Poll Everywhere
Poll Everywhere's free plan supports ~40–50 participants. Basic paid scales to 700 with LMS and reporting. Enterprise adds SSO, SCIM, and governance. The free plan never expires and needs no credit card.
Hands-on comparison
Poll Everywhere vs. SlidesWith (2026)
One is a platform. The other is a presentation tool. Here's when each is the right fit.
Poll Everywhere and SlidesWith both embed interaction into slides, but they are built at different scales for different audiences. SlidesWith is designed for facilitated team meetings where the presentation is the product. Poll Everywhere is designed for recurring professional and academic use where data, integration, and scale matter.
The bottom line
SlidesWith is the better choice for design-forward, facilitated team meetings with small-to-medium audiences where the slide deck is the centerpiece and visual coherence matters. Poll Everywhere is the better choice for any use case that involves larger audiences, recurring sessions, LMS integration, enterprise governance, or security compliance.
Side-by-side comparison
| Feature | Poll Everywhere | SlidesWith |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Enterprise, higher ed, large recurring sessions, LMS-connected workflows | Presentation-first facilitated team meetings with small-to-medium audiences |
| Free audience limit | ~40–50 participants | 10 participants (hard cap) |
| Paid audience limit | Up to 700 (basic paid) | 250+ (higher plan) |
| Native PowerPoint plug-in | Yes — native, stable plug-in | Yes — slide-native (SlidesWith format, not PPT import) |
| LMS / LTI support | LTI 1.3 Advantage; Canvas Partner | None |
| Security certifications | SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 + 27701 | None publicly listed |
| Q&A moderation | Supported; advanced moderation in Q2 roadmap | Upvoting supported |
| Anonymous participation | Supported | Requires names or emails to participate |
| AI-assisted creation | Available; best used in preparation | Limited or unclear |
Which tool is right for you?
| Choose Poll Everywhere if… | Choose SlidesWith if… |
|---|---|
| Your audience exceeds 10 participants on the free tier or 250 on a standard paid plan | Your primary use case is internal facilitated team meetings where the slide deck is the centerpiece |
| LMS integration or enterprise governance is required | Interaction embedded inside the presentation (not alongside it) is a core requirement |
| Sessions are recurring and content needs to be reused and tracked | Audience is small, visual coherence matters, and professional polish is important |
| Participants need to join anonymously without providing names or emails | You want a simple, low-configuration tool for occasional professional presentations |
How each tool performs by scenario
Both tools can handle basic polling. The differences show up in specific conditions. Below is a direct comparison across the six use cases covered in our hands-on testing.
| Scenario | Poll Everywhere | SlidesWith |
|---|---|---|
| Teaching a class | Yes — LaTeX, native slide integration, LMS grade passback, anonymous participation. Designed for recurring classroom use. | No — requires names or emails to join, which reduces participation. Not built for academic workflows or LMS reporting. |
| All courses at a university | Yes — LTI 1.3, Canvas Partner, SOC 2 certified. | No — no LMS integrations, no security certifications. Not designed for academic deployment. |
| Team meeting | Yes — PowerPoint-native, professional, minimal prep. Best with some preparation. | Yes — one of SlidesWith's strongest use cases. Interaction built directly into the slide deck makes for a clean, frictionless meeting experience. |
| Company-wide Q&A | Yes — scales to large audiences, voting and ranking supported. | Limited — not designed for open-ended high-volume Q&A. Assumes a guided presentation format rather than open questioning. |
| New employee onboarding | Yes — reusable across cohorts, engagement data reviewable. | Yes for small, design-forward onboarding sessions. Overhead of maintaining slide decks across cohorts adds up. |
| Conference presentation | Yes — reliable at large scale. QR join, no accounts needed. | Yes for small-to-medium conference sessions where the presenter controls the format. Requires names/emails to join, which can reduce participation. |
Watch our unedited first-time tests
Unedited first-time recordings of both tools — no scripts, no retakes.
Poll Everywhere
Video transcript – Poll Everywhere
0:00 Okay, it's time for Poll Everywhere. I'm on a casual Friday here — not the same day as the other recordings. I'm already familiar with this product, so it's not really fair for me to do a blind run-through, but I'll do my best to do a stream-of-consciousness walkthrough.
0:20 We're starting out after sign-up and login. We're going to ask about turtles again — that's our running theme. We'll go for a Competition, which is the gamified version with leaderboards.
1:09 We could make a series of polls as well. These questions are AI-generated — trivia about the Ninja Turtles theme song. Not quite what we wanted, but we can run through it. You could edit the questions or adjust the AI prompt to improve output.
2:00 For the purpose of comparison I'm going to go ahead and present, and I'm joining with another device. Responding as "the helpful zebra." Let's see — Donatello — and the helpful zebra is in the lead.
2:48 My mistake — I started on the final slide. Let me jump back. Okay, so now we have the competition loaded. Leo. Zebra is ahead. Points are allotted based on response time. The radar visualization looks good.
3:37 You get confetti and a leaderboard at the end. There are a lot of little things you can do in a competition — showing who's connected, for example. You can also export polls to PowerPoint, view questions and correct responses, and pull reporting.
4:48 Let's look at billing quickly. We're on the Teams trial for the first 30 days, then we drop to Intro — 40-person audience size, some AI prompts per month, unlimited questions. Higher tiers increase audience size, reporting capabilities, AI access, and branding. Pricing feels fairly competitive with the others we've tested.
5:36 That's Poll Everywhere.
SlidesWith
Video transcript – SlidesWith
0:00 Alright, Slides With Friends. This came up after signup. There's a countdown — not sure if it logs me out. I'll jump on another device to confirm my email. Confirmed — we're in.
0:34 I don't have a slide deck, so maybe I'm ready to play? I can browse popular templates. Looking at one — "Weekend Activity" — people type words rather than choose options. I can see that working. Let's look at upgrading. 50 people on starter. Unlimited slides and events. I like the design — fresh, its own thing.
1:36 Back to create a new one. TMNT Best. We get color palettes — green for the turtles, makes sense. Let's go "comicky." Actually, let's go "professional." Starting now.
2:19 Got it. Big pink button makes sense. No obvious AI creation here, so we'll do things manually. Going with multiple choice — who's the best turtle? Four options: Leo, and the answer is Raph.
3:25 One more question — best weapon. Swords, Bo Staff. Let's launch. Some options are premium only — unclear which ones. It lets us proceed anyway.
4:54 Joining up. It wants my email to join as a participant. Okay, I'm in as RG. Presenting now — I Like Snowy. Who's the best turtle? I made a selection and I can see that I voted — good feedback. Correct answer was Raph.
5:57 Which weapon is the best? Going through the full sequence. Something unexpected happened — unclear what I triggered. Sword's kind of the coolest. Nunchucks pretty cool too. I didn't add a score summary slide — that's what was missing. You can place score slides throughout.
7:04 I like some of the styling here — it looks pretty buttoned up. A few things I didn't expect but all made sense once figured out. Mainly comes down to how many people you're hosting. Nice work from SlidesWith.
Pricing and limits
SlidesWith
SlidesWith's free plan caps at 10 participants — making it essentially a test-drive for any real use. Paid plans support 250+ participants, with branding available on higher tiers. Enterprise governance controls are limited compared to full-platform tools.
What usually triggers a procurement conversation
SlidesWith is rarely evaluated in formal enterprise procurement processes — it is more often adopted by individual teams or presenters. Poll Everywhere enterprise procurement conversations center on SSO, SOC 2, LMS integration, and admin controls.
Switching between Poll Everywhere and SlidesWith
Moving from SlidesWith to Poll Everywhere
SlidesWith users moving to Poll Everywhere gain scale, LMS integration, anonymous participation, and enterprise governance. The main adjustment is that Poll Everywhere operates alongside your slide deck (as a plug-in) rather than being the slide deck itself — a workflow difference that takes some getting used to.
Moving from Poll Everywhere to SlidesWith
Poll Everywhere users moving to SlidesWith typically do so for a specific, design-forward meeting context where seamless slide interaction is more important than scale or data. Tradeoffs include losing anonymous participation, LMS connectivity, and the full enterprise feature set.
See how Poll Everywhere compares to SlidesWith in your setting
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