If you want to run a live poll, you'll want to know the best tools out there. With years of experience in the industry, we can tell you which tools are good, and then help you narrow down your choice based exactly on what you need to do.
So whether you're having a meeting and want whole-team feedback, running a conference with a live speaker, giving a lecture, or just want to keep your audience engaged, the perfect polling platform for you is out there. We've got the rundown, below.
We have a video review, or get straight to the written list below. We dig in to the details and functionalities of each pick, their pros and cons — basically why we think they're a good choice, and for whom. There's quick gifs for each tool of how their live polls work, as well.
Slides With Friends is a great all-around interactive presentation solution, and is one of the frontrunners in our list of audience polling tools. It comes with pretty much everything you'd need to create polls, collect feedback, and display live results instantly.
Players join on their mobile device with a QR code scan or custom URL (so, no downloads wasting valuable time), and easily send in answers, emoji, sounds, and more, during your event or meetings real time.
This tool works wherever you can share your screen, so you can use it on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, or in a conference room. With multiple different kinds of question types including multiple choice polls, open text, charts, graphs, rating, and more, it's pretty full-featured for all your interactive presentations where you need to collect instant feedback.
It's especially built for your audience's engagement while you run live polls. So, with this tool you can do everything from get quick answers during your online meetings, to run an online poll,
You can make your own polls types from scratch or there are templates you can start from. For example here's a "Poll the Audience" Template where you can edit the questions on each slide to ask your group exactly what you want.
If you want to do more in-depth analysis to make better decisions for later events, you would need to get the upgraded plan. And if you want to remove access to event recaps from your audiences, you would also need an upgraded account.
Slido is one of the more basic slideshow presentation platforms with polling for your audience. It allows for a good Q&A and online poll, but isn't designed for much else. This platform offers a very basic free option, as well as three other annually billed subscription levels to meet the needs of small to medium-large companies or non-profits.
Slido is particularly helpful for larger organizations with frequent training and team building due to unparalleled comprehensive analytics tools. You can review Q&As, which participants led the group in responding, see all of your poll results at a glance, and easily create infographics from multiple choice questions.
Slido can be a dry and survey-only forward tool. If you want to wow your audience, or seem like you put a ton of work (when you really didn’t) into an interactive presentation, this tool is a little lacking.
Poll Everywhere is an interactive application that can be implemented almost anywhere, anytime. For instance this is the only platform here that integrates with Slack on this list.
This service is designed to scale up as you grow your audience. It offers the most subscription options starting at low fees for small meetings and reaching up to a $12,000 per year Enterprise plan. The Teams and Enterprise options are on the expensive side, although they are feature rich.
The free version gives you more features than others listed, starting with a 25-attendee roster (compared to 7 to 10 participants with other apps). It also lets you add polls and unlimited real time questions.
If you have a single meeting or seminar, a cheaper one-time live polling and presentation plan rich with more poll features is available.
None of the free live polling tools include analytics or moderation capabilities, but Poll Everywhere's lower-level paid version doesn't offer them either. You must pay for the more expensive “Engage” option for these features, regardless of the size of your business and the frequency of your events.
Aha Slides is one of the most affordable live polling services, and they offer a lot of perks that aren’t available with more expensive options.
The free version is the most limiting of the services listed here, but the features of the Essential and Plus plans are affordable options for freelancers and solo entrepreneurs running a small meeting. You can pay one-time, or you can subscribe for holding regular online or in-person events.
Even large companies can take advantage of this affordability when detailed analytics and sharing is not necessary, with the upper level service accepting up to 10,000 attendees.
In addition to live polls and brainstorming word clouds, Aha also offers sliding scales, idea sharing, multiple choice, and even a spinner wheel for a variety of attendee participation that encompasses all types of learners.
Aha Slides is one of the easier live polling platform to learn and use to create, but that simplicity means that you don’t have a lot of the same advanced features offered by other polling tools listed here.
Mentimeter is super-featured and filled with lots of options. This makes it powerful, but also kind of tough to figure out / get an immediate understanding of. It's also a bit pricier than others given all of its integrations and features.
Mentimeter has a tool that allows for multiple translations within the same live presentation. This means that you can reach anyone in the world and still get the same audience participation that you receive in your hometown.
While you can export data from your surveys, Q&As, and live polls, Mentimeter differs from other services in that you can export raw info, but the platform doesn’t generate reports for you. This makes the analytics information less helpful.
Vevox is a integration-powerful tool that lets you run, among other things, interactive polls to a live audience.
Vevox is one of the more expensive tools that includes live polling and other interactive features to keep your participants engaged. Unlike the other tools here, you can gather all types of anonymous feedback and surveys to help you improve future presentations.
Vevox is unique in that it doesn’t have different service levels. Although a free option is available to get you started, the paid version is the same for everyone. An individual plan is $50 per month, with the Enterprise plan giving you a $5 discount per user.
Vevox offers one of the best free versions, although it is only available for use with PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams. it allows an astounding 500 participants, and the only features excluded in the free subscription are analytics and reporting.
While you can use Vevox’s polling applications in other environments, it was really designed for use with Microsoft products, including Windows, PowerPoint, and Ms Teams. Those integrations are seamless, but using the service with other platforms may be more complicated.
This video has reviews plus footage/screengrab video of each tool. It's a 15 minute watch and walks you through the "how it works" of the polling platforms, plus what's good / not so good, about each.
Experts agree that active participation increases the enjoyment of your audience and retention of your information. They also agree that live poll tools are a great way to do this.
"Incorporating the right type of online real-time polling ... has overriding benefits."
Journal of Research in Innovative Teaching & Learning, "Real-time polling to help corral university-learners' wandering minds"
Regardless of what platform you choose, there is no doubt that live polling is a useful tool to keep an audience engaged.
Our choice for the best live polling tool is Slides With Friends. It's got great live polling options and is easy to get started with and use.
Some things you can do using SlidesWith:
