Two ways to ask the same questions. They are not two values of one setting — they are different acts, with different costs, and they end differently. This page is what each one commits you to.
Everyone answers together, in the same minutes, while you advance the questions from the host console. You start the room, people join with a code, and nothing moves until you move it.
Not started → Live now → Ended.
You publish a window and share a link. People answer in their own time, on their own device, and nobody is driving. The window opens and closes on the clock, not on your say-so.
Not started → Scheduled or Open → Closed.
The question is not which is more advanced. It is whether the answers have to happen at one shared moment.
Two things, and at the moment you click, neither of them is money.
It is a straight count of your running rooms — not a device check, so signing in somewhere else does not help, and not a queue, so the eleventh fails rather than waiting. It fails at the moment you press start, with the audience already there, which is why it is worth knowing before you plan a day of back-to-back sessions. A room stops counting the moment its session ends.
Nothing advances on its own. Opening a room does not open a question: until you send the first slide, everyone who joined sits on “Waiting for the host to start…”, and they will sit there for as long as you leave them. If you are not going to be at the console, publish an async window instead.
One thing it settles for you, and one it lets you skip at your own cost.
A survey can never be anonymous, and it is not a setting you can change: a live vote knows a device, a survey confirms an address. The reason is plain — with no host in the room and a link that can be forwarded, an anonymous window cannot tell one person answering twice from two people answering once.
Nobody creates an account to answer. They type an address, get a code, and that is the whole of it.
Whether a window is open is worked out from the times, not the stored status: opens-at, closes-at and now, recalculated on every single read. So an expired window is closed even if the scheduler ran late, and a submission after the deadline is refused rather than quietly counted. Closing always beats opening. Only two close times are refused up front: one that is already in the past, and one that falls before the window opens.
Nothing enforces a close time, so a window without one simply stays open until you close it by hand. But then the invitation email has no date to state — it tells people the deadline is “when the host closes it” — no add-to-calendar button appears on the join page, and the run has no natural end, so neither you nor the participants can tell a session that is still collecting from one everybody has forgotten. Set a close time unless you really do mean “until I say stop”.
Still torn? Start one and see — a draft costs nothing until you open it.Getting started