Yes, Kahoot has a free tier, and it is genuinely free rather than a trial. The two things people discover later are that the free player limit is small — and that it depends on which kind of account you signed up for, because Kahoot sells school, work and home as different products with different free allowances.
If you are a teacher, the rest of this page is the detail. If you landed here because you need audience questions in a meeting rather than a game, Kahoot is probably the wrong shape and there is a free tool built for that: askone.org.
AskOne is made by The Product Compass. Slido belongs to Cisco, every other tool here belongs to someone else, and their free-tier figures come from each vendor's own pricing and help pages, read in September 2026.
Last updated: September 19, 2026. Kahoot's plans differ by country and by whether the account is for school, work or home, and they change often — check the live page before relying on a number.
What the Free Plan Covers
Making and playing kahoots. Creating quizzes, running them live, and the reports afterwards are all on the free tier. Kahoot does not gate the core loop.
A small player cap. This is the limit that actually bites, and it is the one that varies: free accounts run a limited number of players per live game, with the exact figure depending on the account type and your region. Check it on Kahoot's pricing page before you plan a session around it.
The public question bank. Millions of ready-made kahoots, which is genuinely the best reason to use Kahoot and is free.
No card, no clock. The free plan does not expire.
The shape of it: Kahoot gives away the game and meters the room. For a class of thirty that is a complete product and costs nothing. For a two-hundred-person all-hands it stops at the door, and the upgrade is priced per host per year.
Where the Free Plan Stops
The player cap, mid-game
The limit is on players in one live game, so it does not degrade gracefully — the room fills and the rest of the audience cannot join. If your worst-case audience is larger than your cap, the free plan is not a plan, and the worst case is the number that matters.
The paid tiers are per host, per year
Kahoot's paid plans are annual subscriptions per presenter or teacher, split into separate school, work and home families. Two colleagues who each run sessions are two subscriptions. That arithmetic, rather than the headline price, is usually what decides it for an organisation.
It is a quiz tool, and that is not a criticism
Kahoot is built around a scored game: points, a timer, a leaderboard, music. That design is why it works so well in a classroom and why it fits a town hall badly. If what you actually need is a ranked list of the questions your audience wants answered, no amount of Kahoot configuration produces one — it is a different product, and an excellent one at the thing it is for.
Which Tool the Question Behind This Usually Wants
People arrive at "is Kahoot free" from three different places, and they want three different answers:
Teaching a class. Stay on Kahoot, or look at Wooclap, which is built for lectures. The free question bank alone is worth the account.
Running a workshop with slides. Mentimeter puts interaction inside the deck — though its free plan meters people by the calendar month, which is covered on the Mentimeter free-plan page.
Running a meeting, a webinar or an all-hands. You want questions from the audience, ranked by the audience, with the option to approve them before they hit the screen. That is a Q&A tool, not a quiz tool, and the free one is below.
The Free Tool for the Meeting Case
askone.org is live Q&A for talks, webinars, all-hands meetings and cohort sessions. A host opens a room and gets a join code; the audience opens a link or scans a QR code, asks questions, and upvotes the ones they want answered. The room does the ranking, so the top question is the next question — and you finish the hour having answered the ones that mattered instead of reading a scrolling chat out loud.
The meter is per room, and nothing counts down. This is the part worth reading twice, because it is where the free tiers in this category differ most. Most of them meter a calendar month: the account gets a pool of participants, every session draws from it, and when the pool is empty the next audience is refused until the month turns over. AskOne has no such counter. The cap is per room — a room admits up to 100 people, and you can open a room every day of the month without any of them counting against the next one. There is no monthly total, nothing resets, and nothing runs out.
Live Q&A, ranked by the room. The audience asks and upvotes; the top question is the next question, so the hour goes on what people actually wanted answered.
Polls. Single or multiple choice, revealed when you choose.
Word clouds. One-word answers from the room, drawn live as people type — the opener that gets a quiet room talking before anyone has to raise a hand.
Rating scales. A numbered scale with your own labels at each end, and the average as it moves.
Quizzes. A question with a right answer, held back until you reveal it.
Written answers. Open text when a word is not enough and you want the sentence.
A projector view for the room. The ranked list, readable at the front of a hall.
Moderation, and the moderators who do it. Hold new questions for approval and change your mind mid-session. Moderators handle questions and surveys; they never open or close rooms.
No account for your audience. A link or a QR code on their phones. No app, no extension, no sign-up wall between someone and the question they wanted to ask.
The session does not end with the call. When the room closes the host gets the questions and the survey totals, and can export everything as CSV.
On the quiz question specifically: there is a quiz here, and it is deliberately not a Kahoot. A question with a right answer, revealed when you choose, sitting alongside the Q&A in the same room. No points, no timer, no leaderboard. If the leaderboard is the reason your session works, keep Kahoot.
Free is one open room and up to 100 participants — no credit card, no trial clock. Premium raises that to ten open rooms and 1,000 participants per room, at $20 a month or $10 a month billed annually. The features are identical on both.
What is not there yet: single sign-on, a Teams or Zoom app, and PowerPoint integration. If your organisation buys software through a security review, that last one is the gap to know about.
When Kahoot Is Still the Right Answer
You are teaching, and the competition is the engagement — the points and the leaderboard are doing real pedagogical work.
You want a ready-made quiz on a topic rather than writing one. The public bank is enormous.
Your school or company already has the licence and it costs you nothing personally.
If none of those is true and your session is really a room full of questions, the free plan you want is at askone.org.
Questions People Ask
Is Kahoot free for teachers?
There is a free tier for school accounts that covers creating and playing kahoots and the public question bank, with a cap on players per live game. The paid school plans are annual and per teacher. Because the numbers differ by country and change often, check Kahoot's pricing page rather than any third-party figure, including this one.
Why does Kahoot say I need to upgrade?
Almost always the player cap on a live game, or a feature that belongs to a paid family — the school, work and home plans gate different things, which is why two people on "the free plan" can hit different walls.
Is there a free Kahoot alternative for large groups?
For a quiz specifically, the tools in this category all cap the free tier somewhere; the comparison is on the alternatives page. For a large session that is questions rather than a game, askone.org admits 100 people per room free with no monthly total, and 1,000 on the paid tier.
Can I use Kahoot for an all-hands Q&A?
You can run a quiz in one, but Kahoot has no ranked audience question queue and no approval step before a question reaches the screen, which is the feature an all-hands actually turns on. askone.org includes both on the free tier.
How does this compare with Slido's free plan?
Slido is the closer product for meetings: unlimited Q&A free, but three polls per event and paid moderation. The breakdown is on the Slido free-plan page.
Start free at askone.org: one open room, 100 participants per room, every question type, no credit card and no monthly counter.