August 19, 2026 · 7 min read
How many people can join a live poll at once?
Every plan's participant limit, the production load tests those numbers come from, and what actually constrains a big live room - written for anyone who has to promise a number before an event.
If you are booking a room for 800 people, "it scales" is not an answer. You need a number you can put in a plan, and you need to know what happens if you are wrong about it. Here is the number for each plan, where it comes from, and what actually breaks first when a room gets big.
The limits, by plan
- Free - 50 people in a live session, 3 published polls, 500 responses each
- Pro - 1,000 people in a live session, 10 seats in the workspace
- Team - 1,500 people in a live session, 25 seats
- Event Pass - 2,000 or 5,000 people for 7 days, bought once, no subscription
These are per live session, not per month. A Pro workspace can run a 1,000-person session on Tuesday and another on Wednesday.
Where those numbers come from
They are not a pricing decision dressed up as a technical one. They come from two load tests run against the production stack, and the results are published in full:
- 20,000 concurrent participants connected to one session with zero failures
- A 2,500-person room answering at 100 answers a second, with a 20 ms median write
- A ceiling of roughly 180 answers a second on the current hardware, which is where the caps come from
Note
The ceiling is published on purpose. A vendor that only tells you the good number has not told you where it stops - and the honest limit is what makes the rest of the figures worth believing. The full report, including how to re-run the tests yourself, is on the capacity page.
What actually limits a big room
Not the connections. Holding 20,000 open sockets turned out to be the easy part. What constrains a live room is write throughput: the moment you advance a slide, several thousand people answer within a few seconds, and every one of those answers is a write that has to be counted and broadcast back. That burst is the thing being sized, which is why the caps sit well below the connection ceiling.
It also explains something counter-intuitive: a 2,000-person room where people answer over a minute is easier to serve than a 500-person quiz where everyone answers in the same three seconds.
Choosing for a specific event
- Count the room, not the invite list. Attendance runs well below registrations, and only people who actually open the poll count.
- Leave headroom. If you expect 900, a 1,000 cap is tight; the 2,000 Event Pass costs less than the anxiety.
- Recurring events want a plan; one-offs want a pass. A yearly subscription for one annual conference is the most common way to overpay.
What happens if you hit the cap
The session keeps running for everyone already in it. Additional joiners see a clear message rather than a broken screen, and the host console shows a live count against your limit the whole time - so you can see it coming rather than discover it. You can lift the cap mid-event by buying an Event Pass; it applies to the workspace immediately.
For the one-off route, see running one event without a subscription. For the full test methodology and the numbers behind this page, see the capacity report.
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