Top 7 Free Slido Alternatives for any use case

What is Slido?

Slido is a live polling and Q&A tool that lets audiences vote and submit questions during hybrid, remote, or live meetings. Like many other ‘audience engagement platforms’, or ‘interative presentation software’, Slido features live polls, and Q&As, designed to be used during meetings. 

While a useful solution, there are other tools and platforms on the market that may have more features and functionality or target a different group of users.

Hence, we see a growing number of alternatives to Slido. While it is undoubtedly a handy and reliable tool, other services may be able to perform specific tasks better, help you get started quicker, or provide a more comprehensive service.

So let’s have a little look at a few of these alternatives and see what their strengths are. 

Best free Slido alternatives

• Mentimeter
• ThoughtExchange
• Kahoot!
• Pitch
• Swift
• Miro
• Crowd Mics 

For engagement with more features - Mentimeter 

Yes, I am admittedly a little bit biased but, at the same time, that’s probably because there really is great value in using Mentimeter. Similar to Slido, you can include several different interactive slides that are designed to engage your audience and gather instant feedback with the help of word clouds, Q&As, polls, and surveys.

Users of Slido and Mentimeter can create interactive presentations. The greater variety of slide types, as well as more ‘traditional’ slides - bullet points, text blocks, images - users can access with Mentimeter, mean that it is possible to create a more comprehensive experience rather than a few interactive polls and quizzes. 

Quizzing a live audience or asking them to populate a Word Cloud in real-time certainly has its advantages, but many presenters will want to gather information about their audience beforehand or follow up and gather all-important feedback after they present. Mentimeter has additional features and capabilities that let users create surveys that can be filled out at any time. 

So, for a more comprehensive tool that takes the preparation, the presentation itself, and feedback into account, Mentimeter is a more suitable option for gathering audience responses during classes, meetings, and events. 

For surveying employees - ThoughtExchange 

We mentioned above that Slido thrives when it comes to live situations, from classrooms to meetings, but that running surveys may not be a strength of its platform. ThoughtExchange on the other hand really takes surveys to the next level with an incredible amount of detail and a variety of unique selling points. 

ThoughtExchange focuses on removing bias in surveys and helping users gather real opinions and feedback to form solid, data-driven strategies. This data-focused approach is fundamental to the way ThoughtExchange has built its platform and in doing so it can help presenters and leaders anywhere quickly come up with solutions to any complex problem. 

For K12 - Kahoot!

Slido, while providing some solutions for those in lower education, is not as much of an EdTech tool. Kahoot!, on the other hand, is the name that comes to mind when many of us think of educational technology for children. Tools that make remote and hybrid teaching easier are now a mainstay for teachers around the world. 

Thanks to its interface, design, and user-friendliness, Kahoot! has become a hit with kids and teachers around the globe. Teachers, especially those of younger children, can jump in and create their own bespoke quiz for any type of lesson or subject. 

Likewise, they can also browse the litany of online quizzes available in the Kahoot! Academy. Both of these tools cater to different users but, when it comes to teachers, Kahoot! is one of the strongest alternatives.

For beautiful pre-designed slide decks - Pitch 

Slido offers a lot in terms of functionality and can impress audiences with its interactive features. Oftentimes, we, as presenters, will want to wow our audience with slides that jump off the screen and show off our flair for design. Pitch can help even the most artistically challenged design a slide deck that looks as good as the content.

While Slido lets you fully customize your slides and your presentation with relative ease, it does not provide you with a clear starting point. Pitch offers a clear starting point thanks to its extensive library of pre-made presentations (also known as templates). 

Gather insightful questions and answers  - Swift

Slido offers a Q&A feature that allows audience members to submit questions that can easily be read by both fellow audience members and presenters. Audience members can also upvote the questions they find relevant so the most popular submissions will rise to the top. However, Slido is not a dedicated Q&A tool and there are alternatives out there that offer a more thorough experience. 

Swift is one of the best tools when it comes to running Q&A sessions as it can be run in a live setting while also offering presenters the ability to moderate submissions. A particularly neat feature of Swift is that you can share the top questions during your presentation and highlight them on your screen, improving transparency and openness. 

To collaborate and brainstorm - Miro

Miro is a lot more versatile than many assume and perfect for creating a more collaborative and cooperative meeting. So in a nutshell, yes Miro can provide similar benefits to Slido and no it does not do it in the exact same way. It’s an interactive platform without audience polling. 

Miro, like Pitch and Kahoot!, offers new users a simple first step by providing a comprehensive library of templates that highlight just how many use cases Miro caters for. Timers, voting, a specific meeting mode, and chat features mean that Miro is more than capable of running collaborative meetings in person and online. Brainstorming sessions are where Miro really takes the cake as its slide-less meetings and presentations become a streamlined and creative experience.

For big events and conferences - Crowd Mics by biamp

Crowd Mics is a nifty tool from the guys over at biamp where everyone in the audience can transform their smartphone into a do-it-all tool. The one feature I particularly love here is the voice feature that turns anyone's phone into a microphone. 

We all know how annoying and time confusing it can be to pass a mic around a crowded conference hall or auditorium. Thanks to biamp everyone has a personal microphone that will broadcast their voice around the room. Hosts and moderators can line up who speaks next and who is next to ask a question or provide some insight. 

Plenty of ways to engage and interact

There are a number of different ways you can interact with your audience. As well as that, different audiences will respond better to different types of presentations - some prefer more visual cues while others want the ability to ask questions. 

The same goes for presenters as we all have our preferences. Many of us will want to add content slides to help provide context to our interactive elements while others will want to ditch the slides and go for something unique.