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We've noticed that quite a few people have signed up for Water Cooler Trivia after looking for Ricotta Trivia alternatives.
And Ricotta Trivia is obviously a brand that, as a team, we've been familiar with for a while. We know that they offer some really good solutions for virtual team building.
I guess you could say they've been in our peripheral vision.
Obviously, what we're building at Water Cooler Trivia is supposed to be a really unique experience, but we're definitely aware of what's also out there and available for teams.
Ricotta is not for everyone, so with my experience in the online trivia space, I've written some notes to give you the lowdown on what I see as the best and worst options available right now in terms of online trivia games.
These are solutions you can integrate into Slack, Teams, and even email in some cases.
At this point, I've spent a huge amount of time inside workplace engagement platforms, and I feel like I've formed some pretty strong opinions on what's actually going to move the needle in terms of team building.
The last thing I want to do is recommend a team building game that's going to add cognitive overhead for your team.
This is why I like games that you can integrate into something like Slack, and then just set and forget.
I would usually start off with some type of comparison table that sets out all of the options available to you. But in this instance, I don't think that's useful.
Because on the face of it, most of the tools that are available to teams look pretty much identical on paper.
I'm sure at this point you've probably tried many different trivia games, icebreaker questions, custom polls, things like that.
And if we were to set all of those out on a comparison table, they all mostly tick the same boxes.
The problem is, feature parity doesn't equal usage parity.
We know that two tools with the same feature list can end up having wildly, and I mean wildly, different adoption rates. And that all really depends on how the daily interaction feels for the team.
People want the same on-paper capabilities as Ricotta Trivia, but they're looking for something slightly different. It's about the feel of the tool and the experience that comes with it.
So, every single tool on this list has come up in a conversation at one point or another with a team leader that's looking for an engagement tool of some kind.
There are a few on this list that I'm more enthusiastic about than others.
Ultimately, you know your team better than anyone else.
A lot of this comes down to personalities too.
If you have a team full of introverts, for instance, you'll probably gravitate toward tools that encourage lower-pressure, asynchronous participation.
I feel like Kahoot has been around forever at this point.
I mean, I even remember playing it around 10 years ago with a team.
And I'll be honest, it was really fun. I enjoyed it at the time.
But back then, it wasn't even something that workplace teams were playing.
It was just considered a fun party game, and now it's been repurposed for the workplace.
From what I've seen, it tends to land well at company all-hands meetings and team offsites.
I think the synchronous requirement is what stops it from working on a regular basis inside of a normal working week.
It essentially fights against everyone's calendar.
I'm just not sure this is the game to build a weekly ritual around.
Because, like a lot of synchronous games, teams grow to resent them because they're having to put time aside in their calendars.
And that's frustrating because, as I said, Kahoot is a fun game.
It's really just wrong place, wrong time.
I like the occasional Slack poll.
But as a weekly ritual, I don't think they really cut it.
It's probably not going to inspire much conversation in the chat. And the problem with polls is that they demand a poll creator every week.
So you'll need someone to really take ownership of that format. And if nobody does, the whole thing is just going to trail off within a month of trying it.
I think it's best to reserve polls for actual decisions that need to get made within a team.
I don't think they're right as an ongoing engagement mechanism.
You might have seen an app inside the Slack marketplace called Trivia from Springworks. And it's totally fine to use.
I think the question bank is probably a little smaller than what we're offering at Water Cooler Trivia.
You could use the free tier if that meets your needs and you have quite a small team.
But I think if you're really looking to build a weekly ritual and you want something that will still feel fresh three months in, you're probably going to need to look elsewhere.
It's a perfectly good option if you need a tool for this afternoon.
So I'm sure you've probably heard of Wonder, Gather, Kumospace, those types of tools, and they sit very far away from trivia as a category.
But in terms of the outcome that you're trying to achieve, they're really quite similar.
Because ultimately what we're looking to do is build more team connection.
And that's why I do think they're worth looking at as a Ricotta Trivia alternative.
If you're not aware of what these are, they're essentially virtual hangout spaces, and you can get your team to chat with each other.
Ideally, they'll start using them regularly and getting that commitment is the hardest part.
Though that can be said for any of the tools in my list today.
I don't see recognition platforms as being direct competitors to trivia.
They really just sit adjacent to it, and any leader that's trying to solve cultural problems is likely evaluating these two categories of tools together.
I know that for celebrating individual work, it makes sense to lean towards a recognition tool.
I've never really seen them have the same level of impact for pulling the whole team together around a shared moment.
That's just not what these recognition tools are about, and that's totally fine.
Though, as you've probably seen, we're starting to get a lot of all-in-one platforms bundling recognition with everything else, which is getting a tad confusing.
I'm pretty sure I mention Donut in every list I write these days. It pairs teammates for casual, rotating chats, and for hybrid or fully remote teams, it's a must-try.
In an office-based environment, though, it can make social interaction feel a little forced.
Donut may have features that help avoid that, but I think it's most valuable when you're trying to create connection between colleagues who wouldn't otherwise run into each other.
QuizBreaker is closer to a direct Ricotta Trivia alternative.
If you're not familiar with this tool, it's essentially for sending weekly trivia questions about your teammates for people to guess.
It's a fun concept, and I've personally seen it click at teams under 20 people.
If you're above that size, the format can start to feel a little repetitive as folks learn each other's answer patterns.
I love an old-school trivia night. With everyone showing up and someone reading out the questions.
There's a shared moment.
It obviously creates a lot of room for team bonding and culture building.
The downside of it all is coordination. I know that there's a big trade-off between async convenience and having that live energy.
But you have to consider what's realistic when setting out a weekly team ritual.
Okay, full disclosure, I'm partial to this one for a reason, and I'm terribly biased.
Water Cooler Trivia is the Ricotta Trivia alternative I would recommend to anyone.
What we do is send a short weekly quiz, written by our team of trivia nerds, to your team via Slack or email.
Everyone then gets to answer the questions on their own schedule. Results and rankings then get shared with you the next day.
Rather than being one of these engagement suites that tries to be everything to everyone, we've been super focused on doing one thing extremely well.
And you'll notice that in the question quality and the way your team engages with the quizzes.
Our question sets are created by real editors rather than scraped from a generic bank. Water Cooler Trivia is asynchronous, so you're not having to deal with scheduling headaches, and it never feels like an inconvenience.
We've currently got around 1,200 groups playing along every week, and just this week we've sent 25,187 quizzes.
And if you go and have a quick read through our Google reviews, you'll see that Water Cooler Trivia has become a weekly ritual for many teams, over many years.
I keep seeing platforms that try to be everything to everyone: trivia, icebreakers, polls, recognition, and virtual hangouts.
The problem is that they often don't do any one of those things particularly well.
The all-in-one option can look like better value on a pricing page, but in practice, you may pay for six features and only use two, and those two may not be best in class.
That's why I tend to recommend specialist tools that focus on one category and do it exceptionally well.
The truth is, you won't know just from the demo.
Let's be honest, demos are optimized to make everything look easy.
We know that the real test happens three, four, five weeks down the line, when the novelty of the whole thing has worn off, and the tool actually has to earn its slot in the workspace on merit alone.
You need to look at the features your team is using inside Ricotta before you consider buying anything else.
If you're evaluating Ricotta alternatives for the first time and haven't picked anything yet, save yourself a step.
I want you to start with a specialist tool for the one ritual you want to run weekly, then add other pieces only if a real need emerges.
Here's a good way to think about this…
You should really be treating your tool stack like your meeting calendar.
And what I mean by that is taking a highly selective approach.
Much like every meeting has to earn its place, apply the same logic to your tool stack.
Try Water Cooler Trivia with your team and see what a Ricotta Trivia alternative feels like when it's designed to do one thing exceptionally well.
