5 Free Slido Alternatives for Live Polling (2026)

Why look for a Slido alternative

Slido is a capable live-polling tool. Two things send people looking for alternatives: cost and friction. Slido's free plan caps how many polls you can run per event, and the more useful features sit behind paid tiers, which adds up if you present regularly. The other friction lands on the audience. If you have watched participation drop while people fumble with an app or a login, you already know why "free" and "no sign-up" matter as much as the feature list.

This guide compares five free ways to run live audience polls in 2026, including where our own tool fits and where it doesn't.

What to compare

Four things matter more than the length of the feature list:

A real free tier. Is it usable, or a demo that expires the moment your audience grows?
Sign-up friction for respondents. Do participants need an app or an account, or just a link?
Real-time results. Do answers appear live on screen, or do you refresh to see them?
Setup speed. How fast can you get from "I have a question" to "the room is answering"?

1. rifts

rifts.to is a real-time audience survey tool, free to start, built around one idea: the link is the product. You create a poll in seconds, share one link or a QR code, and responses stream in on screen as people tap. Nobody installs an app, and nobody needs an account to answer. It runs in English and German.

Best for: presenters, teachers, and event hosts who want the shortest path from question to live answers. Trade-off: rifts does live polling and stops there. If you want quiz games, scoring leaderboards, or event management bundled in, the tools below carry more.

2. Mentimeter

Mentimeter is the best-looking option here, with a wide range of question types and word clouds. The free plan works for small sessions but limits questions per presentation, and the nicer interaction types and exports are paid. Worth it if you want breadth and can live with the caps. Our Slido vs Mentimeter comparison goes deeper on the two.

3. Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere has been around a long time and plugs into PowerPoint and Google Slides. Its free tier caps respondents per poll, which is the number to check before a large session. Strong on slide integration, weak on a free tier you can grow into.

4. Wooclap

Wooclap leans toward education, with quiz-style interactions and a clean interface. Teachers get a free tier with limits on questions per event. Good fit for a classroom that wants gamified questions, and more than you need for plain live polling. We compare it in more detail in Wooclap vs Mentimeter vs rifts.

5. Google Forms

Google Forms is free, unlimited, and already in everyone's account. It is not a live-polling tool. Results do not update on a shared screen, so you would sit there refreshing a responses tab. Right answer for an asynchronous survey, wrong answer when the point is to react to the room.

Quick comparison

rifts and Google Forms sit at opposite ends: rifts is built for the live on-screen moment, Forms for async collection. Mentimeter, Poll Everywhere, and Wooclap land in between, capable but with free-tier caps on questions or respondents that you will hit as you present more often.

How to choose

Pick for the moment you are designing for. A live audience where participation rate is everything wants the least friction and the most reliable real-time display. A gamified classroom quiz wants a quiz-first tool. Async feedback wants a form. To try the no-app, no-sign-up version now, you can create a live poll on rifts.to and share the link with your group in about a minute.