A Mentimeter alternative for one event, not a whole year
Mentimeter is a good product, and if you present slides to a room every week it is probably the right one. Most people looking for an alternative are not unhappy with it. They need it for one event, and Mentimeter sells its paid plans by the year.
Here is what Mentimeter's free plan really allows, what it costs past that, read off its own pages on 11 October 2026, and where we fit.
First, check whether you need to pay anyone
Mentimeter's free plan is more generous than its headline number. It counts 50 participants a month across all your sessions, but it never cuts off a session that is running, so one session a month can hold any number of people. Once a session has gone past 50, you get eight hours to finish it, and no new session can start until your month resets.
So if you run one event a month, the free plan is enough and you should use it. The limit bites on the second event in the same month.
What Mentimeter costs past the free plan
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Mentimeter Free | $0 | 50 participants a month, plus one session a month with no cap |
| Mentimeter Basic | $14 per presenter a month, billed yearly | No participant limit, import PowerPoint, Keynote or PDF, export results |
| Mentimeter Pro | $28 per presenter a month, billed yearly | Basic plus a shared team workspace and more design control |
| Mentimeter Small Conference | $350 once | 30 days, up to 4 presenters, no participant limit |
| Mentimeter Large Conference | $750 once | 30 days, up to 20 presenters |
| EventQuiz Event Pass | $39 once | 72 hours of live time, any number of sessions, no player cap |
| EventQuiz Annual | $299 a year | Unlimited events, 5 team seats, no auto-renewal |
Read off mentimeter.com/plans and mentimeter.com/plans/conference on 11 October 2026, excluding tax, as shown to visitors in the United States. Mentimeter shows prices in your local currency, so yours may differ.
Paying by the month is not an option for Basic or Pro. Mentimeter's own FAQ answers “Can I pay for one month?” with “No”, and points one-time events to the conference packages.
The shape of the bill
Mentimeter is priced for people who present all year: a yearly plan, per presenter. For a single event its answer is a conference package that runs for 30 days. If your event is one day, you are paying for a month to use it on that day.
Ours is priced the other way round. $39 buys 72 hours of live time, counted from your first live session and not from when you buy it, with any number of sessions inside that window. $299 buys a year of unlimited events with five team seats. Neither renews on its own.
Refunds differ too. Mentimeter refunds within 14 days only if you have not used it at a live event. Our Event Pass is refunded in full within 14 days of buying it, whether or not you started a session, no questions asked.
What you get here
A quiz that is the whole show
Points, streaks and a leaderboard on the big screen, with rounds and standings between them. Questions can carry a picture, ask players to type the answer, or ask for the closest number. AI writes ten questions on a topic you pick in seconds, and every word stays editable.
Four more modes come with every plan: Survivor, where a wrong answer costs a life; Survey, anonymous live polls with no right answers; Lucky draw, which spins the nicknames in the room and stops on a winner; and Q&A, where people send questions from their phones, vote on them, and you pick which one goes on the big screen.
Measured, not claimed
We ran 1,000 simultaneous players through 20 questions against the live product: no dropped answers, questions reaching phones in about 130 ms at the 95th percentile, and the full archive written in 21 seconds. We do not publish a hard player cap, because we have never had to enforce one, and nobody gets locked out of a running event.
What players do
Open the site, type a PIN and a nickname, and they are in. No app to install, no account to create, and a nickname is all we ask for by default.
Bringing your questions over
If your questions live in a spreadsheet, the editor imports them from our Excel template, one question per row. There is no direct import from Mentimeter.
Where Mentimeter is the better choice
You will find this out anyway, so here it is up front.
- You present slides. Mentimeter is a presentation tool. Basic and up import PowerPoint, Keynote and PDF, and its plan table lists embedding slides from PowerPoint Web, Google Slides and Miro. We have no slides at all.
- You want word clouds or open-text answers to your own questions. Mentimeter has both. We have neither; our Q&A collects questions from the room, not answers.
- You run one session a month. Mentimeter's free plan covers it. We have no free plan, only a 24-hour trial.
- Your company needs single sign-on. Mentimeter's Enterprise plan has SSO and SCIM. We do not.
If you want to try it
The prices are in the pricing section and you can buy in one click. If you would rather see it work first, start a free trial: 24 hours from your first live session, up to 10 players per game, all five modes, no card.
Comparing more tools than Mentimeter? We keep player limits and prices across the market on a separate page.
Built and used by someone who runs training events for a living, which is why the pricing looks the way it does.