I had intended to do a complete comparison between the two poll plugins on WP-Extend but only one of them worked as intended, WP-Polls, which pretty much makes the comparison a non-starter. This then is just a review of WP-Polls

All the reviews I do are based on a few simple concepts. I believe things should be immediately obvious. If I can’t get a poll, for example, up and running in 5-10 minutes without heading to the website then that to me would be a fail. WP-Polls answered that test very well.

The plugin creates a new top-level menu option that adds everything you need. Not only the options to manage and add polls, but also a usage page that explains how it all works. There really isn’t anything else you need.

Adding a poll is very simple, as you would expect, but the impressive part of this plugin are the customisation options.

In the poll options there is a choice between a flat bar, a gradient bar, and a CSS coloured bar, with a height choice. You can also choose a the order the answers are shown in: random, exact, or alphabetical, and the order the results are shown in:ascending or descending.

It is also possible to amend the poll template. There are around 20 different poll-template tags that can be used to change how poll header, body, footer, results, error messages, disabled poll messages and archive pages appear. Although I didn’t choose to amend any of these the potential is there to do pretty much whatever you want to do.

One thing I particularly liked was the different ways a poll could be added. It has a widget, you can also include it in a post, or as part of a theme file by using the PHP commands. There is also an archive page where all the polls can be displayed.

I previously reviewed Poll Daddy. While Poll Daddy appears slicker than WP-Polls, i.e. the results are presented in a much more graphically rich way, I feel the differences are only superficial. The key different is that one is part of your WordPress install and the other isn’t and that honestly makes all the difference.