Interactive displays have become indispensable in today’s classrooms, where technology and pedagogy converge. They transform static spaces into dynamic learning environments, making the complex simple and the abstract tangible. Among the top contenders in this space are SMART Technologies and Promethean, each offering interactive displays that promise to elevate the educational experience.
Choosing the right interactive display isn’t just about picking a piece of technology; it’s about selecting a tool that will shape how teachers teach and how students learn. That’s why we’ve conducted an in-depth tech comparison between SMART Boards (GX series and MX series with iQ) and Promethean Displays (LX and ActivPanel 9 models), focusing on five key features that educators rely on every day:
- Annotation tools
- Integration with student devices
- Whiteboarding content and capabilities
- Multi-user interactivity
- Android app experience
If your school is operating within a tight budget, rest assured—this tech comparison focuses on functionality included at no extra cost, ensuring your investment maximizes educational impact without hidden fees.
By evaluating these brands, you'll see why SMART Boards consistently emerge as the superior tool for education, while Promethean displays may leave something to be desired.
1. Annotate naturally, without thinking about it
Annotation tools are central to any interactive display. They enable educators to bring lessons to life by marking up content, illustrating ideas, and fostering engagement through visual interaction. While both SMART and Promethean offer annotation features, the experience for the user diverges significantly.
All SMART Boards are equipped with SMART Ink, a tool that seamlessly integrates with any on-screen content. Whether you’re writing, drawing, or interacting with an application, SMART Ink ensures that your annotations remain in place in any program as you navigate between different tabs and files. The best part, SMART ink turns on automatically when you start writing vs. having to turn on a tool or ink layer each time you change programs. This creates a fluid and intuitive experience, allowing teachers to maintain their lesson flow without interruptions.
On the other hand, Promethean Boards provide basic annotation capabilities through ActivInspire or Android ink tools, but the experience can be less streamlined. Users often report that switching between writing and interacting with content requires multiple steps, which can disrupt the flow of a lesson.
Educators who connect their Windows or Mac computers to the display will discover that only a single person can interact with the display at one time.
Additionally, ActivInspire annotations aren’t applied to the tab or application, forcing teachers to either scroll through a slide sorter of markup to find old work or redo their annotations altogether. Android ink tools only provide a single writing layer, so switching between programs means redoing work or abandoning it altogether. Users must toggle Android ink tools on and off as they navigate between pages, adding more steps and interfering with classroom time.
For schools focused on interactive, student-centered learning, we believe that SMART is the clear winner in this category.
Point: SMART ✓
2. Connecting student devices for a collaborative, well-rounded classroom experience
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 excel in this area with their two-way device integration built directly into the whiteboard, allowing teachers to connect and integrate student devices effortlessly. Sharing content between the board and student devices is easy with options to join through a QR code or class ID, no student accounts required. This enables real-time collaboration where students can actively participate in lessons from their devices. We especially liked the precise control teachers had over which pages students can contribute to and the built-in polling and brainstorming templates for devices.
Promethean Displays sunsetted its ClassFlow platform in 2023. Currently, they do not offer any included solution to broadcast to multiple student devices or solicit student contributions. For schools with extra budget, a paid subscription to Explain Everything connects a maximum of eight devices. But what about the other 22 students in the class?
For educators seeking a smooth, integrated experience that encourages student interaction, SMART Boards once again take the lead.
Point: SMART ✓
3. Whiteboard: A teacher's best friend
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 Boards with iQ come equipped with SMART’s whiteboard app. The whiteboard app functions much like a traditional whiteboard but with the added ability to embed both images and video, save work, and easily share it with students. We especially liked how fast it was to use the integrated image and video search, which bypasses YouTube ads.
This is the app that really shows SMART’s tenure and expertise in education, offering tools that truly support learning and pedagogy. Their research-based approach delivers activities and features that foster active classrooms and engage students through hands-on, flexible, and collaborative learning.
In contrast, Promethean’s whiteboard app requires more effort to bring in elements, as these resources must be accessed via a browser or saved ahead of time to cloud storage. Like most displays, it works great with a split screen, but that adds the extra time and distraction of searching for content, accessing other websites, or watching YouTube ads. Creating interactive activities for students is best done ahead of time, limiting what teachers can easily do on the fly. And for that, SMART Boards are a more efficient option for busy educators.
Point: SMART ✓
4. Let students get hands-on for collaborative learning
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.
All SMART Boards are designed with advanced touch technology focused on interpreting the different ways students touch the board. When our team got hands-on, we found that 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 collage project. This meant that students could work together without worrying about the technology - an essential functionality for group activities.
While Promethean Displays also offer multi-touch capabilities, once two or more people started touching, the experience wasn’t as smooth. Teachers and students can easily write together, but we noticed a lot of conflict when trying to move objects and erase at the same time.Users must coordinate with their peers which leads to conflicts and frustration for all users. I expect that this could discourage teacher and student usage and limit the effectiveness of collaborative learning activities.
Point: SMART ✓
5. Access to your favorite Android apps
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 offered comparable access to Google Mobile Services and Google Play, so we looked at how each display’s tools helped teachers teach with their favorite apps.
On a SMART Board with iQ, ink is activated automatically when we pick up the pen, and still allows us to interact with apps and content like we were used to with their Windows & Mac software. The basic screenshot tool made it easy to capture screens to share with students or import into the whiteboard. Switching applications is fast.
We also really loved the option to save the ink markup, which kept the ink editable on top of the screenshot, so students could easily revise and add notes in the iQ whiteboard.
Accessing and using Android apps on the Promethean is quite similar, however, there are a few issues that make a difference to teachers. Users cannot interact with the content in the app while the ink is selected and visible on the screen. Users must hide the annotation overlay, manipulate the app, and then re-show the ink, adding multiple steps, interrupting lesson flow, and creating many frustrations along the way. It was also slower, running Android 12 with half the RAM of the SMART MX.
We liked that the Promethean screenshot tool had a crop feature, and capturing the image directly to the whiteboard saved a few clicks, but it wasn’t enough to come out on top. The ink and elements in the screenshot are no longer editable, making the screenshot a standard image.
Point: SMART ✓
The Best Smart Board: The Original SMART Board!
While both SMART Boards and Promethean Boards offer valuable tools for the classroom, the differences in user experience, ease of use, and overall functionality are significant. Teachers using Promethean may spend more time navigating menus and features, whereas SMART Boards provide a streamlined, intuitive platform designed specifically for education.
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 today and let us show you how SMART comes out on top: