Self-Hosted Audience Engagement Tools: Claper vs Live Polling & Q&A Alternatives (2026)

Introduction

Whether you’re running a conference talk, a classroom lecture, a company all-hands meeting, or a community webinar, engaging your audience in real time transforms passive listeners into active participants. Live Q&A sessions, instant polls, and audience feedback loops make events more interactive and memorable. While commercial tools like Slido (acquired by Cisco) and Mentimeter dominate the market, self-hosted alternatives give you full control over your data, branding, and feature set without per-event subscription fees.

In this guide, we focus on Claper, a standout open-source audience engagement platform, and compare its approach with other self-hosted interaction paradigms including polling schedulers, survey platforms, and feedback collection tools. Each approach serves different use cases, and understanding the trade-offs helps you pick the right tool for your specific event type.

Why Self-Host Your Audience Engagement?

Running audience interaction on your own infrastructure eliminates several pain points of SaaS polling tools. First, there are no attendee limits or per-event costs — host as many polls and Q&A sessions as you want. Second, you control the branding: no third-party logos on your presentation screens, no external domains leaking to your attendees, and full customization of the interaction experience. Third, sensitive Q&A data (like internal company questions during an all-hands) stays within your network rather than flowing through a third-party server.

For organizations that run frequent events, the cost savings compound quickly. A single Slido enterprise license can run thousands of dollars annually, while a self-hosted Claper instance on a $10/month VPS handles unlimited events. For related self-hosted collaboration tools, see our meeting scheduling platforms guide.

Claper: Live Q&A and Polling Platform

Stars: 757 | Language: Elixir | License: AGPL-3.0

Claper is a modern, real-time audience engagement platform built with Elixir and Phoenix LiveView. It enables presenters to create interactive sessions where attendees can ask questions, upvote others’ questions, and participate in live polls — all from their phones or laptops without installing any apps.

Claper’s design philosophy centers on simplicity and speed. The presenter creates an event, shares a join code or QR code with the audience, and immediately starts receiving questions. Attendees see questions appear in real time via WebSocket connections, and the upvoting mechanism ensures the most popular questions rise to the top naturally — eliminating the need for a moderator to curate questions manually.

Docker Deployment

Claper provides an official Docker Compose configuration that includes PostgreSQL for data storage:

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services:
  db:
    image: postgres:15
    volumes:
      - "claper-db:/var/lib/postgresql/data"
    healthcheck:
      test:
        - CMD
        - pg_isready
        - "-q"
        - "-d"
        - "claper"
        - "-U"
        - "claper"
      retries: 3
      timeout: 5s
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: claper
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: claper
      POSTGRES_DB: claper
    restart: unless-stopped

  claper:
    image: claperco/claper:latest
    ports:
      - "4000:4000"
    environment:
      DATABASE_URL: "ecto://claper:claper@db/claper"
      SECRET_KEY_BASE: "your-secret-key-here"
      PHX_HOST: "claper.yourdomain.com"
      PORT: "4000"
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  claper-db:

For production use, place Claper behind a reverse proxy with SSL termination. The Elixir/Phoenix application is remarkably efficient, typically using under 200MB of RAM for moderate event loads.

Key Features

• Real-time Q&A: Attendees submit and upvote questions via WebSocket connections
• Live polling: Create multiple-choice polls with real-time result visualization
• Presentation mode: Full-screen display optimized for projectors and big screens
• QR code join: Attendees scan a QR code to join — no app installation needed
• Event management: Create, schedule, and archive multiple events
• Branding customization: Custom logos, colors, and event themes
• Export capabilities: Download Q&A transcripts and poll results as CSV

Alternative Approaches to Self-Hosted Audience Interaction

While Claper excels at real-time event interaction, the self-hosted ecosystem offers several complementary approaches for different types of audience engagement:

Approach 1: Scheduling Polls (Doodle Alternatives)

For finding meeting times rather than real-time event interaction, tools like Rallly and Framadate let you create date/time polls where participants indicate their availability. These are ideal for scheduling rather than live engagement. The key difference: scheduling polls are asynchronous (responses trickle in over days), while Claper-style Q&A is synchronous (responses happen during the event).

Approach 2: Survey Platforms

For collecting structured feedback after events or running detailed questionnaires, self-hosted survey platforms like LimeSurvey and Formbricks offer branching logic, conditional questions, and advanced analytics. These are better suited for post-event feedback forms, NPS surveys, and research questionnaires than for live interaction during a presentation.

Approach 3: Feature Request & Feedback Boards

For ongoing product feedback rather than event-specific interaction, self-hosted feedback platforms like Fider let communities submit, discuss, and upvote feature requests over weeks or months. These operate on a fundamentally different time scale than Claper’s real-time event focus but serve a related purpose: giving your audience a voice.

Comparison Table

How to Choose

Your choice depends on the type and timescale of interaction:

• Choose Claper for live, synchronous events where you want real-time Q&A and instant polls. It’s the closest self-hosted equivalent to Slido or Mentimeter and works brilliantly for conference talks, classroom lectures, company town halls, and webinars with 20-500+ attendees.

• Choose scheduling polls (Rallly, Framadate) when you need to find a meeting time across multiple participants. These are purely for coordination — use them before the event, not during it.

• Choose survey platforms for post-event feedback, research data collection, or any scenario requiring structured questionnaires with conditional logic and detailed analytics.

• Choose feedback boards for ongoing community engagement around a product or service where you want to maintain a public backlog of suggestions and their status.

For most event organizers, the optimal setup combines Claper for live interaction during events with a survey platform for post-event feedback collection. The two tools together replace the full Slido + Typeform workflow at zero recurring cost.

FAQ

How many concurrent attendees can Claper handle?

Claper’s Elixir/Phoenix architecture (built on the BEAM VM) is designed for high concurrency. On a modest 2GB VPS, a single Claper instance can comfortably handle 500-1,000 concurrent attendees submitting questions and participating in polls. The WebSocket-based communication is extremely efficient compared to polling-based architectures. For larger events (1,000+), scale horizontally behind a load balancer.

Can I use Claper without an internet connection at the venue?

Yes, if you run Claper on a local server (like a Raspberry Pi or a laptop) and create a local WiFi network for attendees. Since Claper is fully self-hosted, it doesn’t require internet access — just a local network that attendees can connect to. This is particularly useful for conferences in venues with unreliable internet or for security-conscious organizations that require air-gapped operation.

Does Claper support anonymous Q&A?

Yes. By default, attendees join Claper events without creating accounts — they simply enter a display name (which can be anything). This encourages honest questions since attendees don’t need to identify themselves. Presenters can also configure events to require moderation, where questions must be approved before appearing publicly, or open mode where all questions appear immediately.

How does Claper compare to open-source alternatives like Mentimeter or Slido?

There are no fully open-source equivalents to Mentimeter or Slido with comparable feature sets. Claper is the closest self-hosted alternative for live Q&A and polling. Framadate and Rallly offer polling but are focused on scheduling rather than live interaction. LimeSurvey provides survey capabilities but lacks real-time presentation features. Claper is the only tool in the open-source ecosystem that combines live Q&A, instant polling, and a presenter display mode.

Can I export poll results and Q&A transcripts?

Yes. Claper supports exporting Q&A transcripts and poll results as CSV files. This is useful for post-event analysis, sharing unanswered questions with speakers, and documenting audience sentiment. The export functionality works at both the individual event level and across multiple events for trend analysis.

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