In our hands-on comparison of SMART Boards and Promethean displays across seven categories that matter most to educators, SMART came out ahead in all seven: annotation, student device integration, whiteboarding, multi-user collaboration, the Android app experience, included software, and longevity. SMART invented the interactive whiteboard in 1991, and that education-first heritage shows in how naturally its displays behave in a real lesson. Promethean makes capable hardware, and its ActivPanel 10 offers genuine flexibility in how you configure it, but the day-to-day teaching experience is where the two part ways. Here is what our team found when we put both to work.
Choosing an interactive display is not just about picking a piece of technology; it is about selecting a tool that will shape how teachers teach and how students learn. Our team compared SMART Boards with iQ (SMART’s pedagogy-focused operating system) against Promethean displays hands-on, and this comparison focuses on functionality included at no extra cost, so your investment maximizes educational impact without hidden fees. We evaluated seven things educators rely on every day:
- Annotation tools
- Integration with student devices(Active screen time engagement)
- Whiteboarding content and capabilities
- Multi-user interactivity
- Android app experience
- Included software vs subscriptions
- Longevity and staying current
1. Which interactive display lets you annotate naturally, without thinking about it?
SMART does, and the difference is bigger than any feature list suggests. Every SMART Board comes with SMART Ink, which activates automatically the moment you start writing, keeps your annotations in place in any program as you navigate between tabs and files, and can save ink directly into native files such as PDFs and Microsoft Office documents. SMART Ink is the ONLY desktop annotation software supporting simultaneous inking over multiple files and programs, without clunky menus or overlays. In practice, teachers just write, and the lesson keeps moving.
Promethean provides annotation through ActivInspire or the Annotation app included in ActivSuite, the software designed for ActivPanel 10 models, but in our testing the experience was less streamlined. Switching between writing and interacting with content took multiple steps. ActivInspire annotations are not applied to the tab or application itself, so teachers scroll through a slide sorter of markup to find old work or redo annotations altogether. The ActivSuite Annotation app provides a single writing layer, so switching between programs means abandoning or redoing work, and toggling the tools on and off as you navigate adds steps that eat into classroom time. Educators who connect a Mac computer will also find that only a single person can interact with the Promethean display at a time.
For schools focused on interactive, student-centered learning, we believe that SMART is the clear winner when it comes to interactive display annotations.
Point: SMART ✓
2. Which interactive display connects student devices for a truly collaborative classroom?
In today's digital classrooms, student devices play a crucial role in fostering engagement and collaboration. However, if not properly integrated with the front-of-room display, these devices can become a distraction rather than a learning tool.
Both SMART and Promethean offer a fairly comparable screen share solution, so we looked one step further, into broadcasting, contribution, and student collaboration.
SMART Boards with iQ have two-way student device integration built directly into the whiteboard. Students join through a QR code or class ID with no student accounts required, which keeps setup fast and reduces the student data a school has to manage. Students do not just view the board; this enables real-time collaboration where students can actively participate in lessons from their devices. We especially liked the precise control teachers have over which pages students can contribute to, plus the built-in polling and brainstorming templates.
Promethean sunsetted its ClassFlow platform in 2023, and its story here is still catching up. Promethean's Screen Share tools can now stream the panel to student devices for viewing, but two-way contribution is a different matter. For schools with extra budget, a paid Explain Everything subscription connects a maximum of eight devices for collaboration. But what about the other 22 students in the class? For educators seeking an integrated experience that makes every student a participant, SMART Boards take a clear lead.
Point: SMART ✓
3. Which digital whiteboard saves teachers more time?
The whiteboard is a teacher's primary tool for creating and managing lesson content. It needs to be versatile, easy to use, and capable of accommodating diverse teaching styles.
SMART's iQ whiteboard is built around ready-to-teach content. It works much like a traditional whiteboard, but with the ability to embed images and video, save work, and share it with students in a few taps. The integrated image search and ad-free video search were standouts in our testing, letting teachers pull engaging content into a live lesson in seconds while bypassing YouTube ads entirely. This is the app that really shows SMART's tenure in education: research-based activities and features that foster active, hands-on, collaborative classrooms.
Promethean's Explain Everything whiteboard does include integrated image and video search options, but a subscription is required if a teacher wants to create more than three lessons or projects. Bringing in other resources takes more effort, since they must be accessed through a browser or saved ahead of time to cloud storage. Split screen works, but it adds the time and distraction of searching websites and sitting through video ads mid-lesson. Creating interactive activities for students is best done ahead of time, which limits what teachers can do on the fly. For busy educators, SMART is the more efficient option.
Point: SMART ✓
4. Which interactive display handles several students at the board at once?
Interactive displays should encourage students to get involved, work together, and learn collaboratively. The ability to support multiple users simultaneously is crucial for fostering a hands-on learning environment.
SMART is the ONLY interactive display provider that allows multiple people to write, erase, and interact at the same time without interfering with one another. When our team got hands-on, any user could write, move, erase, and gesture at any time, no matter what the other users were doing, just as they would with a traditional whiteboard or a collage project. Students worked together without ever thinking about the technology, which is exactly what group activities need. Depending on the series, SMART Boards support up to 50 simultaneous points of touch, and every one of them is backed by continuous pen, touch, and eraser differentiation for each user.
Promethean displays offer multi-touch as well, but once two or more people started touching, the experience was not as smooth. Writing together worked, but we saw repeated conflicts when users tried to move objects and erase at the same time, forcing students to coordinate turns. We expect that friction discourages both teacher and student usage and limits the effectiveness of collaborative learning activities.
Point: SMART ✓
5. Which interactive display delivers the better Android app experience?
Integrating Android apps into interactive displays can greatly enhance the classroom experience, offering a wide range of digital learning tools and resources for educators and students alike. With the addition of Google’s EDLA (Enterprise Device License Agreement) on many interactive displays, it’s important to understand which displays enhance the integrated experience and which ones fall short.
Both SMART and Promethean offer Google EDLA certified displays with access to Google Mobile Services and Google Play, so app availability is comparable. The difference is how each display helps teachers actually teach with those apps. On a SMART Board with iQ, ink activates automatically when you pick up the pen, and you can keep interacting with apps and content while the ink is on screen. The screenshot tool captures screens to share with students or import into the whiteboard, and saved ink markup stays editable on top of the screenshot, so students can revise and add notes later in the iQ whiteboard.
On the Promethean, users cannot interact with app content while ink is selected and visible. You hide the annotation overlay, manipulate the app, then re-show the ink, adding steps and interrupting lesson flow each time. We did like the crop feature in Promethean's screenshot tool, and capturing directly to the whiteboard saved a few clicks, but the captured ink and elements become a flat image that can no longer be edited. It was not enough to come out on top.
Point: SMART ✓
6. Which interactive display includes more software without subscriptions?
SMART includes its core teaching software with the display: SMART Notebook, Lumio (free version), and the iQ whiteboard and apps all come with a SMART Board purchase, with no add-on subscriptions for the classroom features covered in this comparison. Every teacher in the building gets the teaching experience on day one.
Promethean's model is more license-based. According to Promethean's own product listings, the ActivPanel 10 includes two ActivSuite licenses and a single ActivInspire professional license per panel, with additional ActivSuite seats sold as annual subscription licenses, and some ActivSuite classroom tools require a license or sign-in to use. Two-way student collaboration through Explain Everything is also a paid subscription. When you compare total cost, count the licenses every classroom will actually need across the life of the display, not just the panel price.
Point: SMART ✓
7. Which display stays current longer?
A display is a long-term investment, and this is where SMART's commitment is hardest to match. SMART commits to at least five years of automatic over-the-air software updates from a display's launch, well beyond the three year minimum that is standard for Android-based systems, and was first to market with a purpose-built Android 15 upgrade delivered over the air. For up to ten years after release, appliance-based upgrades such as the AM60 refresh the display's computing without replacing the screen, reaching SMART displays sold as far back as 2015. SMART is unique in the interactive display market in supporting upgrades for models that old, and SMART panels are rated for 50,000 hours of use. For additional information regarding SMART’s computing modules and their compatibility with different SMART Board models, visit our support page dedicated to this topic.
Ask any vendor two questions before you buy: how many years of software updates are committed in writing, and what happens to displays you bought five years ago? SMART's answers are the strongest in the industry.
Point: SMART ✓
The verdict: which is the best interactive display / smart board?
SMART takes all seven categories. Both SMART Boards and Promethean displays offer valuable classroom tools, but the differences in user experience, ease of use, and total value are significant. Teachers using Promethean spend more time navigating menus, toggling ink layers, and managing licenses, while SMART Boards provide a streamlined, intuitive platform designed specifically for education, with software included and an upgrade path measured in decades rather than product cycles. With SMART, educators have the tools to create engaging, collaborative, and effective learning environments, making SMART Boards the best choice for the modern classroom. Book a demo and let us show you how SMART comes out on top.