Best free pub quiz software in 2026

"Free" means something different in nearly every quiz tool, and the difference usually isn't in the feature list. It's in how many people are allowed to play.

That's the thing to check first. A pub quiz with twelve teams on twelve phones is twelve people as far as most of these tools are concerned, and several free plans stop well short of that. A tool can have every feature you want and still be unusable on a Tuesday night in a busy pub.

Everything below was checked in October 2026. Prices and limits on these products change often, so follow the links before you commit to anything.

What you actually get for free

One thing nearly all of them get right: nobody has to install anything. SpeedQuizzing is the only tool here with a player app. Everywhere else, people open a browser, type a code or scan a QR, and play.

The participant cap is the whole story

Kahoot is the clearest example, and it's the tool most people try first. On the free personal plan you can add up to 10 participants to a game. Ten.

The cap counts devices, so a pub quiz where every team shares one phone tops out at exactly ten teams. Play it the way Kahoot is normally played, one person per phone, and ten people is a small table rather than a quiz night. Kahoot's paid personal tiers fix it cheaply (at the time of writing, with annual billing shown per month in US dollars, Bronze is $3 for 50 participants and Silver is $7 for 100), so the honest summary is that Kahoot is affordable rather than free once your quiz is a real quiz. The full comparison with Kahoot goes through what else changes in a pub.

Crowdpurr and TriviaMaker both stop at 20 participants on their free plans. For a small team social that's fine. For a pub, it isn't.

Mentimeter is the confusing one. Its help centre says you can keep presenting "until you hit a total of 50 participants" in a month, while its plans page advertises unlimited participants once a month. Those two statements don't agree, and I couldn't reconcile them, so test it with a few phones before you rely on either reading.

Slido is the most generous of the polling tools on participants: its free Basic plan takes up to 100, which is more than most pub quizzes need. The limit that bites instead is content, since free gets 3 polls per slido and unlimited polls and quizzes start on the paid Engage tier.

quizquiz.co doesn't count players. Team play is unlimited on the free plan, along with rounds, questions and quiz nights. Its limits sit elsewhere: you can keep 3 quizzes saved, and 20 AI-generated questions get applied before you'd need Pro. You can build and present a whole quiz without making an account at all.

The tools built for a pub, rather than a classroom

Most of the free tools in that table were built for teaching or for meetings, and they're good at those jobs. Two things in the list are aimed squarely at a pub.

SpeedQuizzing has been running since 2011 and says it powers well over 2,000 events a week. It's a speed game at heart: players race to lock in an answer on an app, with formats like Fastest Fingers and Buzzin'. The only free option I could find is a demo mode capped at 4 devices, and the pricing works through prepaid credits, where one Pro activation costs 3 credits and covers a day of hosting with unlimited player devices. Its price breaks page puts the smallest bundle at 3 credits for $30, which is one activation, so $30 is the minimum to start hosting. Worth knowing before you compare it to the free tiers above: it isn't free, and it doesn't pretend to be. If a buzzer race is the night you want, it's the tool to look at, and the head to head comparison is a fairer treatment than I can fit in a paragraph.

quizquiz.co is the site publishing this article, so take the rest of this paragraph accordingly. It's made for the traditional format: you read a question, teams confer and write it down, and the pace belongs to the room rather than a timer. Players answer on printed sheets or on phones, one phone per team, and you pick which per quiz. The answer sheets are generated from the quiz itself, both the blank ones and the host copy with the answers on. Music and video questions take a YouTube link with a start point and a clip length. There's a phone remote so you can walk the room while the quiz stays on the big screen.

What it doesn't do: buzzer formats, league tables across a season, or a library of professionally written question packs. It also wants a connection: the slides keep going if the wifi drops, but YouTube clips, the phone remote and team phones won't. If any of those is a dealbreaker, it's the wrong tool and I'd rather you knew now.

The free option everyone forgets

PowerPoint for the web is free with a Microsoft account, and Google Slides is what plenty of quizmasters already use. Neither counts participants, because neither knows anything about your players. A deck on a laptop in the desktop app plays with no connection at all, as long as your media is local rather than an embedded YouTube clip, and you can hand the file to whoever covers for you next month. The free browser version is online by definition, so the offline trick needs the paid desktop app.

The cost is your evening. You lay out picture grids by hand, you build the answer sheets separately and rebuild them every time you reorder a round, and you mark everything yourself. Clips are the weak spot: Microsoft's documentation says online videos cannot be trimmed, so you can't set a YouTube clip to start at 1:12 and run for ten seconds. For a text-only quiz none of that matters much, and I say so at more length in the PowerPoint comparison.

The classroom tools, briefly

Quizizz is now Wayground, and quizizz.com redirects there. Wayground and Gimkit are built around teachers, student rosters and assignments, and Baamboozle is marketed to teachers too. They have the same mismatch as Kahoot, only more so. Blooket's own site blocked us, so I can't tell you much about it first hand, and I'm not going to quote prices or player limits I couldn't read on any of them. Kahoot alternatives for pub quizzes covers where each of them fits.

If your quiz is part of a meeting rather than the point of the evening, the polling tools are a reasonable answer and often one your employer already pays for. That's a genuinely good reason to use them, and it's covered in the comparison with Mentimeter, Slido and AhaSlides.

What I'd pick, by the night you're running

A weekly pub quiz with 10 or more teams. quizquiz.co, which is the night it was built for, or SpeedQuizzing if you want a buzzer race instead of teams conferring.

A work social or a Christmas do. quizquiz.co if the quiz is the event and people play in teams. One of the polling tools if the quiz is ten minutes inside a longer meeting.

A classroom, a training session or a young crowd. Kahoot. It's built for this and nothing else on the list beats it.

A big virtual event with hundreds of people. Crowdpurr, which scales in a way the pub tools don't try to.

A village hall with no internet. The desktop version of PowerPoint, with the media saved locally. Everything else here expects a connection for live play.

A one-off quiz for eight people. Most of these, honestly, including the free plans that cap out low. Watch two of them: SpeedQuizzing's demo mode stops at four devices, and AhaSlides' free plan allows five quiz questions in a presentation.

Two things worth checking before you commit

First, test the venue's WiFi with a few phones at the same time, before the night. Nearly everything in this list needs a connection for live play, and a quiz that dies at question three is a worse evening than a slightly plainer quiz that works.

Second, if you're planning a music round, work out how you'll actually play the clips before you commit to a tool. It's the job that catches people out, and the options each have a catch, which we've been through in the best way to play music in a pub quiz.

Once you've picked something, how to run a great pub quiz covers the parts no tool handles for you, and the quiz maker is free to build and present with if you want to try this one.