The short answer: the best Slido alternative depends on what you are actually trying to learn. For the most generous free tier, Vevox (100 concurrent participants, unlimited basic polling). For the biggest brand and slickest presenting, Mentimeter. For budget, AhaSlides. For teaching, Wooclap. But if your polls exist because you want to understand what people think — not just visualize it on a screen — Koji replaces the poll entirely with AI-moderated interviews that ask follow-up questions and analyze the answers for you. All 8 compared below, with caps and prices verified against vendor pricing pages in July 2026.
Slido, acquired by Cisco in December 2020, is the default live-polling layer for a lot of corporate all-hands and conference sessions. It is genuinely good at what it does. But its free tier is far tighter than most people realize, its pricing jumps hard exactly when you need it to scale, and — like every tool in this category — it is built to display answers, not to interpret them.
Why teams look for a Slido alternative
The free tier is three polls. Not three per session per month — three polls per slido, plus one quiz. Audience Q&A is included but without moderation, so you cannot screen questions before they hit the screen. Surveys, data exports, and analytics are all absent from the free plan entirely.
The 100-participant cap is cumulative, not concurrent. This is the detail that catches teams out. Slido counts participants by device, across the whole life of your slido — so 100 people joining, dropping off, and rejoining across a two-hour all-hands can exhaust the cap before your last poll runs. Most competitors (Vevox, Poll Everywhere, Kahoot) count concurrently. It is not an apples-to-apples number, and comparison tables that list "100" next to "100" are quietly misleading.
There is no monthly billing. Slido sells annual plans or one-time event passes only. The commonly quoted "€15/month" for Engage is an annual figure divided by twelve — the actual commitment is €180 up front. One-time event passes run €60 (200 participants), €240 (1,000), and €499 (5,000) for a window of up to seven days.
The scale jump is steep. Going from 200 to 1,000 participants means Engage (€180/yr) to Professional (€720/yr), a 4x increase that also forces a two-user minimum. Q&A moderation, custom branding, and organization-level analytics all sit behind that same Professional wall — so any organization that needs to screen questions at a town hall pays four times over. Enterprise (SSO, SCIM, HIPAA/BAA) starts at €1,800/yr with a three-user minimum. All prices are excluding VAT and are geo-localized, so check your own currency.
If you already pay for Webex, you may already own it. Cisco's own documentation states that paid Webex plans include a full Slido licence at no extra cost — usable standalone, not just inside Webex. Cisco has also said it intends to eventually replace Webex's native polling features with Slido. Worth checking your existing licences before you buy anything.
The limitation nobody puts on the pricing page
Every tool in this comparison — Slido included — has the same structural ceiling: a live poll cannot ask a follow-up question.
This is not a knock on the software. It is what the format is. And Slido's own documentation makes the cost visible. A word cloud displays only the top 50 responses, and Slido warns that with a large audience "some single responses may not display due to lack of space." Word clouds strip out connector words, and Slido advises participants to answer in one to three words. Open text polls cap at 5,000 responses.
So when 400 people tell you the new onboarding flow feels "confusing," you get a large word that says CONFUSING. You do not get why. Nobody asked. The one genuinely interesting outlier — the person who typed a sentence that explains the whole problem — is statistically the one most likely to be cropped out of the display.
The academic evidence lines up with this. A 2016 meta-analysis of audience response systems (Hunsu, Adesope & Bayly, Computers & Education, 111 effect sizes across 53 studies and 26,000+ participants) found a small but significant effect on cognitive outcomes and a substantially larger effect on non-cognitive ones — engagement, participation, attendance. A 2025 systematic review in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Serrada-Sotil et al.) was blunter: after screening 653 records, only 11 met inclusion criteria, and most studies prioritized motivation and engagement over actual conceptual learning and retention.
Read plainly: live polling reliably makes a room feel more engaged. It is much weaker evidence that anyone learned — or that you learned — anything durable. That gap matters when the meeting in question is an employee engagement survey readout or a customer feedback session.
And engagement itself is under pressure. Microsoft's Work Trend Index found 42% of people actively multitask in meetings in an average week — sending an email or a chat message — and noted this excludes passive multitasking, so the real number is higher. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace put global employee engagement at 20% in 2025, down from 21% the prior year, with disengagement costing an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity, about 9% of global GDP. A word cloud is not going to fix that. Understanding what people actually mean might.
The 8 best Slido alternatives in 2026
1. Koji — best when the poll is really a feedback exercise
Koji is not a live polling tool, and that is the point. Instead of putting a question on a screen and counting the answers, Koji runs an AI-moderated voice or text interview with each participant, asynchronously. The AI asks your questions, hears the answer, and — crucially — asks a follow-up. "You said the onboarding felt confusing. Which step lost you?"
Then it does the part that live polling leaves entirely to you: automatic thematic analysis across every response, with quotes attached to each theme, and a one-click report.
- AI-moderated interviews — every respondent gets probed, not just counted, with no moderator and no scheduling
- Six structured question types — open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking, and yes_no — so you keep clean quantitative data alongside the qualitative depth
- Customizable AI consultants — brief the AI on your product, your context, and what you need to learn
- No moderator bias — the AI asks every participant the same questions with the same neutrality, which is more than can be said for a manager reading questions off a slide to their own team
- Asynchronous — nobody has to be in the room at 4pm on a Thursday, which removes the participant cap problem entirely
Best for: employee feedback, customer research, post-event debriefs, concept testing, and any situation where "what do people think?" deserves more than three words. Trade-off: if you genuinely need a live word cloud on stage in front of 500 people, use Mentimeter or Vevox for that moment and use Koji for the follow-up that actually produces insight.
2. Vevox — the most generous free tier
Free: 100 participants, concurrent, with unlimited basic polling and Q&A. Paid: from €11.95/mo (Starter) to €24.95/mo (Pro), with enterprise tiers reaching 5,000 participants.
Vevox is the straightest swap for Slido and frequently the better-value one. The concurrent counting model alone makes its free tier meaningfully larger than Slido's, and it has a strong Microsoft Teams integration plus a real foothold in higher education and formal governance settings like AGMs.
3. Mentimeter — the biggest brand
Free: 50 participants per month, aggregated across all your presentations. Paid: Basic $11.99/mo, Pro $24.99/mo, annual billing only.
The most polished presentation experience in the category. But note the free-tier model carefully: 50 participants per month, not per session — for anyone presenting weekly, that is stricter than Slido's per-slido cap. Exports are paywalled. We compare it in full in our Mentimeter alternatives guide.
4. Poll Everywhere — the enterprise and higher-ed incumbent
Free: 40 responses per poll. Paid: Present $120/yr, Engage $588/yr, Teams $999/yr.
Deepest slide-deck embedding in the category and a strong education price list. Watch the pricing structure: Present to Engage is a 390% increase for zero additional audience capacity — both are capped at 700.
5. AhaSlides — the budget option
Free: 50 participants, with 5 quiz and 3 poll questions per presentation. Paid: from roughly $7.95/mo.
A capable near-clone of Mentimeter at a fraction of the price. Note that the Plus plan was discontinued for new users in September 2024, so older comparison articles list tiers that no longer exist.
6. Wooclap — best for teaching
Free: 5 questions per month — but with a 1,000-participant ceiling on every plan, including free. Paid: Business €12/mo, Pro €25/mo per presenter.
Wooclap gates on question volume rather than audience size, which is an unusual and genuinely useful model if you run occasional large sessions. Built pedagogy-first, with real Moodle and Canvas integrations.
7. Kahoot — best for gamified training
Free: 40 participants per session. Paid: education plans $36–228/yr; Kahoot 360 business plans $228–948/yr.
The game-show format drives energy better than anything else here. It is also the least suited to sincere feedback — leaderboards and timers actively distort what people say.
8. StreamAlive — best for chat-native sessions
Free: 5 participants per session. Paid: $20–150/mo, annual.
StreamAlive runs polls directly from the chat box of Zoom, Teams, or YouTube — no second screen, no join code. If your problem is participants failing to join a separate app, this solves exactly that.
A note on Glisser: it appears in most "Slido alternatives" listicles with a full pricing table. Glisser went into administration in February 2023 and its platform assets were acquired by Array. Do not evaluate it as a live product, and be cautious of any comparison article that still lists its prices — it is a reliable signal the piece has not been checked since 2022.
Free tier caps are not comparable — here is the actual comparison
The single most misleading thing in this category is a table listing free-tier participant numbers side by side. They are counted three different, incompatible ways:
| Tool | Free cap | How it is counted |
|---|---|---|
| Vevox | 100 | Concurrent, per session |
| Slido | 100 | Cumulative, by device, per slido |
| Mentimeter | 50 | Cumulative, per month, all presentations |
| AhaSlides | 50 | Per session |
| Poll Everywhere | 40 | Responses, not people |
| Kahoot | 40 | Concurrent, per session |
| Wooclap | 1,000 | Per session — gated on 5 questions/month instead |
| Crowdpurr | 20 | Concurrent, per session |
| Koji | — | Asynchronous; no live cap applies |
Poll Everywhere's is the sharpest trap: it counts responses. Twenty people answering two questions each will lock a 40-response poll.
How to choose
- You need a live word cloud on stage → Vevox (best free tier) or Mentimeter (best polish)
- You already pay for Webex → check your licence; you may already have full Slido
- You run occasional very large sessions → Wooclap, for the 1,000-participant ceiling on every tier
- You teach → Wooclap or Kahoot
- Your budget is near zero and sessions are frequent → Vevox or AhaSlides
- You actually need to know what people think → Koji
That last one is the honest fork in the road. If you are polling because a slide needs a visual, any tool on this list works. If you are polling because a decision depends on the answer, a three-word response ceiling is the wrong instrument — and you should be running open-ended questions with real probing instead.
Where live polls end and research begins
The useful mental model is the difference between a poll and a survey — and then the further gap between a survey and an interview.
A poll gives you a distribution. A survey gives you a distribution with more questions. An interview gives you the reasoning — and reasoning is what you need to make a decision, because "62% found it confusing" does not tell you what to change, while "the payment step asks for the billing address before the card and everyone assumed it was broken" does.
Koji is built for that third thing, at the scale of the first. You write a brief, share a link, and every participant gets an AI-moderated conversation that follows their answers wherever they go. Then the analysis happens automatically — themes, sentiment, supporting quotes, and a shareable report, in hours rather than the weeks that manual coding takes.
Try Koji instead of your next poll
Run your next all-hands feedback round, customer check-in, or post-event debrief as AI-moderated interviews instead of a word cloud. Same effort to set up. Vastly more to act on.
No research expertise required. From question to insight in hours, not weeks. 10x faster than manual analysis.
Start a free study with Koji →
Pricing and free-tier limits verified against vendor pricing pages in July 2026. Slido prices are shown in EUR excluding VAT as displayed on Slido's pricing page; Slido localizes currency by region, so confirm your own. Vendor pricing changes frequently — check before purchasing.
