A Mentimeter alternative for teams who only need moderated audience questions on the venue screen: approval before display, separate control and display links.
Mentimeter describes itself as an interactive presentation and audience engagement tool. You build slides, and the slides carry live polls, word clouds, quizzes, scales, and rankings that the room answers from their phones. For a lecture, a workshop, or a corporate training session, where the interaction is part of the deck, that is exactly the right shape of product. The teams who go looking for an alternative are usually trying to get one thing out of it: audience questions on the screen behind the speaker. They are not building a deck in it at all. They have a keynote, a panel, or an all-hands where people should be able to ask something, a moderator should decide what goes up, and the venue screen should show the approved question and nothing else. For that job, an entire presentation platform is more product than the event needs, and most of what it does well never gets used.
Questro is not a presentation tool. There are no slides, no polls, no quizzes, no word clouds, and no scale or ranking questions, and there is no plan to add them. If any of those belong in your session, Mentimeter is the better choice and nothing on this page should change that. What Questro is: a browser workspace for the screens in a live room. Moderated audience Q&A is one of four tools, alongside a stage Timer, a Teleprompter, and AI live captions. Each tool produces a public display link for the room and a private control link for the person running it, and nothing is installed anywhere — attendees, moderators, and operators all work in a browser tab. The comparison is not feature-for-feature, because the two products are not the same category. It is narrower than that: if moderated questions on a screen are the whole requirement, is a presentation platform the right thing to buy?
Mentimeter is presentation-first. Its interactive formats — polls, word clouds, quizzes, scales, rankings — are built into slides, Q&A sits alongside them as one interaction type, and the experience is organized around a presenter view driven from the deck. Questro is display-and-control-first. Q&A is the core workflow rather than one format among many: approve, reject, pin, mark answered, and read audience upvotes from a private moderation view, while a separate public display link shows the venue screen only what has been approved. Questro adds a stage Timer, Teleprompter, and AI live captions in the same workspace; Mentimeter covers audience interaction formats that Questro does not have at all. Neither list is a scorecard. They describe two different jobs that happen to overlap on the word "Q&A".
Moderated Q&A means a question stays private until a moderator decides otherwise. In Questro every submission lands in a moderation view that only the moderator sees. From there you approve it, reject it, pin it to the top so the speaker takes it next, or mark it answered once it has been dealt with, and attendees can upvote so the queue reflects what the room actually wants asked. The public display never renders anything that was not approved. That matters most in the rooms where an unfiltered feed is a genuine risk: an all-hands after a reorganization, a public meeting, a customer conference with competitors in the audience. Anonymous submission is useful in exactly those rooms, because people will type a question they would not walk to a microphone to ask, and moderation is what makes offering anonymity safe rather than reckless.
The structural difference is that private control and public display are separate URLs rather than two states of one presenter view. A Questro Q&A session gives you a submit link and QR code for attendees, a moderate link for whoever is filtering the queue, and a display link for the venue screen. Because they are different links, the display can run on a venue laptop nobody on your team controls, the moderator can work from a phone at the side of the room, and the audience never sees the pending queue or the reject button. Attendees scan the QR code and the question form opens in the phone browser they already have — no app store step, no account, no download. The shareable moderate link requires Pro or an Event Pass, and hands moderation to a colleague without giving them a Questro login; on the Free plan the account owner needs to be signed in to moderate.
Choose Mentimeter when live polls, quizzes, word clouds, scales, or rankings are part of what you are presenting, when you want the interaction built into slides rather than run beside them, when teaching or training is the setting and checking comprehension in the moment is the point, or when audience questions are one element of a broader interactive deck rather than the entire requirement. Questro does not compete for any of that work, and swapping a presentation platform for a question screen would cost you every format that made it worth using.
Choose Questro when moderated audience questions are the whole job, when approval before display is a requirement rather than a preference, when the venue screen should stay clean and the controls should stay private on a separate device, when attendees need to submit from their own phones with nothing to install, or when the same event also needs a stage timer, a teleprompter, or live captions and you would rather run them from one workspace than three. It is also the closer fit when you are buying for a single event instead of an ongoing program.
Questro has a Free plan that includes up to 50 Q&A questions, Pro at $19 per month or $15 per month billed annually at $180 per year, and a one-time 7-Day Event Pass at $99 for a single event. Pro and the Event Pass include unlimited Q&A questions, subject to a fair-use cap, plus CSV export of the question log. The Event Pass matters for the annual-conference case: if you run one large event a year, a monthly subscription is the wrong shape for the purchase, and the pass covers Timer, Q&A, Teleprompter, and AI captions for that event without renewing. Mentimeter publishes its own plans and they change; check its pricing page rather than trusting a figure quoted on a competitor site.
Start by confirming the session really is a question workflow and not a presentation: if polls, quizzes, or word clouds are required, stop here and keep Mentimeter. If it is questions on a screen, create the event and Q&A session in Questro, open the moderation view on the device the moderator will actually hold — signed in as the account owner on the Free plan, or through the shareable moderate link on Pro or an Event Pass — put the display link on the venue screen, and share the submit link or QR code with the audience. Add a Timer, Teleprompter, or captions to the same event if the room needs them. Then rehearse: submit three test questions from a phone, approve one, reject one, and pin one, and check the display from the back row where the audience will read it.