Workshop facilitation software: which plans include voting, timers and guest access

Workshop facilitation software costs between $0 and about $20 per person per month, but the number that matters is not the price. It is the tier. Across every major whiteboard, the features that actually let you facilitate (a timer, live voting, guest access, breakouts) sit on a paid plan, and the free tiers hold sticky notes without running the session. Miro puts the timer and voting on Starter at $8 per member. Lucidspark puts them on Team at $10 per user. Mural unlocks edit-rights visitors on Team+ at $9.99.

That pattern is consistent enough to plan a budget around. Every figure below was read from each vendor's own pricing page in US dollars on August 26, 2026, and re-checked rather than copied from a roundup, because two of these vendors show European prices to a European visitor and one of them moved its pricing page entirely this year.

How much does workshop facilitation software cost?

Entry paid plans run $8 to $10 per person per month on the whiteboards, and the live-polling tools price on a completely different axis: Mentimeter charges per presenter and lets an unlimited audience join, while Slido charges by audience size. For a single facilitator running internal sessions, expect $100 to $250 a year. For a team of five, $500 to $1,200.

Two columns in that table do more work than the price column. The free-plan column tells you what you can test, and the tier column tells you what you will actually end up buying. They are rarely the same tier, which is where most budgets go wrong.

Which whiteboard plans include a timer and voting?

A timer and voting are paid features on every major whiteboard. Miro includes both on Starter at $8 per member per month. Lucidspark includes both on Team at $10 per user per month, and specifically not on the $9 Individual plan. Mural handles the equivalent through Team+ at $9.99. No free tier in this category includes live voting.

The Lucidspark case is the one worth pausing on, because the pricing ladder is genuinely misleading if you read it quickly. Individual at $9 sits between Free and Team at $10, so it looks like the sensible first upgrade. It is not. Individual removes the three-board cap and adds unlimited boards, Premium Visual Activities and 1 GB of storage, and it adds no collaboration features whatsoever. Voting, the timer, facilitator tools, the laser pointer and guest collaborators are all Team. If you upgrade to Individual because you want to run better sessions, you have paid $108 a year for more surfaces and nothing else.

Worth knowing before you evaluate: Lucid moved this page. The old lucid.co/pricing/lucidspark address now returns a 404, and lucid.co/pricing shows the Lucidchart plans instead. The live Lucidspark plan cards are at lucidspark.com/pricing. The free trial is seven days, requires a card up front and bills automatically unless you cancel, so put a reminder on day six. Full detail is on our Lucidspark pricing breakdown.

Do workshop participants need a paid seat?

Usually no, but only on a paid plan. Every one of these tools has a role for people who join a session without holding a license, and in almost every case that role does not exist on the free tier. This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the category.

Miro documents its roles clearly. Members consume a paid seat. Guests hold a free Miro account and are invited to specific boards without consuming a seat. Visitors open a shared link with no account at all. But on the Free plan there is no guest or visitor-editing role, so anyone you invite automatically becomes a member. Guests proper arrive on Business at $20 per member.

Mural is the most generous here and it is underrated for exactly this reason. The Free plan gives you unlimited members with view-only visitors, and Team+ at $9.99 gives you unlimited visitors with editing rights. One paid seat can host a room full of unpaid contributors who can all move sticky notes. For a consultant running a client workshop, that shape is worth more than a dollar of per-seat savings.

The live-polling tools invert the question entirely. Mentimeter meters presenters and leaves the audience uncapped on every paid plan, so a 3,000-person town hall costs one $14 seat. Slido meters the audience instead: 100 participants on Basic, 200 on Engage, 1,000 on Professional. Slido also charges more per extra member as you climb, $17.50 then $37.50 then $50 a month, so four facilitators on Professional is $1,800 a year rather than the $900 on the plan card. We work through that in detail on Slido pricing and Mentimeter pricing.

Is there a free plan that can run a real workshop?

For a one-off session with a small group, yes. Mural's free tier is the strongest option because it allows unlimited members and unlimited view-only visitors on three editable murals, which covers a single workshop comfortably. Slido's free Basic tier handles up to 100 participants per meeting with no limit on how many meetings you run, which no other tool here matches.

What no free plan gives you is the facilitation layer. You will be timing sections on your phone, taking votes by asking people to type in chat, and losing the board when you need a fourth one. That is workable once. It is not workable as a practice, and the moment you are running sessions monthly the $100 to $250 a year is not the expensive part of the exercise. The expensive part is eight people's time.

What software do facilitators use to run a workshop?

Most facilitators end up with two or three tools rather than one, because the category splits by job. A canvas holds the artifacts. A polling tool captures the room. A session design tool plans the agenda before the day. And something has to produce the raw material the session works on.

• Canvas and sticky notes: Miro, Mural, Lucidspark or FigJam. Pick on what your company already owns rather than on features, because at this price the switching cost dwarfs the difference.
• Live polling and audience input: Mentimeter for large audiences and unlimited attendees, Slido for recurring meetings under 100 people on the free tier.
• Agenda and session design: SessionLab, where only workspace members need a seat and collaborators are free.
• Generating the options: a blank canvas is the hardest part of any workshop, and none of the tools above fill it for you.

That last line is the honest gap. Every tool in this article gives you a surface, a timer and a way to vote. None of them produces the ideas that go on the wall, which means the quality of the session still rests entirely on whatever the room can generate cold, under time pressure, in front of colleagues. Our facilitation tools comparison maps the whole toolkit, including where each piece stops.

It is also worth separating a workshop from a diagnosis. If the real question is where the organization stands on culture, process or digital maturity, a facilitated session will surface opinions but not a baseline, and you are usually better served by a structured way to score those dimensions across the whole company before anyone books a room. Run the workshop on the findings, not instead of them.

What is the cheapest way to run a facilitated workshop?

If your company already pays for Figma, a FigJam Collab seat at $3 per month on Professional is the cheapest genuine board in the category. If not, Mural Team+ at $9.99 per member gives you the best participant economics, because unlimited edit-rights visitors mean you buy one seat and invite everyone else free.

Two cost traps are worth pricing in before you commit. Miro meters AI in credits on top of the seat price, 25 per member on Starter and 50 on Business, so heavy generative use runs into a second meter. And Miro's license minimums depend on how you pay: none by credit card, but invoicing is annual only and requires at least 10 Starter or 5 Business licenses, with Enterprise quoted from 30 members. A three-person team can buy Miro, just not on an invoice. Aggregator sites claim Lucidspark's Team tier carries a three-seat floor; Lucid publishes no such minimum on its pricing page or in its help center, so treat that figure as unconfirmed and check it in checkout. The wider arithmetic is on brainstorming software cost, and per-vendor detail sits on Miro pricing, Mural pricing and FigJam pricing.

Which one should you buy?

Buy the one your company already owns a license for, then spend the saved money on session design. That is an unglamorous answer and it is almost always the right one, because the difference between a good workshop and a wasted afternoon has never been the whiteboard.

Where the tools genuinely differ is participant economics, so let that decide any tie. If you facilitate for people outside your company, Mural's unlimited edit-rights visitors on Team+ are worth more than the dollar you would save on Miro Starter. If you present to large audiences, Mentimeter's per-presenter model with an uncapped audience is dramatically cheaper than Slido's per-participant caps. If you run small recurring internal meetings, Slido's free tier does it forever. And if the sessions you run keep stalling at the part where the room has to produce ideas, the tool you are missing is not another canvas. Our innovation workshop tool walks a challenge through generation, clustering and a scored decision, so the wall is full before the timer starts.