Short answer: AskOne — free for the entire feature set: live Q&A, polls, word clouds, rating scales, quizzes, the projector view, moderation, the AI first pass 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 21, 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 whole set — live Q&A, polls, word clouds, rating scales, quizzes, the projector view, moderation, the AI first pass and the moderators who do it — is on the free tier, including the thing most of them charge for. Moderation is what an all-hands cannot run without, and here it costs nothing — including the AI pass that does the first read when there is nobody free to do it.
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.
Answers from the host, in writing. Type an answer onto a question and it moves to an Answered tab the whole room can read — including the ones you did not get to out loud.
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 a person, or let the AI take the first pass and leave you only the ones it was not sure about — both free on every plan, and switchable 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.
Your agent can read the room. A read-only HTTP API and an MCP server, on every plan: every room, question, vote and written answer. So the follow-up FAQ is one sentence to an assistant that already has the session, rather than an afternoon with a spreadsheet.
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.
And the first read does not have to be yours. A room is set to one of three things and you can change it mid-session: no moderation, hold every question for a person, or let the AI take the first pass. On that third setting each question is classified before anyone sees it, in about a third of a second — inside the wait the person asking already has — and it is included on every plan, within fair use.
It judges civility, never the subject. What it rejects is abuse, harassment, spam and keyboard-mashing. A question that has nothing to do with your session is not on that list, on purpose: in a room ranked by votes an irrelevant question sinks by itself, while a wrongly rejected one is gone and the person who asked it is told it was not accepted. Being wrong is expensive in one direction only, so what is on topic stays the host's call.
When it is not sure, a person decides. Below the confidence line — and on a timeout, or when the model is unreachable — the question waits in the moderation queue instead of being guessed at. The failure direction is always towards a human, never towards the wall.
Nothing is deleted and you can overrule it. Whatever the AI held back sits in its own list for the host to open and restore.
What leaves the room. In an AI room the question text and the room's name and description go to the model. No participant name, cookie or IP goes with them.
Measured on the release that shipped it: a hundred questions through the live classifier — none of the 55 civil ones rejected, 24 of the 25 abusive or spam ones caught outright and the 25th held for a person, so none of them reached the room. Median 315 ms against a two-and-a-half-second budget. It is re-run on every release, because a model can move underneath wording that did not.
You can open a real room right now, without signing up for anything. AskOne keeps one open to the public — askone.org/r/WQYJ7G. Vote a question up the list, answer the live survey, ask something of your own. It is a room on the running product rather than a video or a guided tour, and it resets itself every few hours, so nothing anyone leaves in it stays.
It is also where the AI first pass stops being a claim. A civil question typed into that room on 21 September 2026 was screened and on the wall immediately — inside the wait the person asking already has, which is the entire argument for letting a machine take the first read.
The word cloud is the one most people try first, because it costs a room fifteen seconds and changes the temperature of the next forty minutes — how to run one, and the questions that work.
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. Every feature on this page is on both plans, moderation and the AI pass included; what the paid plan buys is capacity, and your own logo in place of the small “Create your own room — free” line a free room shows its audience.
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.
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. Its free plan is permanent and gives away every slide type, but it meters people by the calendar month: 50 participants a month across everything you run, plus one unlimited session, resetting on the day you signed up. Q&A moderation is two tiers up, on Pro at $24.99 per presenter per month. The full breakdown is on the Mentimeter free-plan page, and if it is down to these two, Slido vs Mentimeter puts the two free plans side by side.
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 that depend on whether the account is for school, work or home, and no ranked list of audience questions. Excellent at the thing it is for; what its free plan actually covers is on the Kahoot free-plan page.
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 is checked 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 — and so is the AI pass that reads the queue when the only person who could is the one talking. 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, and the difference that matters most is whether it counts by the month. Mentimeter does: 50 participants a month, resetting on your signup date. The others count per session, per activity or per event — Vevox and AhaSlides by participants in one session, Poll Everywhere by responses per activity, Slido by participants per event. On askone.org the meter is the room: 100 people in each, as many rooms as you like, and no monthly total to run out of.
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, and takes the first pass with AI when nobody in the room is free to watch a queue. What ‘anonymous’ means tool by tool, including how an abusive participant can still be banned without ever learning who they are, is on the anonymous Q&A page.
Can AI moderate the questions instead of a person?
It takes the first pass, which is the part a solo host cannot do while talking. On askone.org a room is set to no moderation, to hold everything for a person, or to AI, and all three are free on every plan. The AI judges civility and good faith rather than whether a question is on topic; anything it is unsure about waits for a human instead of being guessed at; and nothing it rejects is deleted — the host can open the list and put a question back.
Slido or Mentimeter?
Slido if the session is questions, Mentimeter if it is slides — their free plans are metered in opposite places, and neither includes moderation. The head-to-head is on Slido vs Mentimeter.
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.