Tarphi vs Mentimeter: Which One Makes Teaching More Interactive?

If you’ve run interactive sessions before, there’s a good chance you’ve tried Mentimeter, the polished presentation tool with live polls, word clouds, quizzes, and Q&A. It’s loved in staff meetings, conferences, workshops, and university lectures because it turns one-way slides into two-way conversations.

Tarphi, on the other hand, was built for something a bit different. Instead of focusing mainly on presentations, Tarphi wraps the whole K–12 teaching workflow into one platform: Create > Present > Assign > Assess. It combines game-based quizzes, calm study modes, flashcards, live teaching tools, curriculum-aligned AI authoring, assignments and deep reports designed for real classrooms.

So how do these two tools compare? And which one actually fits your classroom, or school? Let’s break down Tarphi vs Mentimeter in detail.

Mentimeter is a web-based interactive presentation platform that turns traditional one-way lectures into participatory sessions. Presenters build slides with questions like polls, word clouds, quizzes, or Q&A, then let audiences join from their phones via code, link, or QR. Responses show up instantly as charts, rankings, or word clouds.

Mentimeter is known for:

• Live polls, quizzes, word clouds, and surveys

• Clean, professional slide designs

• Anonymous Q&A to surface questions from shy participants

• Emoji reactions and live feedback

• Simple exports and summaries after a session

It’s a fantastic choice for meetings, workshops, training sessions, and one-off events where the main goal is interaction and feedback during a presentation.

Tarphi is a complete K-12 instruction and assessment platform that includes game-based quizzing but goes much further. It’s designed for everyday classroom teaching, not just one-off presentations or events. Tarphi combines activities, lessons, practice tools, games, assignments, and analytics into a single, teacher-friendly system.

Tarphi focuses on:

• Curriculum-aligned & AI-powered quiz and lesson creation

• Flexible game modes

• Deeper assessment and mastery tools

• Assignments with teacher controls 

• Detailed class, student, and question-level reports

In Tarphi, you can create quizzes or lessons either manually or using Tarphi AI. Then you can repurpose that content using 5 modes such as presentation, study, flashcard, solo games, and competitive games. Unlike presentation-first tools, where everything starts from slides, Tarphi is built around the actual flow of teaching.

Mentimeter: Interactive Questions Inside Presentations

Mentimeter’s core is building interactive slides:

• Multiple Choice questions

• Word Clouds

• Ranking & Scale questions

• Open-Ended questions

• Quiz slides (Select Answer / Type Answer with leaderboards)

You can start from scratch, or use templates, add images, text, and videos to slides, include live Q&A slides with anonymous questions, import PowerPoint / PDF / Keynote, and use basic AI helpers to quickly draft quizzes, surveys, or polls.

However, Mentimeter’s question types are designed mainly for feedback, opinion-gathering, and lightweight knowledge checks. Most question types don’t score or track detailed learning progress over time; quizzes can show a countdown timer, scores, and a leaderboard, but the platform is not built as a full assessment system.

Tarphi: Instruction-Ready AI Authoring with Real Pedagogy

Tarphi treats activity creation as part of actual teaching, not just making a slide more interesting. With Tarphi, you can create 3 types of activities manually or using AI:

• Quizzes (8 different types

• Collect Opinions (Live Polls, Linear Scale, etc.)

• Presentation Slides (8 different layouts)

Question Types That Match Classroom Needs

Tarphi offers 8 different quiz formats: Multiple Choice, True/False, Short Answer, Fill in the Blank, Match Up, Match Sequence, Word Scramble, and Sentence Scramble. These formats let you assess math skills, grammar & phonics, reading & comprehension and vocabulary.

Mentimeter can check understanding or collect opinions, but it doesn’t give you this range of pedagogy-aware question formats.

AI with Curriculum-Ready Content

Tarphi’s AI is built for K–12 teachers who care about curriculum alignment. You can control grade level, curriculum standards, DOK level, Bloom’s Taxonomy levels, and Lexile reading levels. Tarphi uses these to generate instruction-ready questions and activities, not just generic quiz items. That means less rewriting, fewer edits, and more time teaching.

Mentimeter’s AI can help you quickly create questions or surveys, but it doesn’t support curriculum standards, DOK level, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and Lexile levels. 

Answer Explanations & Rich Media

Tarphi lets you add a detailed explanation to every question. Students don’t just see “Correct / Incorrect”; they see why an answer is right or wrong, which is huge for learning. On top of that, Tarphi supports image, GIFs, audio and videos. Mentimeter supports images, video, but not GIFs or audio responses. And it doesn’t have a dedicated explanation panel per question.

AI Modify for Differentiation

Tarphi’s AI Modify lets you instantly adjust difficulty, change reading level, adjust wording, and more. You can adapt a quiz for different groups without recreating everything from scratch. Mentimeter doesn’t provide this kind of differentiation tool for classroom use.

Who wins?

• Mentimeter is quick and polished. Use it if you just want to make a presentation interactive.

• Use Tarphi if you want curriculum-ready activities, deeper question types, explanations, and AI built around K-12.

Mentimeter: Interactive Presentation Experience

Mentimeter offers two different modes that control how participants move through content:

• Presentation Mode (default): Presenter controls the pace and what slide participants see.

• Survey Mode: Participants progress through all questions independently, like a survey.

The Presentation Mode is good for live sessions and the Survey Mode is good for self-paced responses.

Tarphi: Modes Built for Teaching, Practice & Games

Tarphi gives teachers several ways to run a lesson, practice, or review without switching platforms. You can teach, quiz, or let students study on their own, all using the same activity.

Presentation Mode

Tarphi’s Presentation Mode feels like a live teaching hub. You can move slide-by-slide to explain new concepts, highlight key points, draw on the screen, and use effects to maintain attention. At any moment, you can launch a quiz without restarting or requiring students to join a game session.

Navigation can be teacher-controlled or automated, and additional supports like leaderboards, remote control, text-to-speech, magic effects, and annotation tools make lessons more accessible and interactive. Compared to Mentimeter’s presentation flow, this offers far more classroom-focused flexibility.

Study Mode

Study Mode supports independent, self-paced practice. Students interact with questions using drag-and-drop, touch, and swipe gestures, all within a calm environment with ambient sounds and soft visual effects. Instead of competitive urgency, Study Mode emphasizes mastery and academic focus, ideal for homework and test preparation.

Flashcards Mode

Flashcard Mode transforms any quiz into an interactive set of digital flashcards automatically. Students can flip cards, review content, and mark what they know or don’t know to build mastery over time. This mode turns every activity into a flexible study tool teachers can reuse without recreating content, making it especially useful for vocabulary, key terms, or pre-exam practice.

Review Games

Tarphi includes a set of solo and competitive review games that wrap learning content in fun mechanics. Students can play individually or participate in live classroom challenges like Classic Play, Squad Battle, or Precision Run. Each game emphasizes accuracy and knowledge while still delivering excitement and replay value, offering a balance between engagement and learning effectiveness.

Who wins?

• Mentimeter offers live presentations and self-paced surveys for engaging audiences.

• Tarphi makes switching between Presentation mode, Study mode, Flashcard mode, and review games seamless, giving teachers a more powerful and classroom-ready experience overall.

Mentimeter: Session-Based, Not Actual Homework

Mentimeter is primarily built around live or scheduled sessions. But it doesn’t provide dedicated homework for students with deadlines, multiple attempts, or structured progression. There’s no built-in concept of assignments with per-student tracking over time; it’s more about event-based participation than ongoing coursework.

Tarphi: Classroom-Tuned Assignment Controls

Tarphi treats assignments as part of your lesson planning, not an afterthought. You can turn any quiz or lesson into an assignment, set deadlines, add/remove timers, decide whether students can retry and how many times, choose whether to show/hide answers, and toggle the leaderboard on or off. It also lets students pick Study Mode or Solo Game Mode when completing homework.

Who wins?

• Mentimeter is fine for quick surveys or one-off audience check-ins.

• Use Tarphi if you want real homework or assignments that connect to your teaching and reporting.

Mentimeter: Live Feedback & Simple Exports

Mentimeter provides:

• Session summaries with total votes and participation.

• Question-level charts (bar graphs, word clouds, distributions).

• The ability to compare results across multiple runs of the same presentation.

This works well for gathering quick insights, capturing audience sentiment, opinions, and evaluating workshop or lesson engagement at a surface level. But it doesn’t focus on tracking student skill growth, mastery of standards, or long-term performance across multiple assignments.

Tarphi Reporting: Instructional Analytics You Can Teach With

With Tarphi reports, you can see class-wide summaries as well as individual student-level details. Also, you can review question-by-question accuracy and difficulty, track total questions answered, compare correct vs incorrect percentages, monitor points earned per student, analyze average time per question, spot fastest and slowest responses and identify patterns and common misconceptions.

Who wins?

• Mentimeter’s reporting is great for presenters who just need snapshots of audience responses.

• Tarphi’s report supports teachers who need to drill from class performance into question-level data, student-level mastery, and time-on-task insights to make real instructional decisions.

Mentimeter: Engagement & Feedback, Less Curriculum Depth

From a teaching perspective, Mentimeter is excellent at:

• Breaking up lectures

• Getting participation from quiet students (anonymous Q&A)

• Surfacing opinions and prior knowledge

• Running quick comprehension checks

But from a K–12 pedagogy standpoint, Mentimeter has some clear gaps. You cannot tag questions with grade levels, standards, Depth of Knowledge, or Bloom’s Taxonomy. You can still ask good questions, but the platform doesn’t help structure them around formal learning goals.

Most features revolve around engagement during a session (polls, word clouds, Q&A). It’s not designed as a full assessment or practice system, so teachers must do extra work to translate Mentimeter results into actionable instructional plans.

While Mentimeter supports MCQ, ranking, scales, and open-ended prompts, it doesn’t provide K-12-specific tasks like sentence scrambles, word scrambles, or structured matching that many language and foundational skill teachers rely on.

Mentimeter shows live charts and basic quiz scores, but it doesn’t deliver step-by-step answer explanations, targeted feedback, or granular student-level progress across multiple assignments.

Overall, it’s an excellent presentation and engagement tool, but it wasn’t built to be a core K–12 learning and assessment platform.

Tarphi: Built for Real K–12 Instruction

Tarphi is designed to support actual teaching, not just interactive presentations. When teachers create activities, they can set academic details such as grade level, curriculum standards, Bloom’s Taxonomy, DOK levels, and reading level. Tarphi’s AI uses these options to generate content that fits classroom goals, which makes lesson creation faster and more accurate.

Tarphi also lets teachers add explanations to every question. Students can see these explanations right after answering, helping them understand mistakes instead of just seeing a score. This turns quizzes into short learning moments, where presentation-first tools like Mentimeter generally fall short.

Assignments in Tarphi are fully customizable. Teachers can decide whether answers should be shown, add time limits, allow retakes, show or hide leaderboards, and more. These settings make it easy to adjust homework based on student ability, lesson goals, or classroom style, offering far more flexibility than the simple survey-style tasks found in most audience-response tools.

Tarphi’s reporting gives teachers useful data they can act on. They can see how the whole class performed, which questions caused problems, and how individual students did. This helps teachers identify learning gaps and plan follow-up lessons more effectively than basic summary charts.

In short, Tarphi connects content, feedback, and data in a way that supports daily teaching and real student learning, not just quick interactions.

Mentimeter: Clean, Professional, and Interactive

Mentimeter engages audiences with: 

• Clean, modern slide designs.

• Word clouds growing in real time.

• Live polling and bar charts moving as votes come in.

• Quiz slides with leaderboards.

• Mentimote control.

• Anonymous Q&A that encourages attendees.

• Emoji reactions (heart, thumbs up/down, question mark, cat).

It brings a calm, professional style of engagement, great for older students, staff training, or events. But it doesn’t lean heavily into game worlds, character-based rewards, or classroom-style “play” that younger learners often enjoy.

Tarphi: Engagement That Flexes With Focus

Tarphi hits engagement from multiple angles:

• Live game modes like Classic Play, Squad Battle, Precision Run, etc., for high-energy sessions.

• Animated themes and backgrounds that feel playful but structured.

• Magic effects (confetti, bubbles, blur, drumroll, curtain call, silence) to reset focus.

• Draw tools so teachers can model thinking on screen.

Then, when it’s time to calm things down:

• Study Mode and Flashcard Mode with ambient sounds and gentle visuals.

• Clear UI that keeps students focused on the question, not just the leaderboard.

• Custom background music tracks.

So while Mentimeter is great at “this session is more interactive now,” Tarphi is built for longer-term engagement with learning, through both fun games and focused practice.

Mentimeter Pricing

Mentimeter organizes its pricing around individual presenters, with separate plans for education and business. The Free plan costs €0 and includes up to 50 participants per month, with a single monthly session that can exceed that limit. It also provides access to popular activity types like word clouds, polls, quizzes, and basic insights from responses. It’s helpful for testing or occasional use, but the participant restrictions make it impractical as a day-to-day teaching tool.

For educators, the first paid tier is Basic, priced at €10 per presenter per month (billed annually, excluding tax). This plan lifts participant limits entirely and introduces slide imports from PowerPoint, Keynote, and PDF, allowing teachers to convert existing files into interactive sessions. It also adds result exports in Excel and PDF formats, which is useful for documentation, sharing, and post-session analysis.

The Pro tier for education costs €16 per presenter per month (billed annually, excluding tax) and introduces more sophisticated capabilities. These include advanced design tools for customizing themes, collaborative workspaces to share templates and presentations, co-editing features for team lesson building, and remote control via mobile devices to navigate slides and moderate Q&As during sessions. This tier is aimed at departments or teacher teams that want shared resources and more control during live sessions.

For larger institutions, Mentimeter offers a Campus plan with custom pricing starting at 10 educators. It builds on Pro by adding enterprise-focused features such as Single Sign-On, participant verification, automated license management via SCIM, onboarding support, and usage analytics. This plan is designed for universities or school networks that need centralized administration, security, and adoption tracking at scale.

Mentimeter follows a similar structure for business users, but with higher pricing. The Basic plan is €13 per presenter per month, and Pro reaches €27 per presenter per month (both billed annually), with an Enterprise tier on a quote basis. These business plans target teams who run regular workshops, training sessions, or presentations that need branding control, shared content, and large audiences.

Overall, Mentimeter’s pricing favors organizations with presenter-driven sessions, teams that collaborate on shared content, and institutions with structured budgets for licensing. For individual teachers, especially in K-12 environments where daily usage is common, it can become costly if multiple presenters need access, and it prioritizes interactive presentation features over sustained classroom workflows like homework, practice, or continuous learning.

Tarphi Pricing

Tarphi offers a teacher-friendly pricing structure with three main plans: Basic (Free), Standard, and Pro, plus discounted School Plans.

The free Basic plan is perfect for trying Tarphi and exploring its core features. Teachers can create up to five activities, host up to 10 students per live session, and use limited AI generation (five text-only prompts). It’s enough to get a feel for the platform without paying anything.

The Standard plan ($7/month or $60/year, $5/month if billed annually) unlocks nearly everything a classroom needs. It supports unlimited activities, reports, and assignments, all AI generation from text and URLs, Read Aloud, leaderboards, private activities, folders, slide imports (PDF, PowerPoint, Google Slides), AI Modify, and core classroom tools. This plan is ideal for everyday teaching and gives access to most features at an affordable cost.

The Pro plan ($10/month or $96/year, $8/month if billed annually) provides full platform access and premium features. Teachers get unlimited live session participants, AI generation from text, URLs, and documents, all Collect Opinion card types, Team Mode, media uploads, custom branding, adjustable timers and points, question hints, advanced Draw tools, and Remote Control. Pro is perfect for teachers who want all features unlocked without limits.

Tarphi also offers discounted school subscriptions:

• Standard School: $55/year per seat (minimum 2 seats)

• Pro School: $90/year per seat (minimum 2 seats)

School plans include multi-seat management, invitations, seat limits, and admin controls, features that presentation-focused platforms often reserve for enterprise packages.

Tarphi’s pricing is simple, predictable, and designed around everyday classroom workflows, whereas Mentimeter’s model is structured for large-scale presentations, events, and organizational deployments rather than ongoing K-12 instruction.

Mentimeter is fantastic if your primary goal is to make presentations, workshops, and meetings more interactive with polls, word clouds, and Q&A. Its polished design, easy joining flow, and strong visualization tools make it a great fit for PD sessions, university lectures, conferences, or corporate training. If you often run sessions where adult learners or mixed audiences need to share opinions and feedback quickly, Mentimeter fits naturally.

Tarphi, on the other hand, is designed for day-to-day K–12 teaching. It doesn’t just make lessons interactive; it helps teachers create curriculum-aligned content, deliver instruction, assign work, analyze performance, and support long-term student growth. With AI-powered lesson creation, multiple learning modes (presentation, study, flashcards, review games), flexible assignments, and actionable reports, Tarphi supports the full Create > Present > Assign > Assess workflow that real classrooms need.

Finally, if you’re hosting presentations or training sessions and your main purpose is audience participation, Mentimeter is a strong, polished solution. But if you want something that supports everyday teaching, homework, student practice, mastery tracking, and game-based engagement, Tarphi is the more complete and classroom-ready platform.