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Comparing Audience Engagement Platforms: MeetingPulse vs. Mentimeter

With the dawn of remote and hybrid work, increasing numbers of organizations are experimenting with new ways to make their everyday conversations, meetings, and events more interactive for all participants. For many, the answer is to adopt an audience engagement platform that integrates seamlessly with their existing tech stack.

With so many platforms out there, the choice can be a difficult one. In this series of articles, we’ll explore the questions you need to ask to find the right tool for your organization. We’ll help you understand what your requirements are, outline the key features of all the major players, and ultimately, help you find the tool that’s the perfect match for your organization.

When comparing audience engagement platforms, there are four key factors that you should consider in your decision-making process:

  • User Experience
  • Data Collection
  • Features and Functionality
  • Pricing

MeetingPulse is one of those tools, but let’s be clear, we only win when we’re the best fit for your needs. Every organization has a specific set of needs, and every audience engagement platform has a slightly different focus.

Our goal is to help you find the best platform for your organization. We’ve also included reviews from third-party platforms like Capterra and G2, so you can see unbiased opinions from real customers on how the platforms stack up against each other.

With that said, let’s meet the two audience engagement platforms that are the focus of this article: MeetingPulse and Mentimeter.

About MeetingPulse

MeetingPulse is a live interactivity and data collection tool that creates engagement through live Q&A, polls, feedback, surveys, and more. The platform is used by industry-leading companies including Procter & Gamble, Salesforce, and Anheuser-Busch, and is used for town halls, webinars, meetings, and other events.

The software integrates with major video conferencing platforms, requires no downloads, and opens instantly on any mobile or desktop browser. MeetingPulse was founded in 2013. The company is headquartered in San Francisco but has employees in countries around the world.

About Mentimeter

Mentimeter enables companies to create interactive presentations through a series of tools including polls, quizzes, word clouds, and more. The platform is used by more than 90,000 organizations around the world, and features integrations with widely used tools including Powerpoint, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. There are plans available for a variety of different kinds of customers, including individual speakers, large enterprises, and educational institutions.

Mentimeter was founded in 2014, and is based in Stockholm, Sweden. The company now has around 200 employees based both in Sweden and North America.

User Experience

User experience is critical in determining the adoption of any new enterprise tool, but it’s especially important for audience engagement tools. For an audience engagement tool to be widely used, it must be intuitive, easy to use, and simple to learn.

For meeting attendees, who will likely only use the tool intermittently, the user experience should be seamless. They should be able to easily access the platform from a range of different devices. Sign up should be smooth, and participation should feel effortless.

For meeting organizers and event planners, it’s important that the platform offers more powerful management tools. However, the user experience should still be simple to navigate, minimizing the likelihood of errors during events. Let’s explore the user experience offered by both MeetingPulse and Mentimeter:

MeetingPulse: User Experience

MeetingPulse is straightforward for meeting attendees to use. There’s no need to download any additional software. The platform integrates with all major video conferencing platforms, including Zoom, WebEx, and Microsoft Teams. Attendees can join meetings from any device, using either a QR code or a short link.

During the meeting or event, there are twelve different audience engagement modules, each of which are highly intuitive and require little to no explanation for attendees to use. MeetingPulse also offers a streamlined back-end. Organizers of all kinds of meetings benefit from an easy-to-use interface with sophisticated features.

For larger events, including conferences, live streams, and town halls, there’s a range of even more advanced features, including custom branding and a powerful API. There’s also the MeetingPulse Experts program, which helps event organizers connect with event technology providers to create memorable experiences for all attendees.

Mentimeter: User Experience

Mentimeter also offers users a relatively simple experience. Meeting organizers can integrate Mentimeter with their Powerpoint presentations, and audiences can use Mentimeter’s audience engagement tools straight from their smartphones.

There are three main ways for meeting attendees to access Mentimeter: with a meeting code on menti.com, by scanning a QR code, or by clicking a voting link. These all work on the attendees’ mobile internet browsers, and there’s no additional software that needs to be installed. Meeting attendees can access any of Mentimeter’s features from their smartphone, including Q&As, word clouds, and live polling.

For meeting organizers and event planners, Mentimeter offers easy to use features that help administrators prepare for events, engage audiences, and conduct follow-up analysis.

For enterprise customers, there’s a range of more advanced features including simple team management and single sign on. There’s also a tailored onboarding process and access to Customer Success Managers to help organizations to get the most out of their events.

What Do Customers Say?

Reviews from users on third-party sites like Capterra and G2 highlight a positive user experience for both MeetingPulse and Mentimeter. On Capterra, MeetingPulse scores 4.6/5.0 for ease of use, while Mentimeter scores 4.4/5.0. Here’s a few comments from actual users of both platforms who left online reviews discussing their experiences:

MeetingPulse User Reviews

“MeetingPulse has a modern UI that incorporates the latest trends in online solutions, meaning that it is extremely easy to pick up, use and understand. The experience has been so positive that after testing it for a few months, I subscribed to an annual plan” — Information Technology and Services Company on Capterra.

“Helps our team collaborate, share ideas, and execute faster than ever before. Super easy to get started. Can sign up, create a meeting, and start collaborating in less than 5 minutes. No more excuses for boring meetings.” — Marketing Agency on Capterra.

“I like that everyone finds it really easy to use. Also that it pops up right in the browser with no apps to download which makes it easy to get people to use it” — Financial Services Company on Capterra.

Mentimeter User Reviews

“Mentimeter is a very simple and yet very comprehensive software to present and discuss interactively with participants. The tool also offers the possibility to visualize data” — E-Learning Company on Capterra.

“In order to use Mentimeter, audience members have to go to a different site and enter a number as well as then view the presentation on the mentimeter site. It can be confusing to toggle between Zoom and Mentimeter” — Design Company on G2.

Data Collection

Audience engagement tools enable meeting organizers to create more memorable, interactive events, but they also produce a wealth of data that can yield valuable insights. Following the conclusion of an event or meeting, it’s important that administrators can view reports and download datasets that summarize audience engagement throughout the meeting.

This data might be used for a wide variety of purposes, including:

  • Tracking learning and development
  • Measuring engagement levels at different points of an event
  • Marketing or sales purposes
  • Analyzing audience feedback on ideas and proposals
  • Identify opportunities to improve future events
  • Collecting votes on key issues

Both MeetingPulse and Mentimeter make it possible for organizers to download all relevant data at the conclusion of an event. There are a variety of analysis and reporting tools available. Let’s explore the data collection capabilities of each platform:

MeetingPulse: Data Collection

MeetingPulse offers users a variety of reporting and analysis tools that can be used to effectively analyze any meeting or event. It’s easy to see a topline overview of the meeting, and users can also customize reports and export raw meeting data in CSV or PDF files for further analysis.

A feature unique to MeetingPulse is the ability to track audience sentiment throughout the event, using the Pulse feature. At any time, audience members can share their feelings or reactions, enabling meeting organizers and leaders to understand how their audience reacts to different speakers, important announcements, or other moments within any given event.

This data is displayed as a timeline of overall sentiment throughout the meeting, and serves to help organizers to understand which moments the audience was particularly excited, and when they were more subdued.

MeetingPulse is also used for governance, as this reviewer discuses:

“We love being able to do polls and raffles remotely. We also use MeetingPulse for voting on issues, which is a great record” — Hospital Administrator on G2.

Mentimeter: Data Collection

Mentimeter offers similar features to MeetingPulse, enabling event organizers to export data in Excel or PDF formats. It’s also possible for organizers to send audience members an email with the results of all the polls conducted during the event.

However, Mentimeter lacks any kind of analysis dashboard, and there’s no ability to customize reports or track audience sentiment. One interesting data collection feature offered by Mentimeter is Trends, which enables meeting organizers to visualize how data changes over time. There’s also the ability to segment audience responses based on several criteria, enabling a deeper level of analysis that helps organizers uncover powerful insights.

One elements that users particularly appreciate is the data visualizations provided by Mentimeter:

“My scrum team uses the voting feature for our Sprint Retrospective. It makes the voting faster and provides visually appealing graphs and charts that can be easily read by everyone” — Quality Assurance Analyst on Capterra

Features and Functionality

It’s important that audience engagement platforms offer their users a variety of different tools. Using the same audience engagement feature over and over again, whether that’s a poll or a Q&A, is sure to send engagement plummeting.

The best meetings and events keep the format varied in order to effectively hold attendees attention throughout the duration of the event. The greater the variety of tools an audience engagement platform offers, the better. Greater variety leads to greater engagement, and the ability to create fun, memorable experiences that adds to attendees enjoyment of a meeting or event.

MeetingPulse and Mentimeter both offer a series of features and functionalities that meeting attendees can use to effectively engage with their audiences. In all, MeetingPulse offers 12 different audience engagement modules, while Mentimeter offers 4, although there are additional tools for presenters.

Of course, there is a lot of overlap between the tools. Both MeetingPulse and Mentimeter provide live polling, Q&A, and quizzes. But there are also differences that will be important as you decide the best solution for your organization’s needs.

Let’s take a closer look at the key audience engagement features available on MeetingPulse and Mentimeter.

MeetingPulse: Features and Functionality

MeetingPulse offers users 12 different audience engagement tools, providing event producers and meeting administrators with a range of ways to interact with their audience, regardless of what they’re using MeetingPulse for. Features include:

  • Q&A: Host moderated Q&A sessions, and enable attendees to upvote questions they want answered.
  • Polls: Run multiple polls in different configurations. Share results in real-time, or analyze them after the event.
  • Dynamic Surveys: Combine multiple polls into one single survey, and distribute it before, during, or after the event.
  • Pulse: Attendees can react at any time to what’s being said, creating an accurate “pulse” of attendee sentiment throughout the meeting.
  • Ideas: Encourage attendees to submit innovative ideas by creating topic threads where everyone can submit ideas, vote on them, and add comments.
  • Materials: Ensure everyone is prepared by sharing meeting materials, links, and files ahead of the beginning of the meeting.
  • Raffles: Boost engagement with raffles that randomly select a member of your audience as a winner. Use them as ice breakers or a technique to collect emails.
  • Announce: Quickly send an announcement to all meeting attendees to share important updates.
  • Video: Use MeetingPulse‚Äôs video solution, or integrate MeetingPulse‚Äôs audience engagement tools with a range of third party tools for video conferencing, webinars, and live streams.
  • Agenda: Allow attendees to drive the agenda by crowdsourcing topics from your audience.
  • Schedule: Create and share event schedules to keep your meeting attendees on track and make sure your event runs smoothly.
  • Chat (Beta): Enable real-time messaging and free-flowing conversations with an all-new live chat feature.

There’s also a host of event management and security tools to ensure that your event remains secure and on-track.

Mentimeter: Features and Functionality

Mentimeter offers customers four key audience engagement modules. There are also additional features for presenters, most notably Mentimote, which enables speakers to use their smartphone as a remote control for their Mentimeter presentation while on stage. Let’s explore the four key audience engagement features offered by Mentimeter:

  • Live Polling: Users can create a wide variety of different polls, including multiple choice, rank order, sliding scale, and images. There’s pre-built templates for inspiration.
  • Word Cloud: Audience members can submit words using their smartphones, which are then reflected in real-time during the presentation.
  • Quiz: Meeting organizers can create quizzes with right and wrong answers, and then administer their quiz to participants, recording answers and sharing results in real-time.
  • Q&A: Audience members can ask questions anonymously, and the rest of the audience can upvote the questions they want answered. Presenters can moderate questions, but only by using the Mentimote feature.

Pricing

Both platforms offer a number of different tiers that enable users to select the pricing plan that best matches the needs of their organization.

Mentimeter offers users the ability to purchase a one-time pass for single events, but only for large conferences. MeetingPulse and Mentimeter both offer free tiers, which make it easy for potential customers to try out the software before committing to a subscription.

However, bear in mind that these free plans come with limited features: MeetingPulse supports events of up to 100 attendees, with 5 polls per meeting, while Mentimeter’s free plan supports unlimited audiences, but only 2 questions.

For larger organizations, there’s a range of options. Both platforms offer a basic plan for $10/month, billed on an annual basis. For larger organizations, MeetingPulse offers a Premium tier for $192/mo, which includes custom branding, moderated Q&A, and a managed sign-in process. To get similar features on Mentimeter, companies have to sign up for an Enterprise plan, for which pricing is not shared.

MeetingPulse offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, as well as a price match guarantee which ensures users will never pay more for MeetingPulse than a comparable platform. Mentimeter doesn’t seem to offer either of these guarantees but does offer lower pricing to the educational market.

Choosing the Right Platform for Your Needs

Both MeetingPulse and Mentimeter offer customers a variety of audience engagement tools. Using either of these platforms will help an organization take in-person, hybrid, or fully remote events to the next level. Both score highly on review sites: MeetingPulse receives a 4.8/5.0 overall rating on Capterra, while Mentimeter scores 4.4/5.0. So when it comes to deciding which platform to use, it’s really a question of identifying which tool best fits the needs of your organization.

MeetingPulse offers a wider range of features, and also includes tools that are well-suited to the needs of larger enterprises, including the ability to moderate questions, sophisticated reporting tools, and enhanced security and encryption capabilities. Mentimeter offers similar tools, although there is not nearly as much variety, and with features like the Mentimote presenter remote, it’s perhaps better suited for teachers or individual presenters.

But there’s no need to rush into making a decision without trying out both platforms for yourself. Remember, both MeetingPulse and Mentimeter offer a free tier, so before committing to a paid plan, try them out so you can decide for yourself which tool is the best match.

Get started today by creating a free MeetingPulse account.

Get started with MeetingPulse today!

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