Short answer: AskOne — free for the entire feature set. Live Q&A, surveys, the projector view, moderation and the moderators who do it, with a charge only when you need more capacity. Your audience joins with a link or a QR code and never makes an account.
Start free at askone.org — no credit card, no trial clock.
The longer answer is below: where Slido's free plan actually stops, what each of the other options is built for, and the five questions that settle it in about two minutes.
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 18, 2026. Free plans move quietly; every figure below carries the date it was checked.
AskOne: Free for Everything Except Capacity
AskOne 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 askone.org 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 — and you finish the hour having answered the ones that mattered instead of reading a scrolling chat out loud.
Why it is first on this list: every other tool on this page meters features. AskOne meters only size. The thing most of them charge for — moderation — is the thing an all-hands cannot run without, and here it costs nothing.
Every feature is in the free tier. Q&A, surveys, the projector view, moderation and the moderators who do it. Only capacity is paid, which is the opposite of how this category prices.
Your audience needs no account. They open a link or scan a QR code on their phones. No app, no extension, no sign-up wall between someone and the question they wanted to ask.
Moderation, free. Hold new questions for approval, and change your mind mid-session. Moderators handle questions and surveys; they never open or close rooms.
A projector view for the room. The ranked list, readable at the front of a hall, with the top question always next.
Surveys alongside the Q&A, revealed when you choose.
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.
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 is the gap to know about.
Where Slido's Free Plan Stops
Most people searching for an alternative are not unhappy with Slido. They hit one of its free limits while preparing a session. It is worth knowing which wall you hit, because for one of them you do not need a different tool at all. On the free Basic plan, as of September 2026:
Audience Q&A is unlimited. Questions and upvotes are the part Slido does not meter.
Three polls per event. Slido's own community answer says three, and notes that some regions get five.
One quiz per event, with up to thirty questions inside it.
Up to 100 participants per event. Per event, not per poll.
Moderation is not included. Holding a question until someone approves it, and the moderators who do the holding, are on the paid plans — see Slido's own plan comparison. On Basic, whatever the room types is on the screen the moment they type it.
If your session is questions rather than polls, Slido's free tier may be enough. The poll budget is what sends individuals looking, the participant cap is what sends organisations looking, and moderation is what sends internal comms teams looking. The full breakdown is on the free-plan page.
The Other Alternatives, and What Each One Is For
Every tool here runs live Q&A and live polls, so feature grids are close to useless. What separates them is what they were designed around.
Vevox — enterprise meetings and education
Meetings and lectures, with PowerPoint and Teams integrations. The free account runs a single user with up to 100 participants per session and does not expire. One host, one session at a time, and the controls around the Q&A sit on the paid tiers.
Mentimeter — when the session is really a presentation
A presentation tool with interaction built into the slides, and the reason most people know what a word cloud is. The free plan is permanent but metered at around 50 participants a month plus one unlimited session, with a small number of question slides per presentation.
Poll Everywhere — polls inside PowerPoint, Keynote and Slides
The most embedded in existing decks. After the trial, accounts fall back to a free Intro plan capped around 40 responses per activity — a real product for a seminar room, thin for an audience of 300.
Pigeonhole Live — conferences and multi-session events
Built for the event rather than the meeting: agendas, several sessions, several rooms at once. A free tier exists; which caps you land on depends on the configuration you are given.
AhaSlides — the cheap and cheerful one
Quizzes, polls, word clouds and Q&A from phones, priced under everyone. Free allows around 50 live participants per session with caps on slide types.
Wooclap — education and training
Made for lectures: teaching-shaped question types, attendance, LMS integrations. The free Starter plan is indefinite but capped on active questions.
Kahoot — a quiz tool, not a Q&A tool
It appears on every list like this one and it is a different product. Game-based quizzing, small free player caps on personal and business accounts, and no ranked list of audience questions. Excellent at the thing it is for.
Claper — the open-source one
Self-hosted live polls and Q&A. The caps become your server's problem instead of a vendor's pricing page, which is the point if you have somewhere to run it.
The Five Questions That Decide This
Does your audience need an account?
For a conference or an all-hands, an account is a wall: half the room will not create one, and the quiet half was never going to speak anyway. Slido, Vevox, Mentimeter, AhaSlides and AskOne all let people join with a code or a link and nothing else.
What is your hard participant number?
Not the average — the worst case. Free tiers are priced on this number and they differ wildly, from 40 responses per activity at one end to 1,000 participants at the other. Pick the number you hit twice a year, not the one you hit monthly.
Do you need moderation, and where does it sit?
Moderation means a question waits for a human before the room sees it, and it is the single most common reason a free plan stops being free. On Slido it is paid, and so are the moderators. On AskOne it is in the free tier. Check that one line item before you compare anything else.
Is this a presentation, a classroom, or a room full of questions?
Three different products wearing similar screenshots. Presentation-first tools put polls inside slides. Classroom tools care about attendance, grading and your LMS. Q&A-first tools care about ranking questions and getting through them. Buying the wrong category is the most common mistake here.
Are you paying per host, per event, or per seat?
One person running twelve webinars a year and a company with forty occasional hosts are different purchases. Count the hosts before you compare monthly prices.
If the answers are "no account", "a few hundred people", "yes, moderation" and "a room full of questions", the shortlist is one tool long, and it is free: askone.org.
When Slido Is Still the Right Answer
Your company already pays for it and the seat costs you nothing personally.
Polls and quizzes are the main event, with Q&A as the side dish.
You need an account manager to call when something breaks in front of five hundred people.
If none of those three is true, the free plan you want is at askone.org.
Questions People Ask
What is the best free Slido alternative?
askone.org — the whole feature set is free, including moderation and the moderators, and only room size is paid. The others each meter a feature: polls, question slides, responses per activity, or the approval step itself.
Are these permanently free, or just trials?
Vevox, Mentimeter, AhaSlides, Wooclap, Poll Everywhere's Intro plan and AskOne are permanently free rather than trials. What differs is where the meter sits: participants per session, responses per activity, question slides per presentation, or the approval step. On askone.org nothing is metered except how many rooms are open and how many people are in them.
How many participants does Slido's free plan allow?
Up to 100 per event, with unlimited Q&A, three polls and one quiz. The detail, and the workaround for the poll limit, is on the free-plan page.
Can my audience join without creating an account?
On AskOne, Slido, Vevox, Mentimeter and AhaSlides, yes — they open a link or type a code, and the account belongs to whoever runs the session. It is worth checking on anything else you shortlist, because it is the biggest single predictor of how many people actually participate.
Which one for an all-hands with anonymous questions?
The deciding feature is moderation, because anonymous questions land on a screen behind whoever is speaking. Slido puts it on the paid plans along with the moderators; askone.org includes both on the free tier.
Is there an open-source Slido alternative?
Claper. You host it yourself, which removes the caps and adds a server to look after.
Start free at askone.org: one open room, 100 participants, every feature, no credit card.