns the responses into a report, a plan or a vote at committee.

Most platforms are built around pages and forms. A map-based citizen engagement platform starts from the question local decisions actually turn on: where. Which crossing is unsafe, which street floods, which route do people cycle, which corner of the park should stay as it is. On Mapsurvey residents answer by marking the place, and each mark carries the follow-up questions you attach to it. A comment that says 'the junction by the school is dangerous' has to be read, interpreted and geocoded by an officer before it can be counted. A pin on that junction is already a data point; five hundred of them are evidence for a capital bid.

That is also why the data comes out in a form a council can use. Every response exports with its geometry as GeoJSON, GeoPackage, Shapefile or KML for the GIS team, and as CSV or Excel for everyone else. The responses map inside the platform is the working view for the project officer: filter by question and answer, switch to a heat map, open any single response, clean out the test runs. A public results page shows residents that their input was counted.

Mapsurvey is open source under the AGPLv3 licence. The hosted service runs on servers in the United States today; a council whose policy requires the data to stay inside its own jurisdiction runs the same Docker stack on its own infrastructure, at no licence cost, and a choice of hosting region is on the Pro roadmap. Either way the data is yours: every response exports, every survey can be deleted, and nothing is locked behind a tier.

This page is written for the people who buy and procure the platform, and it answers the questions they ask: is there a free plan or only a trial, what does it cost a small jurisdiction, who owns the data, what happens when it goes down. The community engagement platform page describes the product itself, feature by feature, and the civic engagement page covers the methods: how to engage people on a map, from neighbourhood plans to safety audits.

How it works

From a council question to a map of answers in an afternoon

1 · BUILD

Write the questions, add the map

Pick a point, line or polygon question for the where, attach follow-up questions to each mark, and upload your own reference layer from the GIS, such as the proposed scheme or the existing network, so residents react to what you are actually planning.

Mapsurvey layer editor: ten Copenhagen cycling bridges with categories, photos and descriptions
2 · COLLECT

Share one link, no account needed

Residents open the link on a phone or a desktop, mark the map, answer the questions on each place and submit. Survey text can be offered in 75 languages, and a QR code on a poster, a bus shelter or a council-tax letter brings in the residents who never visit the website.

A respondent opens a bridge card with a photo, reactions from others and a thumbs up or down question
3 · ANALYZE

See every answer on one map

Filter by question and answer, switch to a heat map, open any single response, and clean out the test runs. The responses map is the project officer's working view, not a report that arrives from the vendor weeks later.

Mapsurvey Responses map: routes, unsafe spots and bridges across Copenhagen
4 · SHARE

Export to GIS, publish the results

Download GeoJSON, CSV, Excel, GeoPackage, Shapefile or KML for the GIS team and the committee report, and publish an aggregated results page so residents and councillors see what came back.

Public results page with the response count, a link to take the survey, and charts

Why councils choose it

Built for the budget and the procurement of a local government

Location-specific input

Residents respond exactly where the issue is: a junction, a route, a parcel. Points, lines and polygons, each with its own follow-up questions.

One price for every size

A parish council and a county pay the same: free, or one flat workspace price. No per-resident, per-seat or per-project metering, so the second survey costs nothing more than the first.

Your scheme on the map

Upload the proposal as a GeoJSON layer from any GIS. Residents comment on the features you drew, not on a blank basemap.

You own the data

Export everything, including the geometry, at any time. Delete a survey and its responses when the retention period ends. Self-host if your policy requires it. No lock-in.

Open source (AGPLv3)

Auditable code, no black box between the council and its residents' input, and a procurement route that needs no tender for the software itself.

Self-serve, with a person behind it

Build and publish a survey in an afternoon without an implementation project. When you need help, you write to the developer who builds the product, not to a ticket queue.

Compared

Mapsurvey vs Go Vocal and Citizen Space

The two platforms a local-government buyer searching for a citizen engagement platform is most likely to be quoted: the suite that named the category, and the default consultation platform of UK local government. Both are capable; the differences are the price model, the licence and how much of a platform you need.

 MapsurveyGo Vocal (ex-CitizenLab)Citizen Space (Delib)
Free tier for real projectsYes, hosted, unlimited surveys and responsesFree Edition to run yourself; hosted plans by quoteNo; demo on request
Pricing modelPublished: free, or one flat workspace priceQuote only; per-licence, per-year rates listed on UK G-CloudQuote only; per-instance, per-year licence listed on UK G-Cloud
Open source / self-hostingYes, AGPLv3, Docker on your serversFree Edition under AGPLv3; commercial edition SaaS onlyNo, SaaS only
What a respondent can drawPoints, lines and polygons, each with follow-up questionsPins, lines and polygonsPins, lines and polygons (Geospatial add-on)
GIS export of responsesGeoJSON, GeoPackage, Shapefile, KML, plus CSV and ExcelCSV, XLSX, PDF; a unified format described as importable in GIS toolsGeoJSON and Shapefile
Respondent accountNone neededNot published; identity federation offeredOptional, configurable per consultation
Languages75, included27, plus auto-translation on higher plansNot published
Hosting regionUnited States (hosted), or self-host anywhereRegional hosting offered; German data residency on the German siteUnited Kingdom
ScopeMap-based surveys, shared maps, results pagesFull participation suite: ideation, voting, participatory budgeting, surveys, mapsStatutory consultation suite: documents, surveys, maps, results publishing
Accessibility statementNo formal conformance audit yetWCAG 2.2 AA, ISO 27001WCAG 2.2, ISO 27001, text alternative for every map question

Competitor details reflect the vendors' published pages, documentation and UK G-Cloud listings as of October 2026 (Citizen Space read in July 2026); verify current specifics with the vendor. 'Not published' means the public material does not say. We publish no other vendor's price: their listings are the vendors' to quote.

When Go Vocal or Citizen Space may fit better

  • You are procuring a standing participation portal for the whole council, with project pages, ideation, voting and a participatory budget under one login, and you have the officers to run it.
  • Your procurement requires a vendor with a formal WCAG conformance report, an ISO 27001 certificate or a UK-hosted statutory consultation record today.
  • You already run one. Mapsurvey can still carry the map question of a single project and hand the layer back to your GIS.

Comparing platforms for a council? Talk to the person who builds this one

Mapsurvey is independent and founder-led. Email the developer with a procurement, self-hosting, data-processing or 'does it do X?' question and you will get an answer from the person who can change the product, often with a draft survey you can open the same day.

Email the developer

Procurement

The questions a council asks before it buys

These are the questions local-government buyers actually search for when they compare citizen engagement platforms. The answers are the ones we give in writing, and they apply to the Free plan unless a line says Pro.

Free plan, not a trial

Most platforms offer governments a demo or a scoped trial through a sales team. Mapsurvey's Free plan is the whole product with no time limit and no cap on surveys, respondents or team members. A council can run its first consultation, read the results and export them without having spoken to anyone.

One price for every jurisdiction

A town of two thousand and a county of two million pay the same: free, or the flat Pro workspace price below. There is no per-resident, per-seat or per-project metering, so the price does not change when a second department starts using it. Grants and council budgets that need an invoice rather than a card get one.

Data ownership and export

The council owns the data. Every response, including the geometry, exports at any time as GeoJSON, CSV, Excel, GeoPackage, Shapefile or KML. Surveys and their responses are deleted by their owner when the retention period ends. Individual free-text answers are never published on a public results page.

Uptime and support

The hosted service has no contractual SLA today, and we would rather say so than quote a number we do not sell. Deploys are zero-downtime, the stack is monitored, and an incident is handled by the developer who runs it. A council that needs an uptime guarantee self-hosts the same Docker stack under its own IT policy. Pro includes direct support from the developer; Free is supported by email and the public issue tracker.

Hosting and residency

The hosted service runs in the United States today, on Render's Oregon region. Councils whose rules require the data to stay in their own jurisdiction self-host at no licence cost; the deployment is one Docker Compose file and a PostGIS database. A choice of hosting region for the hosted service is on the Pro roadmap.

Accessibility

No formal WCAG conformance audit has been done yet; we say so rather than claim a level. The respondent page is plain HTML that works on any phone, question text can be offered in 75 languages, and a non-map text alternative for map questions is not offered today. If your procurement requires a conformance statement, ask: it is on the list, and a council asking is what moves it up.

What councils run on it

Citizen engagement projects that start with a where

Issue reporting, community mapping and consultation all come down to the same question. These are the projects councils and cities run on Mapsurvey most often:

Create your first survey — free See the local-government page

Pricing

Free to run a real project. One flat price when you need more.

Free
$0
forever, hosted or self-hosted

Not a trial and not a sandbox: the whole collection and analysis product, with no cap on surveys, respondents or team members.

  • Every question type, including point, line and polygon on the map
  • Follow-up questions attached to each place a respondent marks
  • Unlimited surveys, responses and team members
  • Survey text in 75 languages
  • Export as GeoJSON, CSV, Excel, GeoPackage, Shapefile or KML
  • Responses map, filters, heat maps and charts
  • Self-host the open-source code (AGPLv3) on your own servers
Create a free account
Proearly access
$49
a month, or $490 a year, per workspace

One workspace, any number of users, surveys and responses. No per-project, per-seat or per-response metering, so a consultancy can run every engagement of the year on one line item.

  • Everything in Free
  • Public results pages for residents and councillors
  • Direct support from the developer who builds the product
  • Read-only access for clients and committees, custom domain and branding, and a choice of hosting region, as they ship
See what Pro includes

Pro is in early access: the workspace price is fixed, the feature list is being finished with the first customers, and existing accounts keep what they have. If a grant or a council budget needs an invoice rather than a card, write to us.

Related

The same map, by the job you have

Community engagement platformThe product page: features, hosting, data ownership, price. Public consultation softwareStatutory and planning consultations answered on the map. Civic engagementMethods that work on a map, from neighbourhood plans to safety audits. Participatory budgetingWhere residents want the money spent, pinned to the map. For local governmentCouncils, cities and agencies running engagement in-house.

From the field

Citizen engagement projects built with Mapsurvey

Whitehouse residents pin where the dog bins should go Case study Lessons learned

Milton Keynes, England · Parish council

Whitehouse residents pin where the dog bins should go

Whitehouse, a new estate on the western edge of Milton Keynes, has outgrown its dog bins. The community council asked residents to drop a pin where a bin was missing. 39 did so in nine days, and the council's next paper recommended six new bins.

39 residents37 locationsAnswered on phones6 new bins
Whitehouse Community Council Read the story →
Olney's white squirrel count, from paper maps to mobile devices Case study

Olney, Illinois · Municipality

Olney's white squirrel count, from paper maps to mobile devices

Olney, Illinois, calls itself the Home of the White Squirrels. The City has counted them every year since 1977. This year the count moved online and expanded.

Since 197735 count areas~100 volunteersYear-round reporting
City of Olney, Illinois Read the story →

All stories on this topic →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What is a citizen engagement platform?
Software a local government uses to involve residents in its decisions online: consultations, surveys, idea collection and, in a map-based platform like Mapsurvey, places. Vendors also call it a citizen participation platform or citizen engagement software for local government. Residents open a link, mark the locations their answer is about and answer the questions attached to each one; the council gets a map and a table of every response, exportable to its GIS.
Which citizen engagement platforms offer a free trial or a free plan for governments?
Mapsurvey offers a free plan rather than a trial: unlimited surveys, respondents and team members at $0, hosted or self-hosted, with every question type and every export format. Most established vendors offer a demo or a scoped trial through their sales team; Go Vocal also publishes a free self-hosted edition of its software.
What does a citizen engagement platform cost for a small jurisdiction?
On Mapsurvey the price is the same for a parish council and a county: free, or Pro at $49 a month or $490 a year per workspace with any number of users, surveys and responses. There is no per-resident, per-seat or per-project metering. The established platforms license per instance and per year, by quote; a small jurisdiction pays for the same instance as a large one.
Who owns the data we collect, and can we export it?
You do. Every response, including the map geometry, exports at any time as GeoJSON, CSV, Excel, GeoPackage, Shapefile or KML, so it goes straight into QGIS, ArcGIS or a spreadsheet. A survey and its responses can be deleted by its owner. Self-hosting the open-source code puts the database itself on your servers.
What are the uptime and support arrangements?
The hosted service has no contractual SLA today. Deploys are zero-downtime, the stack is monitored, and incidents are fixed by the developer who runs it. A council that needs an uptime guarantee can self-host the same Docker stack under its own IT policy. Pro includes direct support from the developer; Free is supported by email and the public issue tracker.
Do residents need an account to take part?
No. Respondents open a public link and answer on the map — no sign-up or login required. Only survey creators need an account.
Where is the data hosted, and does it meet our residency rules?
The hosted service runs in the United States today (Render, Oregon). Councils that need the data to stay in their own jurisdiction self-host the Docker stack at no licence cost; a choice of hosting region is on the Pro roadmap. Either way the data is yours to export and delete.