Kahoot alternatives for pub quizzes

You've built a quiz on Kahoot, invited the pub, and somewhere around the tenth person joining, it stopped letting people in. Or you're about to try, and you'd like to know what you're walking into. This post is for you, and it works through what to use instead, grouped by the kind of night you're running.

The short version: for a traditional pub quiz with teams, rounds and a big screen, I'd use quizquiz.co. For a fast, noisy buzzer night, use SpeedQuizzing. For a big virtual event, look at Crowdpurr. For a meeting or a classroom, Kahoot is probably fine and you should stay put.

The three walls people hit with Kahoot

Kahoot is a very good product that was designed for a different room. Three things tend to cause trouble when you drag it into a pub.

The free cap. The free personal plan (Kahoot Go) allows up to 10 participants per game, according to Kahoot's personal pricing page, counting devices that join. Put every team on one shared phone and you can run ten teams, which is a small quiz but a real one. Let people play individually, which is how Kahoot is normally used, and you're done before the room fills. The next tier up, Bronze, raises the cap to 50.

Multiple choice only, unless you pay more. The free plan gives you Quiz and True/False questions with up to four answers. "Type answer" questions sit on the Gold tier, which is listed at $12 a month billed annually. A pub quiz runs on questions like "Which river flows through Vienna?", where the team writes something down. Turning every question into a four-option multiple choice changes the feel of the night.

Speed scoring by default. Faster answers earn more points, which is perfect when thirty teenagers are racing each other on tablets and much less so when a table of four is arguing quietly about whether it was Pele or Maradona. The team that conferred longest gets punished for being careful. In fairness this one is fixable: Kahoot has an Accuracy mode where speed doesn't affect the score, and a per-question points setting. It's the default that's wrong for a pub, not the product.

Comparison at a glance

Prices are in USD where the vendor lists USD, and checked in October 2026. Blank cells say "not published" or "couldn't verify" on purpose.

If you want a traditional pub quiz: quizquiz.co

This article is published by quizquiz.co, so here's the case put as plainly as we can make it, followed by the downsides.

The model is the one most pub quizzes already use. You type or paste in your questions, it turns them into slides, and you put those on the TV. Teams answer in one of two ways, and you pick per quiz. They can write on paper, in which case the site generates blank answer sheets for the teams and a host copy with the answers, as a PDF in one click. Or they can use phones: teams scan a QR code on the big screen, pick a team name, and one phone per team submits the answers. There's no app to install and no player account. Answers are marked automatically and you can override any mark, which matters the first time a team writes "Vienna Woods" and you decide it counts.

Questions aren't locked to a format by tier. Open-text answers are available on the free plan, and the scoring is by correct answers, not by who tapped first.

Music rounds work by pasting a YouTube link and choosing a start point and a clip length, with playback controls inside the presenter. That saves you downloading anything or trimming files, and there's more on it in our music round ideas. Picture rounds let you control what shows on screen and what appears on the answer sheet. You can also drive the quiz from your phone with a remote while you walk the room.

Now the honest part. The free plan keeps 3 saved quizzes and includes 20 AI-generated questions; those are the only free limits, and Pro lifts both. It wants a connection. The slides carry on if the wifi drops mid-quiz, but the YouTube clips stop and the phones drop off, which a PowerPoint file on a laptop wouldn't. There's no built-in library of professionally written question packs, so you're writing your own or borrowing from the blog. It's a small independent project rather than an established company. It has no buzzer format, and it doesn't run multi-week league tables.

If that sounds right, the pub quiz maker is the place to start, and the head-to-head with Kahoot goes through the differences in more detail.

If you want a fast, noisy buzzer night: SpeedQuizzing

SpeedQuizzing deserves real credit. It's been running since 2011 and says it hosts well over 2,000 events a week, which is a claim from its own site but a believable one. It's a different kind of quiz from a team-and-paper night.

The host runs it from the Pro desktop app on a Windows or Mac computer. Players use the free SpeedQuizzing app on their phones, either alone or sharing a device as a team. The round types are the draw: Fastest Fingers, Buzzin', Nearest Wins, Wordsnake and Sequence, alongside steadier ones like multiple choice, picture questions, Bingo and Spin The Wheel. The fast buzz and tap formats are what it's known for. If your crowd wants that frantic energy, nothing else here does it better, and quizquiz.co doesn't try to.

It's priced per night with prepaid credits. One Pro activation costs three credits, covers one day on one computer with unlimited player devices, and includes a pack of 70+ questions. The smallest bundle on its price breaks page is 3 credits for $30, which is one activation, so $30 is the minimum to start hosting. Bigger bundles cost less per credit, and credits don't expire. There's a free demo mode limited to four player devices, which is enough to see whether you like it. I'd try that first. There's a full comparison in quizquiz.co vs SpeedQuizzing.

If you're running a big virtual or hybrid event: Crowdpurr

Crowdpurr is an event platform more than a pub tool. Players join from a browser by QR code or URL, with no app. The free plan allows 20 participants and 15 questions per experience, which is a taster rather than a quiz night. Paid plans scale up in steps to thousands of participants. The Classroom plan is $24.99 a month billed yearly for 100 participants and 100 questions, and the top tier is listed at 15,000 participants. For a conference, a company-wide hybrid quiz or a large online night, that headroom is the point. For a Tuesday in a pub with twelve teams, it's more machine than you need. Our virtual quiz guide covers running one online.

If you want a game-show board: TriviaMaker

TriviaMaker builds grid, wheel and multiple choice games. Players join in a browser with a code, and only the host needs an account. The free plan is tight (2 teams, 20 buzzers, 20 crowd participants, with some styles limited), and Premium is $6.99 a month or $19 a year for 50 participants, per its pricing page. It's good for a themed round or a Jeopardy-style finale. I wouldn't build a whole six-round night on it.

If the quiz is part of a meeting or a work social

Mentimeter and Slido suit presentations where you want live polls and audience questions, and AhaSlides suits interactive workshops and team sessions. I haven't researched their prices or limits for this post, so check their own sites. We compare all three against quizquiz.co in this post.

The other classroom tools

Wayground, Blooket, Gimkit and Baamboozle all come up when you search for a Kahoot alternative. They're school tools, and that's the catch: they inherit the fit problem Kahoot has, and Wayground and Gimkit add rostering and assignments on top. Blooket's own site blocked me when I went looking, so take what follows about that one as thinner than the rest.

A small detail that tells you how current a roundup is: Quizizz is now Wayground. Visiting quizizz.com redirects to wayground.com, and the homepage says "Quizizz is now Wayground". It's pitched at teachers, administrators and districts, with LMS integration and rostering.

Gimkit shows the pattern. It has class setup, assignments and a free educator account, and its Pro plan is listed at $59.88 a year, though the help page doesn't name the currency. Baamboozle is the odd one out in that it says "Play from one screen, no devices needed", but it's still marketed to teachers and students. I couldn't verify prices, player limits or whether any of these support open-text answers, shared-device teams or printable sheets, because several of the sites blocked my research. If you want to test one, do it on a free account with your actual quiz before the night.

The no-software option: pen, paper and a printed sheet

This is the oldest pub quiz technology and it still works. You read questions aloud, teams write on a sheet, you swap papers and mark. It costs nothing, nobody's phone battery matters, and nothing breaks when the Wi-Fi does. For a lot of pubs, particularly ones with patchy signal, this is the right call.

What you lose is the screen, the picture and music rounds, and the arithmetic of adding up scores at the end. You can keep the paper and add the rest: quizquiz.co prints the answer sheets for you, and the slides handle the pictures and clips. Our guide to running a great pub quiz covers the rest of the night.

Where Kahoot is still the right answer

None of this means Kahoot is bad. It isn't. It's excellent for a classroom, a training session, a short icebreaker, or a younger crowd who want to race each other on their phones. Players join with just a game PIN in a browser, only the host needs an account, and the speed-based scoring that frustrates a pub table is exactly what makes a classroom game exciting. It's also widely used, so there's a lot of ready-made content to borrow.

If you're running a quiz for a school, a staff training day or a birthday party full of ten-year-olds, stay where you are. Switching would be a worse experience for everyone.

Which one to pick

If you're running a pub quiz with teams, pick something that lets people answer in their own words and doesn't reward whoever taps fastest. If you're not sure, build one round in two of these tools and watch how a real table reacts. The wider roundup of free pub quiz software lays out more options.