Loomio is excellent at what it does. ARA's Council borrows from the same lineage, and wraps the rest of community life around it.
If you're an intentional community taking consent-based decision-making seriously, you've probably heard of Loomio. It's the most established indie SaaS in this space, endorsed by GEN Europe and Sociocracy For All, cooperatively owned, and good at what it sets out to do.
ARA's Council module borrows from the same lineage. The four vote options (Consent, Stand Aside, Abstain, Block), the reasoned-block-as-pause, the threaded discussion. The reason this comparison exists is that Loomio is governance-only by design, and your community is more than its governance.
What Loomio does well
The best dedicated tool for consensus-style decisions.
Threaded discussion designed around working through disagreement, not posting opinions. Decision archive that's actually usable months later.
Endorsed by GEN Europe and Sociocracy For All for a reason. The team has been refining this single problem for over a decade.
Cooperatively owned and principled. A community using Loomio is funding a kind of software it probably wants more of in the world.
Where it falls short
Governance-only. The rest of community life lives elsewhere.
No chore rotation. No tasks with owners. No way to track who's on dinner this week.
No shared resource booking. The community truck and the canning kit live in another tool, or in a spreadsheet, or in the WhatsApp group.
No contributions ledger. The hours, the dues, the materials brought, all of that needs its own home.
No versioned wiki of ratified agreements. Proposals stay in the proposal thread, which means the agreement and the deliberation are in the same place. Useful sometimes, awkward when you want a clean "this is what we agreed to."
What ARA does instead
Decisions tied to the chores, resources, and agreements they actually shape.
The Council does consent-based proposals. Same four vote options, same reasoned-block-as-pause.
What's different: every proposal can link to the Scrolls (agreements) it amends, the Gardens (projects) it starts, the Seeds (tasks) it triggers. Decisions don't live in a separate corner from the rest of community life.
The Council is decent. Loomio is more refined for pure governance work. The trade is breadth.
Side by side
Feature by feature
The honest take
Honest answer: if your community needs only governance, and Loomio is already working for you, stay with Loomio. The Council in ARA is good, but Loomio has spent ten more years polishing this specific surface.
Where ARA becomes the better fit is when governance is one of several things your community needs structure around. The chore rotation, the shed bookings, the contributions ledger, the wiki of ratified agreements, the gatherings calendar. ARA gives you one home for all of that, with a Council that's good enough for most communities. See how the Council works, or keep using both. We've talked to communities doing exactly that.
See ARA without committing.
Walk through Riverbend, a fictional ecovillage running on ARA. No signup, read-only.
Seedling is free forever for up to five members. No card.
Other comparisons
See all "ARA vs..." pages