Curipod vs Pear Deck: pricing, features and which to choose

Curipod is a Norway-based education platform founded in 2019, with its product launched in 2021. It creates teacher-led interactive lessons rather than a student-facing chatbot. Core activities include polls, word clouds, drawing prompts, multiple-choice questions, writing tasks, peer feedback, and reports. Reach Capital described Curipod as having more than 150,000 teachers, 240,000 lessons, and over 1 million students reached by September 2023. Business Insider reported a seven-person full-time team and a $4.6 million seed round in 2023. The product’s identity is consistent across these functions: teachers direct classroom interaction, while AI supports selected lesson-design, writing, and feedback tasks within that teacher-controlled setting. Its classroom format puts the teacher in charge of the shared session instead of asking pupils to use an independent chatbot.

Curipod begins with a teacher selecting a subject, grade level, learning objective, lesson format, curriculum connection, or writing skill. It can generate lesson sequences, interactive questions, short-answer prompts, reading and writing practice, and whole-class activities. Teachers inspect and edit generated material before presenting it. During class, students respond from their devices while teachers review participation, answers, and feedback. The AI activities are teacher-initiated and structured as individual exchanges, not open chatbot conversations. Students can write, discuss, revise, vote, draw, and compare responses. Reports summarize participation and performance, helping teachers identify misconceptions, guide discussion, and plan follow-up work. Students can join without creating accounts. The teacher can use students' responses to decide which idea needs discussion before moving to the next activity.

Curipod is closest to Nearpod because both support teacher-led interactive presentations, although Curipod emphasizes AI-assisted lesson creation and structured writing feedback more strongly. Pear Deck is a strong alternative for slide-based participation, while Mentimeter is better suited to polling and audience response. Google Classroom focuses on assignments and class management rather than the same live lesson format. Curipod suits teachers and districts seeking controlled AI for writing, discussion, and formative assessment, particularly where curriculum alignment and school privacy agreements matter. The distinction matters most when the goal is discussion and revision during class rather than generating a worksheet for later distribution. It is less suitable for buyers wanting open student AI, self-hosting, a public API, or predictable unlimited free usage.

Pear Deck started as an add-on that makes slide presentations interactive, and it became one of the most installed education tools for Google Slides, with more than 81 million installs listed on the Google Workspace Marketplace. It is owned by GoGuardian, the classroom management and web filtering company, which combined Pear Deck with Pear Practice and Pear Assessment, formerly Giant Steps and Edulastic, under the Pear Deck Learning brand. Its users are K-12 teachers, instructional coaches and districts that want every student to respond during a lesson rather than a few raised hands. It also works with Microsoft PowerPoint Online and supports Immersive Reader for accessibility.

Teachers add interactive questions to slides: text, multiple choice, number, website, drawing and draggable responses. During a live lesson, students join with a code and answer on their own devices while the teacher sees every response on the Teacher Dashboard, can project answers anonymously and can lock student screens. Lessons can also run student-paced for homework or absences. Takeaways send each student a Google Doc of slides and their answers. Flashcard Factory has students build vocabulary cards in pairs. A library of ready-made templates and lessons covers social-emotional learning, critical thinking and subject content, and audio can be added to slides for younger readers.

Pear Deck's strengths are its tight fit with Google Slides and PowerPoint, real-time responses from every student, free AI lesson building, accessibility tools and a connected suite for practice and assessment. Its weaknesses are core features such as the Teacher Dashboard and drawing questions behind Premium, a dependency on slide decks and a learning curve for the full GoGuardian suite. Nearpod offers a larger content library and video lessons. Curipod generates interactive lessons from AI prompts. Kahoot suits game-style checks. Formative focuses on assessments with live feedback. Choose Pear Deck if you teach from Google Slides and want every student to participate.