Yes, Mentimeter has a permanently free plan. The number that catches people out is not the price — it is that the free plan meters 50 participants per month, not per presentation, and the counter resets on the day of the month you signed up. Run three workshops in a week and the third one can be the one that stops admitting people.
If you would rather not count at all, askone.org meters per room: 100 people in every room, and no monthly total.
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. Every Mentimeter figure here is quoted from Mentimeter's own pricing page on that date; free plans in this category move quietly.
What the Free Plan Includes
Mentimeter's free tier is a real product, not a trial, and for a one-off workshop it is often enough. As of September 2026, quoting Mentimeter's own pricing page:
50 participants per month. Mentimeter's own wording: "the number of people who can respond to your Mentis each month". It is an account-level pool, not a per-presentation cap.
One unlimited session a month. The plan grants "unlimited participants once per month", so a single big session per month escapes the pool. Choosing which one is your problem.
All 23 slide types, with limits. Word clouds, scales, open-ended questions and quizzes are all available on Free; what the paid tiers remove is the cap on how much you use them. This is the part Mentimeter is generous about, and it is worth saying plainly — the question types are not the reason to leave. The monthly participant count is.
No card, no clock. Free does not expire and does not ask for payment details.
The shape of it: Mentimeter gives away the features and meters the people. That is the opposite of how Slido does it, and it is why the two free plans fail in completely different places. Slido will run a 100-person Q&A all year and stop you at the fourth poll; Mentimeter will give you every slide type and stop you at the fifty-first person that month.
The Number That Catches People Out
The 51st person, on the 12th of the month
The pool is 50 people across everything you run. Two 30-person workshops in the same month do not both fit. Because the limit is monthly rather than per session, you cannot see it coming by looking at the room in front of you — you have to remember what you already spent, which is precisely the kind of thing nobody remembers while setting up a session.
The reset is not the first of the month
Mentimeter resets "every month on the day of the month you signed up". If you registered on the 22nd, your month runs the 22nd to the 22nd. Teams who assume a calendar month discover this in the worst possible way, which is mid-session.
Q&A moderation is two tiers up
Holding an audience question until someone approves it sits on Pro, at $24.99 per presenter per month billed yearly — above Basic, which is the tier most people upgrade to when they hit the participant cap. If your reason for wanting a tool is an all-hands where anonymous questions appear on a screen behind an executive, that is the line item to check first, and on Mentimeter it is the expensive one.
What Mentimeter Charges When You Outgrow It
Three paid tiers, all priced per presenter, all quoted billed yearly:
Basic, $11.99 per presenter per month. Removes the 50-a-month cap and the slide-type limits, adds PowerPoint, Keynote and Google Slides import, and export to image, PDF and Excel.
Pro, $24.99 per presenter per month. Adds Q&A moderation, custom branding, workspace collaboration, participant name tracking and the Mentimote remote.
Enterprise, quoted. SSO and SCIM, LMS integrations for Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle and D2L, and custom data retention.
Per presenter is the number that decides this. One person running a workshop a month is an $11.99 decision. A company where forty people each run two sessions a year is a very different one, and it is the case where a per-presenter price stops looking like software and starts looking like headcount.
What To Do When You Hit the Monthly Wall
Spend the unlimited session deliberately. You get one a month. If you know which session is the big one, hold it for that — and accept that you are now scheduling around a billing rule.
Pay for Basic. If one person runs everything and the sessions are presentations rather than question-and-answer, $11.99 is a fair price for what it removes.
Use a tool that does not count by the month. Which is the next section. The wider comparison, including the tools built for classrooms and quizzes, is on the alternatives page.
The Free Tier That Counts Per Room Instead
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 on their phones, asks questions, and upvotes the ones they want answered. The room does the ranking, so the top question is the next question.
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.
Everything above is on the free tier. Including the one Mentimeter puts behind its $24.99 Pro plan: holding a question for approval before the room sees it. Only capacity is paid here, never a question type and never the approval step.
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 Mentimeter Is Still the Right Answer
Your session is a presentation with interaction inside the slides, rather than a room full of questions. That is what Mentimeter is built for, and it is good at it.
You want word clouds, scales and quiz slides in one deck, and you run few enough sessions that 50 people a month is not a constraint.
You are teaching, and the LMS integrations on Enterprise are the reason you are shopping at all.
If your session is questions rather than slides, and you would rather not schedule around a monthly counter, the free plan you want is at askone.org.
Questions People Ask
Is Mentimeter free forever, or is it a trial?
Free is a permanent plan, not a trial. What expires is not the plan but the monthly allowance: 50 participants, reset on your signup date.
How many participants can join a free Mentimeter?
Fifty per month across everything you run, plus one session a month with unlimited participants. It is an account pool, not a per-presentation limit, which is the detail that catches people out.
Does the Mentimeter free plan include Q&A moderation?
No. Moderation is on the Pro plan at $24.99 per presenter per month billed yearly. If approving questions before the room sees them is the reason you are shopping, compare that line item first — on askone.org it is in the free tier.
What is the cheapest paid Mentimeter plan?
Basic, $11.99 per presenter per month billed yearly. It removes the monthly participant cap and the slide-type limits but does not include Q&A moderation, which is one tier higher.
What is the best free Mentimeter alternative for a Q&A session?
askone.org, because nothing is metered except how many people are in a room and how many rooms are open at once — there is no monthly total to run out of. The full comparison, including the tools built for presentations and classrooms, is on the alternatives page.
How does this compare with Slido's free plan?
They fail in opposite places. Slido meters polls and gives away unlimited Q&A for up to 100 people per event; Mentimeter gives away every slide type and meters people by the month. The Slido breakdown is on the Slido free-plan page.
Start free at askone.org: one open room, 100 participants per room, every feature including moderation, no monthly counter, no credit card.