TL;DR
Polly is a great Slack app — for polls, surveys, and pulse feedback. If your team installed Polly hoping it would also handle birthdays, anniversaries, and recognition shoutouts, you've probably already noticed it's not really built for that. The recurring-poll workaround works for a quarter, then quietly dies.
Cake Day is the dedicated tool for the celebration job: AI-generated birthday and work-anniversary posts that show up automatically in your configured channel, in each teammate's timezone, without anyone running a script or scheduling a recurring poll.
If you actually need polling, keep Polly. They're complementary, not competing.
Quick comparison table
| Feature | Cake Day | Polly |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Birthday + anniversary celebrations | Polls, surveys, pulse feedback |
| AI-personalized celebration messages | Yes — fresh per teammate | No (not the product's purpose) |
| Recurring date-based posts | Yes — automatic, per-teammate | Only via recurring polls (clunky) |
| Per-workspace timezone scheduling | Yes | Yes (for poll scheduling) |
| Year-of-birth storage | No — month and day only | N/A |
| Free tier | 30 celebrations/year, permanent | Limited free plan; paid plans gate most features |
| Pricing model | Flat-rate by celebrations/year | Per author / per workspace seat tiers (check their site for current pricing) |
| Setup time | ~2 minutes | Varies — minutes for a single poll, longer for an org-wide rollout |
Pricing and feature claims about Polly are based on publicly available information at the time of writing. Check polly.ai for current details before deciding.
Where Cake Day wins
1. It's built for the job
Polly is genuinely excellent at structured feedback — pulse surveys, retro polls, meeting check-ins, eNPS. None of that is what teams need when they say "we keep forgetting Sara's birthday."
The "use Polly for birthdays" workaround usually looks like this: someone creates a recurring poll that pings the channel on the right date. It works once. Then someone leaves, the poll stays, the dates drift, and three months later the channel is full of stale "celebrate X today!" prompts that don't match anyone's actual birthday.
Cake Day handles celebrations the way Polly handles polls — that is, as the actual product, not a workaround.
2. Messages that aren't templates
Every Cake Day shoutout is generated fresh by an LLM (we route through OpenRouter so we get the best model for the prompt). It uses the teammate's first name and the occasion, and on the Pro plan you can feed in your team's tone and voice.
Polls and recurring prompts are inherently templated — same structure, same wording, same blocks. That's the right design for a poll. It's the wrong design for "we want this teammate to feel seen on their 5-year anniversary."
3. Privacy by design
Cake Day stores month and day only. The database schema has no column for year of birth — we don't collect what we can't defend (year of birth enables age inference under ADEA / GDPR).
If you've been collecting birthday data via a Polly poll, that data lives wherever Polly stores poll responses. Worth checking with their team if your privacy/legal folks ask.
4. Permanent free tier, flat-rate paid tiers
Cake Day's free plan covers 30 celebrations/year — enough for a ~30-person team forever. Paid tiers ($19, $49, $99/mo) are flat-rate by celebrations per year, not per seat. Roster size never costs more.
Polly's pricing is structured around author seats and workspace size. Reasonable for what they do — but it means a 200-person workspace pays meaningfully more than a 30-person one, regardless of how many polls (or birthday workarounds) actually run.
Where Polly wins
1. It does what it's actually for
If your job is "run weekly pulse surveys, gather meeting feedback, take quick polls, run retros, or measure eNPS," Polly is one of the best Slack apps in the category. Cake Day does none of that and we don't plan to. We're a single-purpose celebration tool. If you need polling, you need Polly (or a similar tool).
2. Survey depth
Polly has real survey depth — anonymous responses, branching logic, scheduled cadences, reporting dashboards, integration with HRIS for pulse programs. None of that exists in Cake Day because none of it is relevant to date-based celebrations.
3. Multi-platform
Polly supports both Slack and Microsoft Teams. Cake Day is Slack-only and we don't plan a Teams version — we'd rather do one platform perfectly than two of them adequately.
When to pick which
Choose Cake Day if:
- Your real gap is "we keep missing teammates' birthdays and anniversaries."
- You want celebration messages that don't feel like a templated poll.
- You want a free tier that's actually free, not a trial.
- You don't want to build, maintain, and supervise a recurring-poll workaround forever.
Choose Polly if:
- You need pulse surveys, eNPS, retros, or meeting feedback.
- You're already running a structured feedback program and need a tool to power it.
- You're on Microsoft Teams and need a tool that works there.
Run both if:
- You need polling AND celebrations. Most teams that have Polly should also install Cake Day for the celebration job; the two don't overlap.
Pricing snapshot (2026-05-07)
Cake Day pricing:
- Free — 30 celebrations/year, 1 channel, 2 admins, permanent
- Starter — $19/mo or $190/yr — 150 celebrations/year, 3 admins
- Growth — $49/mo or $490/yr — 500 celebrations/year, custom GIFs
- Pro — $99/mo or $990/yr — unlimited celebrations, custom AI prompts, custom branding
Polly pricing varies by plan, author count, and workspace tier. Check polly.ai for current rates.
How to add Cake Day alongside Polly
You don't have to uninstall Polly — they don't conflict. Most teams add Cake Day in parallel:
- Install Cake Day at cakeday.io (~2 minutes via Slack OAuth).
- Pick a celebration channel — usually the same channel you'd post recognition in (e.g. #celebrations, #team).
- Invite teammates to add their dates with
/cakeday me(or upload a CSV on Starter and up). - Test the output with
/cakeday test @yourselfbefore the first real post. - Retire any Polly recurring polls that were trying to handle birthdays — Cake Day will pick that up automatically.
Total time for a 100-person team: under 30 minutes.
See also
- Birthday Bot alternatives
- HeyTaco alternatives
- Cake Day pricing
- The complete guide to employee recognition in Slack
Add Cake Day to Slack — it's free
If your team has been stretching Polly into a celebration tool, the switch takes about two minutes and the free tier covers 30 celebrations a year forever. Add to Slack and run /cakeday test @yourself on the way home.