Poll Everywhere
The original phone-based audience polling tool, built for classrooms and live presentations.
About
Poll Everywhere is one of the oldest live audience-response services: audiences answer polls from their phones via SMS, web, or app while results update in real time. It was founded in April 2007 by Jeff Vyduna, Brad Gessler, and Sean Eby, coworkers at Deloitte Consulting who wanted livelier internal presentations; the site launched in September 2007, the company joined Y Combinator in 2008 with $20,000 in funding, and it moved to San Francisco in 2010. It later acquired competitors ClassMetric and TextTheMob, and its history notes over 100,000 educators using the product. Pricing includes a free Intro plan, a Present plan at $120 per year, and an Engage plan at $42 per month billed annually, per vendor-provided listings.
What it can do
- SMS, web, and app-based live polling
- Multiple-choice, open-ended, word clouds, and competitions
- PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides integrations
- Live results and reporting
- Gradebook and LMS integrations for education
Setup
Sign up free at polleverywhere.com, create an activity, and embed it in PowerPoint or share a link.
Prerequisites
None for the free plan; paid plans for larger audiences and more responses.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 2007 founding, founder trio, Y Combinator 2008 funding, and 2010 San Francisco move all documented on Wikipedia; pricing from vendor-provided listings. Strengths: pioneer of phone-based polling with deep classroom adoption and solid presentation integrations. Docked for: (1) fully proprietary with no open core; (2) product pace feels steady rather than fast against newer rivals; (3) SMS-based roots show in a less modern feel. License: proprietary.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 7.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 1.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Founded April 2007 by Jeff Vyduna, Brad Gessler, Sean Eby; site launched Sept 2007 (Wikipedia)
- · Y Combinator summer 2008 ($20,000); moved to San Francisco 2010
- · Acquired competitors ClassMetric and TextTheMob (2012); 100,000+ educators use it
- · SMS, web, and app responses; PowerPoint/Keynote/Google Slides integrations
- · manual review: SMS-era roots show; product pace steady rather than fast
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.