A quiz in the inbox, or a game show together
Water Cooler Trivia mails a weekly quiz to your team and collects the answers whenever people get to them. Quizado runs live: everyone in the call or the room, phones as buzzers, one leaderboard moving in real time.
Water Cooler Trivia is an asynchronous weekly quiz that needs no meeting; Quizado is live team trivia for the meeting you already have, with buzzers, a shared scoreboard and a host driving the pace.
Quizado vs. Water Cooler Trivia
Why Switch from Water Cooler Trivia?
Nobody is in the room together
An emailed quiz is played alone at a desk. It is pleasant, and it is also the same experience as reading a newsletter with a scorecard at the end.
Quizado puts everyone in one session at one time. People shout, argue about the answer and watch the leaderboard flip, which is the part people remember on Monday.
The bill grows with the headcount
Water Cooler Trivia charges per participant, in tiers, with an enterprise plan above them. A big team is a bigger bill every month.
Quizado is priced per host account, not per player. One plan covers the whole department, and guests join without an account. See the pricing page for the current plans.
No moment to point at
Async play has no finish line. There is no last question, no wager, no room going quiet before the answer is revealed.
A Wager round at the end of a live game decides the whole thing in ninety seconds. Teams gamble their points and the scoreboard reorders in front of them.
One format, forever
A written weekly quiz is the same shape every week by design. That is the point of it, and it is also why engagement drifts after a few months.
Change the format instead of the topic. Family Feud for a kickoff, a Jeopardy board for a training recap, Music Bingo for the holiday party, Name That Tune when the meeting needs noise. Family Feud, Jeopardy and Music Bingo are on Hospitality Group.
Questions that are about anything but you
General trivia written for a thousand companies cannot ask which teammate broke the build in March, or what the product shipped last quarter.
From Trivia Pro, write your own round in the editor or type a topic into AI generation and edit what comes back. New-hire onboarding quizzes write themselves this way.
It does not carry an event
When you have people in one room for an offsite or an all-hands, an emailed quiz is not the thing you put on the agenda.
Quizado runs on the projector in the conference room and on the shared screen in the video call, so the same tool covers the offsite and the remote Friday.
What Makes Quizado Different
Built from the ground up for modern bar trivia and live events.
Buzzers on the phones people carry
A Buzzer Race round turns every phone in the room into a buzzer, and the host console locks the first buzz it receives. No IT ticket, no hardware, no install.
One screen everybody watches
The display window carries the question, the timer and the live leaderboard. Put it on the projector in the room, or share that window on the video call.
Join by QR code
Guests point a camera at the code on screen and pick a name. Nobody creates an account, so contractors and clients can play without being added to anything.
AI rounds about your company
Type a topic and get a bar trivia round back, then edit it. Monthly AI credits start on Trivia Pro, which is how a facilitator builds a bespoke quiz the morning of the offsite.
Five round types, one night
Buzzer Race, Everyone Answers, Everyone Scores, Knockout and Wager, with Music Bingo making six on Hospitality Group. Mixing them keeps a forty-minute session from turning into a quiz sheet with a timer.
A league across the quarter
Leagues and seasons, on Trivia Pro and up, keep a running table across sessions, so a monthly game builds a standing rivalry between teams instead of resetting each time.
What Water Cooler Trivia is, and what it costs
Water Cooler Trivia sends a weekly quiz to a team through email, Slack or Microsoft Teams. The questions are hand written by their trivia writers, the team picks when the quiz arrives, and each person answers inside a submission window that suits them. Results come back as a shared leaderboard, and only the winning responses are shared so nobody is embarrassed by a wrong answer. Setup is quick.
Pricing is per participant, banded into tiers by headcount, with an enterprise plan above them. Annual billing is cheaper, there is a free trial, and schools and non-profits are offered a discount. Prices change, so check their site for current pricing before you budget.
That is a well-shaped product for one specific job: keeping a distributed team talking to each other without adding a meeting. If that is the job you have, they do it and we do not. This page is for the other job, the one where you want people in a call or a room at the same time, making noise.
Live and async are different products
An async quiz is a habit. It lands on Thursday, people answer between meetings, and the leaderboard gives the Slack channel something to talk about on Friday. It costs almost no organiser time, it needs nobody to be free at the same hour, and it works across time zones without anyone waking up early.
A live game is an event. It has a start time, a host, a room or a call, and it ends with a result everyone watched happen. That costs an organiser an hour and it asks the team to be in one place, but it is the thing people talk about afterwards. The energy comes from the shared moment: forty phones buzzing at once, the timer running down, the leaderboard reordering on the big screen.
Most teams that ask about this actually want both, and they cost different money for different reasons. Async is priced per head because every head gets a quiz. Quizado is priced per host account because one person drives the session and the rest join by scanning a code. If you already pay per participant for a weekly quiz, a live tool alongside it does not multiply that bill.
Running live trivia for a remote team
The mechanics are simple. The host opens Quizado on a laptop and shares the display window in the video call. That window shows the join code, the question, the timer and the leaderboard. Everyone scans or opens the code on a phone and plays there, so the laptop stays on the call and the phone becomes the buzzer. No plugin, no download, nothing for IT to approve.
For a mixed session, where half the team is in the office and half is remote, put the same display window on the meeting-room TV and on the shared screen. Both groups see the same board. Teams can be mixed on purpose, which is the cheapest way to get the new starter in Lisbon talking to the sales team in Chicago.
For content, start with a built-in question pack. From Trivia Pro you can add one round about the company: the product, the year, the people. AI generation turns a topic into a bar trivia round in seconds, and everything can be edited before it goes on screen. Audience voting lets the room decide an answer together when you want the whole meeting involved in one question rather than competing over it.
Who should stay, who should switch
Stay with Water Cooler Trivia if...
Async wins whenever the calendar is the problem.
- +Your team is spread over too many time zones to meet
- +You want engagement with zero organiser effort
- +Nobody is willing to add another recurring meeting
- +The goal is a weekly Slack conversation, not an event
Add Quizado if...
Live is the answer when you have people together and one hour to make it count.
- +You are planning an offsite, all-hands or holiday party
- +You want buzzers, a host and a scoreboard people watch
- +Per-participant pricing is getting expensive as you grow
- +You want rounds about your company, written by you or by AI
How to switch in 3 steps
Try it on one team meeting
Free account, one built-in pack, fifteen minutes at the end of a regular call. Up to sixteen players is enough for most single teams and costs nothing.
Build one round about the company
On Trivia Pro, use AI generation for a topic, then edit in five questions only your team could answer. That round is the one people quote back to you.
Put it in the calendar as an event
Monthly beats weekly for live games. Start a league on Trivia Pro so scores carry across sessions, and keep the async quiz running in between if it is working.
When Water Cooler Trivia is the right buy
If what you want is weekly engagement with no meeting and almost no organiser effort, Water Cooler Trivia is the better product and you should buy it. It arrives in the inbox, people answer on their own time across any number of time zones, and nobody has to host anything. Quizado cannot do that: our games are live, someone has to run them, and everyone has to be there at the same time. We are the offsite, the all-hands and the Friday call. They are the Thursday habit.
Read this next
New to running a night in-house? Start with the bar trivia software overview, then look at the trivia host app if you would rather run everything from a phone or laptop behind the bar.
Frequently Asked Questions
Run your first night this week
Start free with the built-in packs, put the QR code on the TV and see how the room reacts. Writing your own question sets starts on Trivia Pro.
Other comparisons
Shopping around? Here is how Quizado lines up against the rest of the market.
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