Gimkit might have the best game design in the live quiz category. The in-game economy — earn cash for correct answers, spend it mid-round on upgrades — gives students actual decisions to make, which is more than most quiz shows can say. It's also, by a wide margin, the most expensive tool in its category for the person most likely to be paying: you.
Gimkit's free tier is thin enough that realistic classroom use means Gimkit Pro, which runs about $10 a month or $60 a year as of this writing. Schools rarely pick up that tab. It lands on teachers, in a profession that already self-funds its own pencils, tissues, and birthday treats. Sixty dollars isn't nothing, and it's fair to ask what else that money — or no money at all — could buy.
One fun fact worth knowing before we get into it, because it explains a lot about Gimkit's charm: it was created by a high school student. And in the interest of full disclosure, so was the last tool on this list — Infinilearn, our own math RPG, built by Adrian Martinez, a high schooler in Orange County, California. Student-built tools have a way of understanding what actually feels fun. We've tried to be as honest about ours as we are about everyone else's.
What You're Actually Paying For
Gimkit's model is straightforward: the free tier lets you sample it, and the modes and features teachers actually talk about mostly sit behind Pro. There's nothing sinister in that — it's a small, independent company, and a subscription is a more honest business model than ads or selling data. But it does mean the real price of Gimkit is the Pro price, and you should evaluate it that way rather than as a free tool.
One practical note before you reach for your own card: try asking your department or admin first. Sixty dollars a year is a small line item next to most site licenses, and a one-paragraph request that does the per-use math — forty review games a year at $1.50 each — gets funded more often than teachers expect. The worst outcome is a no, and you're exactly where you started.
It's also worth being precise about what any live quiz tool gives you, at any price. Gimkit is a review-day event: fifteen minutes of energetic recall practice on a question kit you made or imported. It doesn't teach, it doesn't adapt to individual students, and nothing persists after the round ends. Sixty dollars a year buys a better review day — it does not buy daily practice. Keep that distinction in mind through the whole list below, because the alternatives split cleanly along it. (For a deeper look at that split, see our Prodigy vs Blooket vs Gimkit comparison.)
When Gimkit Is Worth the $60
An honest alternatives post should start by admitting when the original is the right call. Gimkit Pro earns its price when:
- You host live games weekly or more: At forty school weeks a year, $60 works out to well under two dollars a game. If review games are a fixture of your routine rather than an occasional treat, the per-use math is genuinely good.
- Your class responds to the economy: The spend-or-save loop keeps students who are behind on points invested in a way pure leaderboards don't. If you've watched that work on your kids, it's hard to replicate elsewhere.
- You already have question banks: The hidden cost of Gimkit is building and vetting kits. If your department shares solid kits or you import existing banks, you've already paid that cost, and Pro is the only remaining bill.
- You want your money going somewhere decent: An indie tool with a subscription, no ads, and no data harvesting is a reasonable thing to fund, if you use it.
And it's not worth it when: you'd host a game once a month, your budget for classroom apps is zero, or the job you actually need done is daily skill practice rather than review-day energy. A live event can't do that last job no matter how good the modes are — nothing persists between rounds, and every student answers the same kit regardless of what they individually need. Those cases are what the rest of this list is for.
Free and Cheaper Gimkit Alternatives
1. Blooket
Best for: The closest free swap · Price: Free core; Plus a few dollars a month · Format: Live quiz show with rotating modes
Blooket is the obvious first stop, because it does eighty percent of Gimkit's job at a fraction of the price. The core experience — hosting live game modes on your own or public question sets — is free, and the paid Plus tier costs a few dollars a month rather than ten. The mode variety is Blooket's version of Gimkit's economy: instead of one deep mechanic, you get many shallower ones to rotate through, which suits classes that crave novelty.
The tradeoffs: no single Blooket mode has the strategic depth of Gimkit's economy loop, mode fatigue is real by spring, and you inherit the same content problem — any-subject public sets of wildly varying quality that need vetting before you trust them with your class. If you end up shopping past Blooket too, we've written a full guide to Blooket alternatives.
Pros: Generous free tier, huge mode variety, students already know it. Cons: Less mechanical depth than Gimkit, modes go stale, question-set quality varies.
2. Kahoot
Best for: Recall checks on a zero budget · Price: Free basic tier; paid tiers for schools · Format: Live trivia
Kahoot's free basic tier covers ordinary classroom hosting, which makes it the zero-dollar fallback everyone already knows how to play. The energy is real and the setup is instant. For math specifically, though, it's the weakest fit in the category: the countdown timer rewards speed and guessing, which suits math vocabulary and quick fact checks but actively punishes the careful work that two-step equations — 7th grade material — require. Use it for what trivia is for, and don't ask it to host multi-step problem solving.
Pros: Free tier does the job, zero learning curve, reliable energy. Cons: Speed pressure fits recall only, weakest math fit of the live tools, sets vary in quality.
3. Quizizz
Best for: Self-paced review · Price: Free core; paid premium tiers · Format: Self-paced quizzes with memes
Quizizz trades the shared countdown for self-pacing, which quietly fixes the biggest problem live quizzes create in math class: your careful solvers stop losing to your fast guessers. Students work through questions at their own speed with memes as the reward loop, and quizzes can be assigned as homework — one prep, two uses. It's still a recall-oriented quiz tool with an uneven any-subject library, but as a free-first Gimkit replacement for actual math review, it's arguably the strongest of the three above.
Pros: Self-pacing suits multi-step math, homework mode, free core. Cons: Freemium nags, no adaptivity, library quality varies.
4. 99math
Best for: Free fluency sprints · Price: Free · Format: Live math sprints
99math eliminates Gimkit's hidden cost entirely: there are no kits to build, because it's math-specific by design. You start a round, students race through arithmetic, and it's over in five minutes. For grades 5-6 fact fluency — where speed genuinely is the skill — it's the perfect free bell-ringer. The limit is scope: fluency only, no concepts, so it has little to offer a unit on proportional relationships or linear equations. It replaces Gimkit's warm-up use case, not its review-day one.
Pros: Completely free, zero prep, no question sets needed. Cons: Arithmetic fluency only, thin for grades 7-9.
5. Infinilearn
Best for: Daily practice, grades 5-9, at zero cost · Price: Free (optional premium) · Format: Persistent fantasy RPG
This is ours — the other student-built tool on the list — and it's here because it answers the $60 question differently. Instead of a better live event, Infinilearn does the job no live event can: persistent daily practice. Students battle monsters across 15 zones, take on quests and bosses, and every attack, spell, and ability requires solving a Common Core-aligned problem for grades 5-9. The adaptive engine tracks accuracy by topic and pulls weapon-attack problems from each student's weakest areas, so practice targets gaps automatically instead of serving the whole class one shared kit.
The teacher side costs nothing: free classrooms, a built-in diagnostic that locates each student's level, assignment tools, and tracking by topic, standard, and student — details on the teachers page. The full game is free for every kid: all zones, all quests, all the math, no ads. The optional Premium ($9.99/month or $59.99/year) adds deeper dashboard insights and student cosmetics — it never gates math content or game progression, so there's no member/non-member divide in your room.
Honest cons: it won't host your Friday game-show — there's no live event mode. It's grades 5-9 only, multiple choice only, browser-based (great on Chromebooks, no phone app), and newer and smaller than the incumbents on this list.
Pros: Free full game and free teacher tools, adaptive practice that persists all year, no reward paywall. Cons: Not a live event tool, grades 5-9 only, multiple choice format, browser only.
The Bottom Line
If you host live games every week and your class loves the economy, Gimkit Pro is $60 honestly spent on an indie tool that respects its users. If the budget is zero, Blooket and Quizizz cover the review-day job free, and 99math covers fluency sprints without a single kit to build. And if what you actually need is the other job — daily, adaptive, standards-aligned practice that runs all year — no live quiz at any price does that. That's the job Infinilearn was built for, and both the game and the teacher tools are free.