Koji vs EvaSys: A Fair Comparison for Course Evaluation (2026)
EvaSys is the European incumbent for survey-based course evaluation. Koji is the AI-native alternative built around moderated student interviews and automatic thematic analysis. Here is an honest, side-by-side comparison to help QA directors and procurement choose.
Koji Editorial
Course Evaluation Research · June 1, 2026
EvaSys, from Electric Paper, is one of the most widely deployed course-evaluation systems in European higher education, used by over 1,500 institutions globally. If you run quality assurance at a European university, it is almost certainly on your shortlist or already in your stack. Koji takes a fundamentally different approach: instead of static Likert questionnaires, it runs AI-moderated conversational interviews with students at scale and analyses the qualitative output automatically.
This comparison is written for QA directors, deans of teaching and learning, institutional-research leads, and procurement teams who need an evidence-based answer to "which course evaluation tool should we use?" We represent EvaSys accurately, including where it is the better choice, then show where Koji's model produces richer evidence.
The short answer
Choose EvaSys if your priority is high-volume standardized survey administration across paper, online, and hybrid channels — particularly if you still process handwritten paper forms at scale, need deep VLE/LMS survey integration via LTI, or your accreditation processes are already built around fixed quantitative instruments.
Choose Koji if you want to move beyond the well-documented limitations of fixed-scale surveys — low response rates, thin "everything was fine" comments, and slow manual analysis of free-text — and instead collect probing qualitative feedback that is automatically themed into actionable, accreditation-ready evidence.
Many institutions run both during a transition: EvaSys for compliance-mandated numeric instruments, Koji for the qualitative depth that surveys miss.
At a glance
| Dimension | EvaSys | Koji |
|---|---|---|
| Core method | Likert/quantitative surveys (online, paper, hybrid) | AI-moderated conversational interviews |
| Qualitative depth | Open-text boxes, manually analysed | Adaptive follow-up probing, auto-themed |
| Analysis | Dashboards on closed items; manual coding of comments | Automatic thematic analysis across all responses |
| Handwritten/paper | Yes — ICR scanning of paper forms | Online/conversational only |
| Bias handling | Depends on instrument design | Standardized AI moderation reduces moderator variance |
| Closing the loop | Reporting; action tracking via process | Built-in action tracking against themes |
| Integrations | LTI, REST API, VLE connectivity | API + survey/LMS links; shares Koji interview engine |
| Compliance | ISO 27001 certified; EU vendor | EU/GDPR data handling, EU hosting |
| Pricing | Custom quote (not public as of publication) | Custom quote (not public as of publication) |
As of publication, neither vendor publishes standard list pricing; both quote based on institution size and scope. Do not treat any third-party "pricing" figure as authoritative — confirm directly.
Where EvaSys is genuinely strong
It would be dishonest to pretend EvaSys is a weak product. It is mature, certified, and solves real problems extremely well:
- Paper and hybrid collection. EvaSys supports online, paper, and hybrid evaluation, with ICR scanning that captures even handwritten responses centrally. If a meaningful share of your evaluations still happen on paper — common in some disciplines, clinical placements, or low-connectivity settings — this is a decisive capability Koji does not replicate.
- Scale and standardization. With 1,500+ institutional deployments, EvaSys is proven at large administrative volumes and handles centralized, repeatable survey cycles reliably.
- Integration. Full LTI connectivity lets it embed into virtual learning environments, and a REST API exposes predefined data sets to central and local administrators.
- Security posture. ISO 27001 certification gives procurement and information-security teams a recognised assurance baseline.
If your evaluation strategy is fundamentally "administer the same validated numeric instrument to everyone, every term, including on paper," EvaSys does that job well and is hard to displace.
Where the survey model hits its limits
The constraints below are not EvaSys-specific — they are inherent to the fixed-questionnaire paradigm that most traditional Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) tools share. Higher-education research has documented them for years:
- Response rates. The shift from paper to online administration is widely associated with lower participation, weakening the credibility of results. Low response rates remain a recognised technical threat to SET validity.
- Shallow free-text. Open comment boxes routinely produce short, low-information responses. There is no follow-up: if a student writes "the labs were confusing," the survey cannot ask why, so the most useful detail is never captured.
- Manual qualitative analysis. The comments that do contain insight must be read and hand-coded into themes — slow, inconsistent across coders, and often skipped at scale, so qualitative evidence goes underused.
- Fixed instruments miss the unexpected. A pre-set Likert battery can only measure what it was designed to ask. Emerging issues outside the question set surface late, if at all.
These are exactly the gaps Koji is built to close.
How Koji is different
Koji replaces the static questionnaire with an AI-moderated interview. Each student has a short, conversational session in which the AI asks an opening question and then probes adaptively — "Can you give an example?", "What would have made that clearer?" — the way a skilled human researcher would, but consistently and at the scale of an entire cohort.
- Adaptive probing turns "the labs were confusing" into a specific, actionable account of which lab, why, and what would help.
- Automatic thematic analysis clusters every response into themes with representative quotes and prevalence — no manual coding backlog.
- Standardized moderation means every student gets the same calibrated interviewer, reducing the moderator variance and inconsistency that affect human-run focus groups while keeping qualitative richness.
- Formative collection lets you gather feedback mid-module — while there is still time to act — not only in an end-of-term post-mortem.
- Closing the loop is built in: themes convert into tracked actions, so you can document not just what students said but what changed in response.
- EU/GDPR data handling with EU hosting keeps you aligned with European data-protection expectations.
The same AI interview engine powers the main Koji platform (koji.so) for general customer and user research — the education product applies that engine to course and programme evaluation.
Evidence quality for accreditation
For ESG/ENQA, NVAO, AACSB, EQUIS, and programme revalidation, the value of evaluation is the evidence it produces. Surveys give you numeric trend lines, which matter — but reviewers increasingly want to see that institutions genuinely understand and act on the student voice. Koji's auto-themed qualitative findings plus built-in action tracking map directly onto the "ongoing monitoring and closing the loop" expectations of these frameworks. See our companion guide on turning student feedback into ESG accreditation evidence for the detailed mapping.
When EvaSys may be the better choice
Be honest with your own requirements. EvaSys is likely the stronger fit if:
- A significant proportion of evaluations are conducted on paper and must be captured centrally.
- You need a single validated numeric instrument administered identically for sector benchmarking or fixed reporting.
- Your accreditation evidence chain is already engineered around quantitative SET data and you are not ready to re-tool it.
- Procurement weights ISO 27001 certification as a hard gate above method innovation.
In those cases, adding Koji alongside EvaSys for qualitative depth is often more sensible than replacing it outright.
Bottom line
EvaSys is an excellent survey administration platform — proven, certified, and unmatched on paper/hybrid capture. Koji is a qualitative-evidence platform that overcomes the structural limits of fixed-scale surveys with moderated AI interviews, automatic thematic analysis, and closing-the-loop action tracking. The best choice depends on whether your bottleneck is collecting standardized numbers (EvaSys) or understanding and acting on the student voice at scale (Koji). For most institutions modernising their quality cycle, the differentiator is the depth and usability of the evidence — and that is where Koji leads.
Want to see moderated interviews on your own modules? Explore Koji for Education.