In-meeting vs pre-meeting polling: which tool fits which use case
There are two distinct categories of meeting polling tools, and conflating them leads to picking the wrong one. In-meeting tools, Mentimeter, Slido, Teams native polling, are designed for real-time audience interaction during a live session. The experience is the point: you see the results appear on screen, the audience reacts, and the live dynamic creates engagement. These tools are excellent at what they do, and what they do is different from decision-making.
Pre-meeting decision tools are designed for async voting before the meeting happens. The result is the point: you want to know what your team actually thinks, without the meeting itself influencing the answer. These tools tend to have features like deadlines, automatic reminders, anonymous mode, and a permanent record of the outcome, none of which matter for an icebreaker poll during an all-hands, but all of which matter when you're choosing a product direction or a vendor.
In-meeting polling works for icebreakers, live audience feedback during presentations, and situations where the real-time result is the experience you're creating. Pre-meeting decision tools work for any vote where you want unbiased input, async participation across time zones, or a decision that needs to hold legitimacy with people who weren't in the room. The practical recommendation for most teams is to use both, depending on what the meeting is for, live engagement tools for the sessions where energy matters, async decision tools for the votes where accuracy does.