Mentimeter vs Slido (2026): Which One for Your Event — and When Neither Fits
Search "Mentimeter vs Slido" and almost every result lands in the same place: both run live polls, word clouds and Q&A, so pick whichever your team already uses. True, and not much help. The honest split is sharper than the feature grid suggests — Slido is built around moderated, upvoted Q&A and town halls, Mentimeter around polished polls, word clouds and slide design — and the thing that decides most purchases is neither feature. It is the pricing model and the participant cap. This article compares the two on what each is genuinely best at, what their free plans actually allow, how they price paid use, how the audience joins, and how they moderate anonymous posts on the live screen — then covers the flat pay-per-use option that fits a few events a year better than either subscription.
- Mentimeter is the stronger pick for polished word clouds, varied question slides and presenter-led workshops and classrooms
- Both free tiers are capped: Mentimeter meters 50 participants per month (account-wide, not per presentation); Slido's free Basic allows 3 polls and 100 participants per event
- Both push annual billing by default, and Slido also prices paid use by participant tier (200 / 1,000 / 5,000), which is easy to under-buy as the room grows
- ZENIN CLOUD is a flat pay-per-use third option: $70 for 7 days ($10/day), no contract, no plan-based participant cap, AI moderation of posts, QR-only join and CSV export — built for the occasional event, not the weekly meeting
Mentimeter vs Slido vs a pay-per-use tool
Mentimeter vs Slido: the short answer
Both tools do live polls, word clouds, quizzes and Q&A competently, so a feature-by-feature scorecard comes out close to a tie — which is exactly why most comparisons stall. What separates them is emphasis. Mentimeter is built for the presenter: polished word clouds, a wide range of question slides, strong visual design, and a workflow that lives inside a deck. Slido is built around the moderated Q&A queue — submit anonymously, upvote, and let a moderator promote or hide questions — with tight Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams integration that makes it the default for company all-hands and conference Q&A.
So the quick rule: if you are a trainer, lecturer or marketer running a presentation and you want slick polls and word clouds, lean Mentimeter; if you are an internal-comms, events or IT team running a town hall where surfacing and ranking audience questions is the point, lean Slido. But before you pick either, notice what both assume — an annual subscription. For a handful of events a year, the billing model and the participant cap matter more than the word-cloud-vs-Q&A distinction, which is why this article ends with a flat pay-per-use option instead of a second subscription.
Live polls, word clouds, Q&A and quizzes are table stakes — Mentimeter, Slido, Poll Everywhere, AhaSlides and the rest all do them. Choosing on the feature matrix is why the decision drags on. The axes that actually differ are the billing model, the participant cap, and how each tool handles an abusive anonymous post on the projected screen.
What each tool is built for
The fastest way to choose is to match the tool to the shape of your event rather than to a checklist of features that both tools tick.
Mentimeter — presenter-led polls, word clouds and workshops
Mentimeter's centre of gravity is the person standing in front of the room. Its word clouds and visuals are widely rated the most polished of the category, it offers a broad spread of question slides, and it carries presenter-focused extras — presenter notes, AI-assisted authoring and a large template library — that make it a natural fit for trainers, lecturers and marketers building an on-brand session (Mentimeter vs Slido). If your recurring job is to keep a workshop or classroom interactive from the slides, Mentimeter is designed for exactly that, and it is usually a corporate-card decision made by the presenter.
Slido — moderated Q&A and town halls
Slido leans the other way. The Q&A queue is its standout: the audience submits questions anonymously, everyone upvotes, and a moderator promotes or hides them before they hit the screen. That workflow is why it dominates enterprise all-hands and conference sessions, and since Cisco's acquisition its integrations follow the same audience — Webex and Teams first. If your recurring problem is "the same three vocal people dominate and we never surface what the room actually wants to ask", Slido is built for that, and the buyer usually sits in IT, AV or internal comms rather than with the presenter.
Pricing and free-plan limits compared
This is the axis that decides most purchases, and it is where the two tools look more alike than their marketing suggests: a capped free tier good enough to demo but not to run a real event, and paid plans billed annually by default.
Mentimeter. The free plan is the one that catches people out — it meters 50 participants per month, account-wide, not per presentation, so several small sessions in the same month draw from one pool. Paid plans lift that cap: Basic is around $11.99 per presenter per month and Pro around $24.99 per presenter per month, both billed annually, with Pro and Enterprise sold on annual terms (Mentimeter — Pricing). Paid plans remove the free plan's participant limit, so audience size stops being the constraint once you are paying.
Slido. The free Basic plan allows 3 polls and up to 100 participants per event, with unlimited but unmoderated Q&A and one quiz. Paid tiers are billed annually and — the part comparisons skip — priced by participant tier (200 / 1,000 / 5,000), so a bigger room costs more. Slido also sells one-time event plans that cover a single event for up to 7 days with unlimited polls, surveys, quizzes and Q&A, again priced by participant tier (Slido — Pricing; Slido Community — all about one-time plans).
The takeaway: both free tiers are fine for evaluating the interface and useless for a real event with an audience. On paid, Mentimeter lifts the cap entirely but charges per presenter seat on an annual contract, while Slido ties the price to the size of the room — which is easy to under-buy. Check your largest session against the cap of the plan you would actually purchase before you compare anything else. For the free-tier limits in detail, Mentimeter free plan limits walks through what breaks first.
Features and question types
Feature parity is real, but the edges differ. Both run live polls, word clouds, quizzes, open text and Q&A, and both import from PowerPoint. Mentimeter's standout is the visual polish and the breadth of question slides, plus AI-assisted authoring and presenter notes. Slido's standout is the moderated, upvoted Q&A and a quiz leaderboard for lighter sessions. On raw audience scale, Mentimeter advertises no fixed audience ceiling on paid plans, while Slido's top tier is sized to very large rooms through its participant tiers.
For a live word cloud specifically — the format where the whole room types a word and it appears on screen instantly — both render one well, and Mentimeter's is often singled out as the nicer-looking. The difference that matters on the day shows up not in the visual but in what happens when someone types something abusive, which the moderation section covers below. If you want the practical craft of running one, how to run a live word cloud walks through the prompts that actually get responses from a large audience.
Q&A and moderation: where the gap is widest
If there is one place these tools genuinely diverge on capability, it is Q&A. Slido's moderated queue — anonymous submission, audience upvoting, and a moderator who approves questions before they display — is the most developed in the category and the main reason it wins town halls. Mentimeter has Q&A too, but its strength is the poll and word-cloud slide rather than the moderated question flow, so for a Q&A-led session Slido is the more natural home.
The second half of moderation is harder and never appears in a feature grid: what happens when an anonymous post is abusive and a live word cloud or open Q&A puts it in front of the whole room instantly. Both Mentimeter and Slido rely on the same basic mechanism — a keyword or profanity filter plus a human who reviews or approves items. That works, but a word-list filter has a structural ceiling: it cannot keep up with deliberate misspellings, spacing tricks or coded phrasing, so someone determined to get past it usually can, and the filtered result still needs a person watching the screen.
Keyword filters match strings. Attackers change strings — swap a letter, add a space, use a homophone — faster than any list is maintained. That is not a flaw in one product; it is the ceiling of the list approach, and it is why "we turned the filter on" is not the same as "the screen is safe".
ZENIN CLOUD takes a different approach: an AI classifier judges each post by meaning rather than matching a list, so it does not depend on the list being current and holds up better against deliberate misspellings — including in Japanese, where kana and substitute characters make list-matching especially brittle. You should still keep one person watching the projected screen with any tool, but the starting point is stronger when the filter reasons about intent instead of spelling.
Integrations and how the audience joins
Integrations are where each tool's DNA shows. Slido integrates most deeply with Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams — the legacy of the Cisco acquisition — which makes it the obvious choice where meetings already run on those platforms. Mentimeter connects to Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Webex and embeds into PowerPoint and Google Slides, fitting the presenter who lives in a deck. Match this to your stack: a Webex-first company and a Slides-first lecturer will each feel the pull toward a different tool.
On the audience side, both are browser-based with no app to install, and participants reach either by scanning a QR code or typing a numeric code at menti.com or a Slido join link. The small friction is the code: reading a numeric code aloud to a large room reliably produces a wave of "I can't get in" as people mistype it. A QR code projected on the screen removes that step — worth checking how each option handles the first two minutes of a big session, because that is where a large audience usually stalls.
When neither fits: the pay-per-use third option
The Mentimeter-vs-Slido question quietly assumes you are buying a subscription. For a team that runs live sessions most weeks, that assumption is right, and this section is not aimed at you — the template library and the muscle memory of weekly use are advantages a per-day tool cannot match. But for the far larger group running a handful of events a year, Mentimeter's per-presenter annual seat bills through the idle months, and Slido's paid plans scale their price with the size of the room even on a one-time event plan.
A flat pay-per-use tool changes the maths. ZENIN CLOUD is $70 for 7 days ($10/day), card checkout only, with no contract or cancellation, no plan-based participant cap (it handles hundreds to thousands), AI moderation of posts, QR-only join, and CSV export on every plan. Count the days you actually ran a live session last year — not the days you meant to — and drop them into a break-even.
The pattern is the same as any subscription: below a certain frequency, per-day pricing is far cheaper; above it, the subscription pulls ahead. For a few events a year the gap is large — and you avoid choosing between Mentimeter's slides and Slido's Q&A when what you really needed was one interactive session, run once, without a renewal or a participant tier to out-grow. The pay-per-use case for a single event goes deeper, and if cost is the whole question, compare it against your own numbers on the pricing page.
How to choose in one sitting
Spreadsheet comparisons stall because both tools check every box. Four questions settle it faster than any feature grid.
Presenter-led polls and word clouds → Mentimeter. Moderated Q&A / town hall → Slido. One-off interactive session → price pay-per-use.
Days you actually ran a live session. A few, price per-day; most weeks, a subscription earns its keep.
Take your largest session, add 30% for people joining from two devices, and see which limit — 50/month, 100/event, or a 200 / 1,000 / 5,000 tier — still covers it.
Post something borderline during a test and watch how each tool handles it on the projected screen. That moment defines the event.
ZENIN CLOUD is $70 for 7 days ($10/day), card checkout only, with no contract, no plan-based participant cap, QR-only join and CSV export. If a single interactive session — not a year of them — is what you are buying, it is the option the Mentimeter-vs-Slido comparison leaves out. See the full numbers on the pricing page.
Which decision are you actually making?
If two or more of these are true, price a pay-per-use tool before committing to either subscription.
Frequently asked questions
Is Mentimeter or Slido better?
Neither is better overall; they specialise differently. Mentimeter is stronger for polished word clouds, varied poll slides and presenter-led workshops or classrooms. Slido is stronger for moderated, upvoted Q&A and town halls, with deep Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams integration. Choose by event shape: a slide-led presentation → Mentimeter; a Q&A-led meeting → Slido.
What is the difference between Mentimeter and Slido free plans?
Mentimeter meters 50 participants per month account-wide, so several small sessions in a month share one pool. Slido allows 3 polls and up to 100 participants per event, with unlimited but unmoderated Q&A. Both are good for evaluating the interface and too limited for a real event with a large audience. For an occasional event, a flat pay-per-use tool such as ZENIN CLOUD ($70 for 7 days, $10/day) avoids both the monthly meter and the per-event poll cap.
Which is better for a town hall or all-hands meeting?
Slido, in most cases. Its moderated Q&A with upvoting and question filtering is built for exactly that format, and its Webex and Teams integration fits enterprise all-hands. Mentimeter works too, but its strength is the poll and word-cloud slide rather than the moderated question flow. If the meeting is large and one-off, also price a pay-per-use tool with no plan-based participant cap.
Which is better for a classroom or workshop?
Mentimeter is the more common pick for a presenter-led classroom or hands-on workshop, thanks to its polished word clouds, broad set of question slides and slide-embedded polling. Slido can run a class but is centred on the Q&A queue. For teaching specifically, many people also compare classroom-focused tools before committing.
Can I use Mentimeter or Slido for a single event without an annual subscription?
Slido sells one-time event plans that cover a single event for up to 7 days, priced by participant tier, so you can avoid an annual contract — though a larger room costs more. Mentimeter is sold as a per-presenter subscription rather than a one-time event plan. For a truly occasional event, a flat pay-per-use tool charges one price for the days you use ($70 for 7 days) with no participant tier and no renewal.
How do Mentimeter and Slido handle abusive anonymous posts?
Both use a keyword or profanity filter plus a human who reviews or approves posts before they appear. That works but cannot keep up with deliberate misspellings, and it still needs someone watching the screen. An AI classifier that judges posts by meaning rather than matching a word list — as ZENIN CLOUD uses — holds up better against evasion, especially in languages like Japanese; you should still keep one moderator on the projected screen with any tool.
No contract, no sales call. Buy 7 days and use them whenever your event lands.
No contract, no sales call, no cancellation. Card checkout only — pick your days one at a time.