The best pub quiz software for UK landlords in 2026

Look at the shape of the bill first. UK pubs get offered three shapes: a flat monthly plan, a pack of credits spent per quiz day, and a supplier who sends content or a whole hosted night. A flat plan is easy to budget and does nothing when you skip a week for a bank holiday. Credits suit a quizmaster who works several rooms and wants to pay only on the nights that run. Supplied content suits a landlord who wants the week off from writing.

Then look at what the room has to do. Ask the question the way a customer would: what do I have to tap before I can answer the first question? An app install is a genuine barrier in a busy pub with patchy signal, and it is the single biggest difference between the tools in the table above. A QR code that opens a web page is one action. A store download plus a login is four, and two of them can fail.

Finally, be honest about who is standing at the front. Software does not host. If your bar supervisor enjoys the microphone, any tool here will do the mechanical work. If nobody wants it, you are really shopping for a quizmaster rather than for software, and companies such as Question One will quote for that. If you have never run one, read the how-to-run-a-pub-quiz guide before you spend anything.

The picture round is the part of a British pub quiz that people actually remember, and it is the part that most software handles badly. On paper it is a photocopied sheet of twenty faces. On screen it becomes one image at a time, which changes the pacing: the room looks up instead of down, and the quizmaster controls how long each picture stays visible. Media questions in Quizado carry image, audio and video from Trivia Pro up, so a picture round is built the same way as any other round. The picture-round guide covers how to run one and ten themes worth stealing, though you still supply your own images.

Answer sheets are the other habit worth examining. A phone quiz removes the photocopying, the collection, the marking and the arguments about handwriting, and it also removes something real: the sheet on the table that a team can argue over together. Some landlords keep a paper picture round precisely for that reason and run everything else on phones. Quizado does not print answer sheets and does not pretend to. It marks on the phone and updates the table on the wall.

For the questions themselves, most landlords end up mixing three sources: a supplied pack for the general knowledge, something local that only your regulars will get, and one topical round written the same week. Free and premium packs are in the app. Writing your own question sets, and drafting a topical bar trivia round with AI credits, starts on Trivia Pro. There are over two hundred free questions on the pub quiz questions page if you want to judge the standard before you buy anything.

Plenty of UK pubs already have a quiz machine in the corner on a revenue share with a supplier. It is a different product and it solves a different problem: it earns from individuals feeding it coins on any day of the week, with no host and no crowd. Quiz software earns nothing directly. It exists to fill a slow Tuesday with people who buy rounds, order food and stay for a fourth pint they had not planned on.

That is why the sums work differently. A quiz machine is judged on its own takings. A quiz night is judged on the wet sales for the evening against the cost of the software plus whatever you pay a quizmaster. In most pubs the software is the small number. If the night runs on the free Quizado plan with a staff host, the software line is nothing at all until the room outgrows sixteen players.

One thing worth saying plainly, because pubs get caught by it: music rounds and music bingo need the same music licences as any other music you play in the building. Quizado provides the game, not a licence, and does not arrange one for you. Speak to your licensing body before you put a Name That Tune round in the diary.