Brightful Review

Brightful is a gamified learning platform for online lectures, virtual meetings, webinars, and remote conferencing. It’s designed for both educators and businesses.

With interactive games, live polls, and other engaging activities for use in your live webinars, Brightful makes it easy to keep your audience engaged and attentive.

In this article, I will be reviewing Brightful. If you are looking for a gamified learning platform for your online classes or team meetings, read on to learn if Brightful offers the features and functionalities you are looking for.

Brightful Overview

Brightful is a remote presentation software that allows you to spice up your presentations with games such as trivia and charades. It also allows you to boost engagement by holding live polls and Q&A sessions, during which you can receive valuable feedback from participants.

It’s designed for both education and business. Educators can use it in online lectures, while team leaders can use it during team building conferences.

Also Read: Mentimeter Review

Brightful Features

Let’s start by reviewing the features that Brightful has to offer for businesses and educational purposes.

Games

You’re probably coming here looking for a gamified learning platform. While Brightful doesn’t have the widest range of games, it does offer a decent selection of games that you can use both in education and business.

Here are some games you can play with your attendees on Brightful:

• Draw It: In this game, attendees participate by drawing a picture or figure based on a prompt. It can be a great way to get young kids to correlate images with words.
• Trivia: Trivia games can be used for any purpose and with participants of all ages. You can create a company wiki trivia, for example, or a trivia game for your history class.
• Charades: Again, a game of charades is a great way to test your participants’ knowledge about pretty much anything and help them engage with each other.
• Would You Rather: “Would You Rather” games are great icebreakers for any type of virtual meeting.

There are also many other games, including:

• Yes or No
• Spot My Lie
• Draw and Tell
• Gin Rummy
• And more

Also Read: Gimkit Review

All in all, the selection of games is decent. Hopefully, more games will be added in the future, but for most users, the current selection will be more than enough.

Explore: Blooket Review

Live Polling

You can also create live polls. These are a great way to gauge your audience’s feelings about certain topics.

Perhaps you want to get an understanding of how your team members feel about the new schedule you implemented. Maybe you are fishing for suggestions on how you can make the workplace a more inviting and comfortable environment after implementing an RTO (Return To Office) policy.

Here, too, there are several types of polls. You can create multiple-choice questions, after which you will get visualizations of the answer breakdowns, complete with color coding, the number of participants who selected each choice, and the percentage of participants who selected each choice.

Instead of creating your own multiple-choice questions with preselected answers, you can allow participants to submit their own answers and suggestions. This gives them more flexibility and allows you to get ideas and suggestions you might not otherwise have gotten.

Also Read: Quizizz Review

Alternatively, you can allow users to rate how they feel about a certain question or ask them to submit text-based answers, which will be collected and turned into a word cloud.

Live Q&As

Another useful tool you can use is the live question and answers activity. This allows participants to submit their own questions.

One feature I really like is the ability for participants to upvote the questions asked by others.

Q&As can be really helpful for learning what your students are struggling with, for example. If a lot of students upvote a question, it means many of them are struggling with that issue.

Check Out: Gimkit vs Kahoot

Integrations

Brightful integrates with the most popular presentation and webinar software.

For example, you can use it with Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and others. You don’t need to download any software; it is a cloud-based solution.

Brightful Pricing

So, how much does Brightful cost?

There are two monthly and yearly plans as well as a one-off plan, which is useful for conferences and other one-time events. Let’s explore the monthly and yearly plans first.

The two plans are Bronze and Gold.

Bronze costs $70/month or $336/year, which comes out to $28/month.

It gives you access to all the games and the live polls and Q&As, but you can only use the existing game content. It also limits you to 20 participants per activity.

Gold costs $100/month or $480/year, which comes out to $40/month. It allows you to host up to 200 participants per activity, and you can also customize games with your own content in addition to using the existing game content.

Gold also gives you access to leaderboards, game reports, and game histories. Leaderboards can be a great way to add a competitive aspect to your games and encourage people to try their best.

Finally, there is a four-day plan. It costs $80 and gives you access to everything that Gold does, but only for four days. Thus, it is more suitable if you need Brightful for an event or conference and don’t want to pay the full monthly fee.

Check Out: Blooket vs Kahoot

If you need multiple hosts, you can contact Brightful for a custom plan. This can be an option if you need Brightful for your entire faculty at your school.

There is a 14-day free trial available, during which you can test out the entire platform.

Overall, I think Brightful is too expensive for what it offers. It can be prohibitively expensive for teachers, who are often on a strict budget.

There are much cheaper solutions available to teachers with a much wider range of games.

Remember, even if you are paying $70/month or $336/year, you can only allow 20 participants to join, and you can’t add your own content. If you hold classes with more than 20 students, you will be forced to pay $100/month or $480/year.

That makes Brightful more suitable for businesses who have the money to spend on a tool like this. Still, though, it is quite expensive compared to the other solutions out there for businesses.

Even with the most expensive plan, the limit is 200 participants. If you are holding large conferences or webinars, you could easily exceed that number.

Also, paying monthly is pretty expensive.

I get that Brightful might be adopting a strategy of charging a high price for monthly subscribers as a way to get people to sign up for the annual plan. However, companies shouldn’t do that; the gap between monthly and annual billing should be something in the range of 10-30%.

Instead, the gap here is 60%. You get 60% off if you sign up for the yearly plan compared to the monthly plan.

That makes it less affordable for people who can’t pay for an entire year upfront, which is often the case for teachers who are paying out of pocket.

I do like that there is a free trial, but there is no free plan available.

As always, check the pricing page for updated pricing information.

Also Read: Best Quizlet Alternatives

Is Brightful Worth It?

No, I believe that Brightful is not worth it. It’s not that it doesn’t offer great features; it does.

In fact, the Brightful software is easy to use and offers not only games but also live polls, word clouds, and other interactive features. These activities are not always available on purely gamified learning platforms.

Plus, Brightful has many use cases.

The games make it useful for younger students and older students alike, but it’s not just for education. Brightful can be used for team building, business conferences, and other important use cases.

The interface is intuitive and overall, the software doesn’t have a big learning curve.

Still, I can’t justify the price with so many other options out there available for much less. Seventy dollars a month for 20 participants is just not worth it, and even if you pay yearly, it’s still pricier than similar platforms and software solutions.

Don’t get me wrong: I would be able to recommend it if it were more affordably priced. However, the current pricing seems like a waste of money. Only allowing for 20 participants for $70/month is just a slap in the face.