iSideWith and Votely are political quizzes the way a phone and a calendar are time-keeping devices. They share a category and almost none of the actual job. iSideWith matches you to candidates and parties in live elections by aggregating your positions on specific policy questions. Votely places you on a 39-axis philosophical map and matches you to one of 81 ideological traditions. If you take both and feel like they are answering different questions, that is because they are.
What they have in common is the basic format (multi-choice questions producing a result page) and an explicit attempt to be more rigorous than the older 2D quizzes that dominated the 2010s. Beyond that, the two diverge sharply on what they think a political quiz is for. This page is for readers trying to figure out which understanding matches their own.
TL;DR
Pick iSideWith if you want to know which candidates and parties match your policy positions in a specific election, especially a US one. Pick Votely if you want to know which philosophical tradition you sit closest to, with an explanation of that tradition's history and arguments, independent of any particular election.
Side-by-side
| Feature | Votely | iSideWith |
|---|---|---|
| Axes | 39 (3 macro, 36 sub) | Not an axis-based model; policy-similarity scoring |
| Ideology buckets | 81 | Candidate and party matches, not ideology labels |
| Visualization | 3D cube | Bar charts of % match to candidates and parties |
| Sign-up required | No | Optional for core quiz, expected for full features |
| Free | Quiz yes, in-depth report $6 | Yes (ads supported) |
| Time investment | 2-10 min | 5 min (short) to 1 hour+ (full) |
| Open source | No | No |
| Election-dependent | No | Yes |
| Primary output | Named ideology + tradition writeup | Ranked candidate and party matches |
Where iSideWith is honestly better
The candidate matching is the real product, and the site does it carefully. iSideWith maintains positions for hundreds of candidates and parties across many democracies, updates them through election cycles, and scores your match against each one on the policy questions you answered. If you are trying to decide who to vote for in a US midterm, a UK general election, or a European parliament race, iSideWith is doing a job no other political quiz does at that scale. Votely cannot help you here. The 81 ideology labels are not pegged to current candidates by design.
The policy granularity is also impressive. The full quiz covers hundreds of specific positions across the major issue categories, and the results break down which issues drove your match to each candidate. For a voter who already knows their general politics and is trying to figure out which actually-existing politician is closest, that level of detail is what you want. The longevity also matters: iSideWith has been refining this format since 2012, and the site is the default citation in US election coverage for this kind of quiz.
Where Votely is better
Philosophical depth, not policy granularity. Votely answers the question "which tradition in political thought am I closest to," which is a question iSideWith does not try to answer. The 39 axes are designed to separate positions that look similar on policy but come from different intellectual traditions (a Christian democrat and a social democrat agree on a lot of policies but read different books). The 81 ideology buckets are large enough that the label you get usually names a real tradition with a literature, rather than a generic position on a small grid.
The result is also durable. An iSideWith result from 2020 is mostly useless in 2026 because the candidate field has turned over and several policy questions have aged out. A Votely result from 2026 will still mean the same thing in 2030 because the ideological traditions are stable on that time scale. The optional $6 in-depth report covers the history of your matched tradition, the strongest critiques of it, and a reading list. iSideWith's results page is not trying to do this and reasonably does not.
Who should pick which
Pick iSideWith if your question is electoral. You want to know which actual candidate or party in a specific election best matches the positions you hold right now, and you want the detail level to be high enough that the result is useful. The site is the best free tool for that job and has been for over a decade. If you take it before a US presidential primary, a UK general election, or a European race, you are going to get genuinely useful information that no philosophical quiz can give you.
Pick Votely if your question is philosophical. You want to know which tradition of political thought you sit closest to, you want a more granular position than the old 2D grids gave you, and you are interested in reading about the history and arguments of the tradition you matched. The optional in-depth report is for readers who want to take the next step into actually reading the tradition. The two quizzes coexist well: iSideWith for the next election, Votely for the longer self-understanding. If you can only run one, pick based on which question is louder in your head right now.