PubTrivia as a SpeedQuizzing alternative

SpeedQuizzing is the established name in British pub quizzes and it is a good product. Most of what the two do is the same: questions on a screen, players answering on their phones, scores settled by the software rather than by somebody with a biro.

Two things differ, and between them they decide which one suits you.

The first is how you pay. SpeedQuizzing sells credits: you buy them in advance, three credits activate one quiz night, and the credits do not expire. PubTrivia is a monthly subscription with unlimited quizzes inside your plan's daily limit. If you run one quiz a month, credits are almost certainly cheaper. If you run one a week, a subscription almost certainly is.

The second is what a player has to do to join. SpeedQuizzing players download the SpeedQuizzing app. It is free, and it is still a download. PubTrivia players point their camera at the table card and a web page opens.

It is easy to overstate this and easy to dismiss it, so here is the honest version.

For a pub with a settled crowd of regulars who come every week, the download is a one-off cost paid once by each team, and after that it is irrelevant. Some of those players will prefer a real app.

For a room with turnover, meaning a city-centre bar, a hotel with new guests every week, a charity night or a taproom where half the crowd have never been before, it is a real barrier, because every new group pays it again. That is the case where a web page that opens in eight seconds wins.

If you run a quiz occasionally rather than weekly. Credits with no expiry date are a genuinely good fit for a venue that does four quiz nights a year, and a monthly subscription for that is money thrown away.

If your crowd is settled and would rather have a real app than a web page. That is a legitimate preference and a native app can do things a web page cannot.

If you already run it and your regulars know it. The cost of changing a working quiz night is higher than people think, and 'slightly better' is not a reason to spend your regulars' goodwill.

If you run a quiz every week. At that frequency a subscription with unlimited nights inside it costs less than buying an activation every time, and the arithmetic gets more lopsided the more you run.

If the crowd turns over. A room where a meaningful share of players are new every week pays the download cost repeatedly, and that is exactly where a scan-and-play page earns its keep.

If more than one person hosts. Ultimate covers up to five host accounts under one subscription with sessions running simultaneously, which suits a group of venues or a rota.