Slido Alternatives for Live Q&A and Polling

TL;DR

• The best Slido alternatives for live Q&A are Mentimeter, Vevox and Poll Everywhere. Each runs in the phone browser, gathers audience questions and lets people upvote what to ask.
• Slido is now part of Cisco. If you want a tool that is not tied to the Webex world, that alone is a fair reason to compare options.
• For a big room, the thing that matters is not the feature list. It is moderation, upvoting, and whether the tool holds up with hundreds of people on it at once.
• Free plans have real limits. Slido caps polls and participants; Mentimeter meters participants by the month. Read the small print before an event.
• If you would rather not run any of it yourself, a host-run option like RoomReader comes built into booking a conference host, so the Q&A is handled from the front of the room.

If you have used Slido and started looking for something else, you are not alone, and there are good Slido alternatives worth comparing. This is an honest roundup aimed at the job most organisers actually care about: collecting live questions from an audience, letting the room upvote the best ones, and running a poll or two without anyone downloading an app.

This roundup names real tools, says where each one fits, and is clear about the trade-offs. No tool here is bad. The right one depends on your room, your budget, and how much you want to run yourself on the day.

Why do organisers look for Slido alternatives?

Organisers look for Slido alternatives for three plain reasons: ownership, price, and fit. Slido is a capable tool. It is also, since the acquisition completed in 2021, part of Cisco and increasingly woven into the Webex ecosystem. If your organisation does not live in that world, you may want something more neutral.

Price is the second reason. The free tier is generous for a small session but tightens fast at scale. Slido’s basic plan limits you to three polls and one quiz per event, and caps a free event at 100 participants. For a conference hall, that means paying up.

The third reason is fit. Some teams want deeper analytics, some want tighter PowerPoint integration, some want a tool built specifically for anonymous, moderated questions. No single product wins on all three.

What matters most in a live Q&A tool?

What matters most is moderation, upvoting, and reliability at scale, not the length of the feature list. A live Q&A tool has one core job: turn a silent room into a queue of good questions the host can actually work through.

Here is what to weigh before you compare brands:

• Moderation. Can you screen questions before they hit the screen? In a professional room, a moderation queue is not optional. It is how you keep the wall clean and on topic.
• Upvoting. The best question is often not the first one. Upvoting lets the room surface what most people want answered, so the host spends time on the right things.
• Anonymity. Honest questions come out when names are optional. The ability to toggle anonymity per session matters more than it looks.
• Capacity. A tool that feels smooth with 30 people can wobble with 600. Check the participant limit on your actual plan, not the marketing page.
• No download. If delegates have to install anything, half of them will not. Browser-based entry is the baseline.

Get those five right and the rest is polish.

The best Slido alternatives for live Q&A and polling

The strongest Slido alternatives for live Q&A and polling are Mentimeter, Vevox and Poll Everywhere. Each is a mature, browser-based tool that does audience questions and polling well, and each has a different centre of gravity.

Mentimeter

Mentimeter is the tool most people reach for when they want polls that look good on screen: word clouds, scales, ranking, and open text that build live as the room responds. Q&A is there too, though polling is where it shines.

Watch the free plan. Mentimeter meters by audience, not by questions, and the free tier engages up to 50 participants per month. For a one-off conference that is easily exceeded, so budget for a paid plan.

Vevox

Vevox leans hard into the Q&A use case, with strong anonymous Q&A, moderation controls and polling in one place. It is a sensible pick when the questions are the point and some of them are sensitive, because the anonymity and moderation options are built in rather than bolted on.

It also integrates with Teams, Zoom and PowerPoint, so it fits neatly into how most corporate events already run.

Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere earns its place by embedding cleanly into slides you already have. If your presenters live in PowerPoint or Keynote and want polls and questions inside the deck rather than in a separate window, it is a natural fit. The free tier suits small audiences, with paid plans for larger rooms.

Which tool suits a large conference audience?

For a large conference audience, prioritise a tool with strong moderation, reliable upvoting and a participant limit that comfortably clears your headcount. A hall of hundreds is a different problem from a workshop of twenty, and most tools are demonstrated on the small case.

Two practical checks before you commit:

1. Run the numbers on your plan. Confirm the paid tier you are buying actually supports your expected attendance with room to spare. Do not rely on the free-tier figure.
2. Test the moderation flow. With a big audience you will get duplicate, off-topic and occasionally awkward questions. You need a moderator screening them in real time, and a host who knows how to read the wall and pick well.

The tool is only half of it. A live question wall does nothing on its own. Someone has to work it into the session, decide which questions to take, and keep the pace up. That is a hosting skill, and it is where genuine audience engagement turns a feature into a moment the room remembers.

Where RoomReader fits as a host-run option

RoomReader is the host-run option: it is not a self-serve app you sign up for, it comes as part of booking a conference host. It is the proprietary live Q&A and audience response software used by Kevin Durham, and it is included with hosting rather than sold as a standalone product.

The honest distinction is this. Mentimeter, Vevox, Slido and Poll Everywhere are tools you license and run yourself. RoomReader is not on that list, because you do not operate it alone. It runs alongside a host who is already reading the room, so the questions, the polling and the pacing are handled from the front rather than left to a laptop at the side.

Like the others, it is browser-based with nothing to download, and it sits within a wider set of whole-room formats. If that host-run approach appeals, the conferencehost.uk conference software page sets out how it works in practice.

How do you pick the right Slido alternative?

You pick the right alternative by starting with the room, not the brand. Decide what the tool has to do on the day, then match a product to that job rather than the other way round.

A quick way to choose:

• Mostly polls and a lively talk? Mentimeter, with a paid plan sized to your audience.
• Serious, moderated, anonymous questions? Vevox.
• Everything living inside existing slides? Poll Everywhere.
• Want the questions run for you, not by you? A host-run option like RoomReader, booked with the host.

Whichever you choose, prove it before the event. Run a ten-minute rehearsal with a handful of phones, confirm the participant limit on your plan, and agree who is moderating. The failure mode is never the tool by itself. It is a good tool with no one steering it, in a room that was never warmed up to use it.

Pick for the job in front of you, test it early, and give someone the clear task of working the questions into the session. Do that and any of these tools will serve you well.