Mentimeter earned its popularity. Live polls, word clouds, and quizzes turned passive audiences into participants, and for a lot of teams it became the default way to make a meeting interactive. But it's far from the only tool, and the right choice depends on what you're running — an all-hands, a workshop, a training session, or a team-building break each call for something slightly different. Here are the alternatives worth knowing in 2026 and where each one shines.
Slido
Slido is the most direct Mentimeter competitor and the one most enterprises land on. Its strength is audience Q&A with upvoting — ideal for an all-hands where you want the best questions to rise to the top rather than getting lost in a chat feed. Live polls and quizzes round it out, and it integrates tightly with the major video and slide platforms, so presenters rarely have to leave their deck.
Kahoot
Kahoot is the loud, gamified option. Its fast-paced quiz format with music and a leaderboard works brilliantly for training, onboarding, and energising a group, which is exactly why it crossed over from classrooms into corporate use. It's less suited to serious sentiment-gathering and more suited to fun, competitive recall — use it when you want a buzz, not nuance.
Poll Everywhere
Poll Everywhere has been in the live-polling space a long time and leans toward the professional end. It embeds cleanly into PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Keynote, and handles large audiences reliably — a sensible pick for presenters who live inside their slide deck and want polling built into it rather than bolted on.
AhaSlides
AhaSlides is the value-focused alternative, offering a familiar mix of polls, quizzes, word clouds, and spinner wheels, often at a friendlier price point for small teams and educators. If Mentimeter's pricing is the thing pushing you to look around, this is a common destination, and the learning curve is gentle.
Vevox
Vevox specialises in polling and Q&A with a strong focus on data and anonymity, which makes it a favourite for governance-heavy settings — board meetings, academic lectures, and anywhere reliable anonymous voting matters more than flashy visuals. If the integrity of the vote is the point, it's a safe bet.
When a Poll Isn't Enough: Try a Shared Game
Polls and word clouds gather opinions, but they don't always create the spark you're after — especially in a remote meeting where energy fades fast and cameras quietly switch off. Sometimes what a room needs isn't another question on screen; it's a shared challenge everyone can rally around for five minutes.
This is where a quick geography game earns its place in the toolkit. Running a few rounds of EarthGuessr on a shared screen drops the whole group onto the same satellite-imagery location and asks everyone to figure out where on Earth they are. It's collaborative, it's genuinely surprising, and it doesn't require anyone to install anything or create an account — exactly the kind of low-friction, high-energy break that resets a long meeting. It pairs naturally with any of the polling tools above: use Slido for the serious questions, then drop into a geography round to wake the room back up before the next agenda item.
How to Choose
- For all-hands Q&A with upvoting: Slido.
- For high-energy, gamified training: Kahoot.
- For polling baked into your slide deck: Poll Everywhere.
- For budget-conscious teams who still want the full feature set: AhaSlides.
- For anonymous, data-serious voting: Vevox.
- For an energy reset that's a team-building moment in itself: a few rounds of a shared geography game like EarthGuessr.
Why Bother Making Meetings Interactive?
It's a fair question — interactivity for its own sake just wastes time. The reason it works is attention. People remember and contribute far more when they're doing something rather than passively listening, and the simple act of casting a vote or making a guess pulls a distracted, camera-off audience back into the room. Interaction also surfaces what a presenter can't otherwise see: the questions people are too shy to unmute for, the opinions hiding behind polite silence. The goal isn't novelty; it's honest input and a room that's genuinely present.
The best interactive meetings rarely rely on a single tool. Gather input with a poll, surface questions with Q&A, and when attention starts to drift, switch to something that gets people talking to each other. If you want to try the geography-break approach at your next meeting, open EarthGuessr, share your screen, and run a round — it takes under a minute to start, and it tends to be the part of the meeting people actually remember.