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Pub quiz software and apps compared

Six ways to run a quiz night, from a supplied host to desktop software to pen and paper: what each one is for, what it costs, and which suits your venue.

Start with the question, not the product

There are six broadly different ways to run a quiz night and they are not competing for the same job. Before comparing any of them, answer two questions about your own venue.

First: does somebody at the venue want to host it? If the answer is no, no software fixes that and you want a supplied host. If yes, you are choosing software.

Second: how often will you run it? A quiz four times a year and a quiz every Tuesday have almost opposite economics: one wants pay-per-night, the other wants a subscription, and getting this backwards is the most expensive mistake on this page.

The six options

Ordered by what you are choosing between rather than by preference. We are the third one.

Pen and paper

The default, and the real competitor

Most quiz nights in the country still run on a photocopied answer sheet, and it is not inertia. Paper cannot crash, cannot lose signal, excludes nobody, and costs almost nothing. It also allows answer formats no software can mark.

Best for
Rooms with no usable connection, crowds who will not use phones, and formats with written or drawn answers.
Watch out for
The marking. Four minutes a round, six rounds, fifty weeks is roughly twenty hours a year of somebody doing arithmetic at the bar instead of serving, and it is the usual reason a quiz night eventually stops.

The longer comparison →

A supplied host

A service rather than software

Companies like Sporcle send a professional host who brings the questions, the kit and the performance. Sporcle describe 500+ local hosts and payment tied to how the night does, so the venue's downside is limited.

Best for
Venues where nobody wants to stand at the front for two hours.
Watch out for
You run their format, not yours, and a share of the upside leaves the building. Coverage depends on whether they have hosts near you, which is worth checking before you plan around it.

The longer comparison →

Dedicated pub quiz software

Built for this one job

SpeedQuizzing and PubTrivia are both in this category: questions on a screen, players on their own phones, scoring done by the software. The differences between them are how you pay and whether players install anything.

Best for
A venue running a quiz regularly, hosted by its own staff.
Watch out for
Check the payment model against your frequency. Per-night credits are much better value occasionally; a subscription is much better value weekly.

The longer comparison →

Game-show platforms

Much broader, much more to set up

QuizXpress is the example: desktop software that drives buzzers, keypads, phones and web players, white-label, sold into everything from pubs to cruise ships to television production.

Best for
Operators running events across several venue types, or anyone who needs buzzers or their own branding.
Watch out for
Capability you do not need is still complexity you pay for, in setup, in learning it, and in what can be configured wrongly on the night.

The longer comparison →

Classroom and training tools

Repurposed, and it shows

Kahoot is the obvious one and it is genuinely good at what it was built for, with an enormous question library and a format that needs no explaining.

Best for
One-off quizzes: a works do, a fundraiser, a team social.
Watch out for
No concept of a table, so teams cannot share a score; a game PIN rather than a printed table code; and a pace designed for a classroom rather than a bar. Commercial use needs a business licence, which is priced per session participant rather than per venue.

The longer comparison →

Audience engagement tools

A presentation with quiz slides in it

AhaSlides and similar tools do polls, word clouds, Q&A and quiz slides. For interaction inside a presentation they are the right shape and the free tiers are useful at small scale.

Best for
A five-minute quiz inside a talk, a workshop or an all-hands.
Watch out for
A quiz night is not a presentation. No teams, no rounds with a break, no standings carrying across an evening, and no permanent table codes.

The longer comparison →

Where we fit, plainly

PubTrivia is in the third category and it is narrow on purpose: a live quiz night in a venue, players on their own phones with nothing to install, teams sharing a score, and the host controlling the pace. It is a monthly subscription, which makes it good value weekly and poor value four times a year.

If you run a quiz occasionally, buy credits from somebody who sells them. If nobody wants to host, get a host. If you need buzzers, get the platform with buzzers. If your room has no signal, stay on paper, and take our scoresheet generator while you are here, because it is free and a decent answer sheet beats a hand-ruled one.

The two questions again

Does somebody at the venue want to host it, and how often will it run. Everything else on this page follows from those two answers, and almost every venue that ends up with the wrong tool got one of them wrong at the start.

If dedicated software is the answer

One free session, all five packs, up to ten tables, no card. Enough to find out before you commit to anything.

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