Decide anything quickly among your friends, family, or co-workers: set up a poll and gather opinions. It's simple with the right app.

Whether you're deciding with your friends what to eat or joining forces with some family to buy a single massive wedding gift, sometimes decisions need to be made in a group. Today Cool Websites and Apps is looking at five tools that make it easy for you to create polls that anyone can vote on, so that you can quickly find out what everyone thinks. With that information in hand, making a decision becomes a lot easier.

We've shown you how to make professional surveys more than once, but today we're going to focus on less-formal polls. This isn't about gauging broader public opinion: it's about quickly making a decision. Let's get started.

Upvoter (Web): Quick, Attractive Polls, No Accounts Necessary

Let's start with something simple. With Upvoter you can head to a site, create a poll, and publish it. You'll need an account to create the poll, but an account isn't needed to vote – so your friends won't have to fuss with that. Just click to vote.

You can allow people to vote multiple times, if you want, which can be a great way to find out what people really care about. CGP Grey explained how in this great video:

Basically, letting people vote for multiple things is a great way to find an option everyone can live with (as opposed to the thing that a plurality of people like best). Which system is most fair is going to depend on the situation, but keep this in mind.

updwn: Quickly Make a Poll; Embed It in Slack

This one's even simpler than Upvoter, because you don't even need an account to create the poll. Even better, participants can add their own options if they want to.

And if you're a Slack user, there's more good news: you can follow the instructions to integrate updwn with Slack, for quick polls among your team.

Slack is kind of like a cult at this point: either you love it unreservedly or you're not altogether sure what it is, and feel uneasy when people talk about it. But if you use the tool, you know that making Slack work with all sorts of services is part of what makes it great. I bet doing quick polls can help a lot with project managment on Slack.

Twitter Polls: Embed Polls Into a Tweet (Which You Can Embed Anywhere)

Twitter recently added a polling function, meaning you can create a poll just by writing a tweet. If you and your friends are active on Twitter, this can be a quick way to decide something.

But this goes beyond the social network, because tweets are easy to embed on web pages. Embeding a tweet is a quick way to add a poll to a blog post – readers can respond for 24 hours, after which they'll see the poll's results (as seen above).

Three Cents (iOS, free): Quickly Make a Poll On Your Phone

If you spend more time on your iPhone than on the web, you might want a native app to create quick polls with. Three Cents is great for this, because it lets you quickly create and share polls – and your friends don't need an iPhone or the app in order to respond.

There's some nice integration with Yelp for restaurants, and quick sharing links for SMS and social networks. Try it out.

Polls.io (Web): Clean, Simple Polls

Many of these tools are similar, but that's okay: it's always good to have more options. And if you want something that's clean, and requires no accounts, Poll.io is well worth a look.

Creating a poll couldn't be simpler, and you'll get a URL for sharing once you're done. Hopefully you'll think of a better thing to ask than I did.

How Do You Make Group Decisions?

Decisions can be a pain, but there are methods that work. If you want more control, of course, you could use Google Docs to make slick surveys, but if you're just trying to quickly decide something that can be overkill. The above tools are all about making polls quickly.

I want to know what you think.

What's the best way to quickly decide something with a large group? Which tools and methods do you prefer? Let's talk it out in the comments below.