Koji vs SoSci Survey: Course Evaluation Compared (2026)

SoSci Survey is one of the most respected survey tools in German-speaking higher education: European-hosted, GDPR-compliant, free for academic research, and powerful enough for experimental social science. So it is a fair question when a quality-assurance or institutional-research team asks whether it can also run their course evaluations. This guide compares Koji and SoSci Survey honestly for that specific job — evaluating teaching and learning at scale — and is written for the people who actually procure evaluation software: QA directors, deans, heads of teaching and learning, and institutional-research leads at European universities.

Short answer

SoSci Survey is an excellent self-service survey and research tool. It is not a managed course-evaluation platform. With SoSci Survey you design the questionnaire, distribute the link, and analyse the results yourself. It is free for non-commercial academic projects, hosts data in Germany under strict data-protection rules, and is unusually flexible for complex questionnaire logic and experiments.

Koji is an AI-native course-evaluation platform. Instead of a static Likert form, Koji runs short, adaptive AI-moderated interviews with students, probes vague answers, performs automatic thematic analysis across thousands of open responses, applies bias-aware standardized moderation, and turns the results into accreditation-ready evidence with closing-the-loop action tracking.

If you have research staff who want maximum control over questionnaire design and are happy to do the analysis manually, SoSci Survey is a strong, low-cost choice. If you want standardized, comparable course evaluation that produces richer qualitative insight and audit-ready documentation with far less manual work, Koji is built for that.

At a glance

Capability	SoSci Survey	Koji
Core model	Self-service questionnaire builder	AI-moderated conversational interviews
Question format	Static items (Likert, open text, matrices)	Adaptive questions that probe and follow up
Qualitative analysis	Manual coding / export to SPSS, R	Automatic thematic analysis with quotes
Bias handling	Depends on questionnaire design	Standardized moderation across cohorts
Closing the loop	Not built in (manual)	Action tracking and longitudinal reporting
Accreditation evidence	Raw data; you build the report	Structured, exportable evidence by standard
Hosting / data protection	Germany / EU, strong GDPR posture	EU data handling, GDPR-aligned
Free academic tier	Yes (with limits, see below)	No (managed commercial platform)
Best fit	Research surveys, experiments, ad-hoc studies	Recurring, comparable course evaluation at scale

As of publication, SoSci Survey publishes commercial rates from €49 (plus tax) for paid use, and offers free non-commercial academic use; institution-wide course-evaluation deployment pricing is negotiated and was not published. Koji pricing for education is quoted per institution.

What SoSci Survey is genuinely good at

SoSci Survey has earned its reputation honestly, and it would be unfair to present it as a weak product. Its real strengths matter to academics:

Free for academic research. SoSci Survey is free of charge for scholarly survey projects that are not carried out on behalf of, or in cooperation with, a company. For a PhD study, a research project, or a thesis, this is hard to beat.
European product, strong data-protection posture. SoSci Survey is a German product that adheres to strict German and EU data-protection requirements, with a white-label presentation so students see the institution rather than a third-party brand.
Methodological depth. Freely programmable survey paths, controlled randomization for experiments, matrix questions, multimedia items, and fine-grained layout control make it a favourite for experimental and complex research designs that would force you to switch tools elsewhere.
University-hosted option. Many universities run their own SoSci Survey instance ("SoSci Survey at your Campus"), which can be configured to process personal data on institutional infrastructure.

For a researcher who needs control and rigor and is comfortable analysing the data themselves, those are real advantages.

Where SoSci Survey falls short for course evaluation specifically

The gap is not quality — it is purpose. SoSci Survey is a survey engine; course evaluation is a managed, recurring, institution-wide process. Several frictions appear when you try to use one for the other:

It is still a static questionnaire. A SoSci Survey form asks the same fixed questions of every student. When a student writes "the assessment was confusing," nobody asks why. The richest signal in course evaluation — the explanation behind a rating — is exactly what a static form cannot capture.
Analysis is manual. Open-text responses arrive as raw data to be exported and coded by hand, or pushed into SPSS or R. Across hundreds of courses each semester, manual qualitative analysis is the bottleneck that stops most feedback from ever being read.
No built-in closing-the-loop. There is no native action-tracking layer that records what changed in response to feedback — the single thing accreditation reviewers most want to see.
Data-protection constraints on the free tier. On the free public server, collecting personal data under the GDPR is not permitted, and free projects are time-limited (online for three months, extendable, with an interview cap). To process personal data you need the paid pro-server (after a data-processing agreement) or your university's own SoSci Survey instance. None of this is a flaw — it is responsible design — but it means the free tier is not a drop-in course-evaluation system.
You build the evidence yourself. SoSci Survey gives you clean data; it does not assemble it into evidence mapped to ESG, your national agency, or AACSB/EQUIS. That assembly is your team's manual work.

How Koji approaches the same problem

Koji reframes course evaluation from "send a form" to "have a short, structured conversation." The same AI interview engine that powers customer and user research on the main Koji platform (koji.so) is applied to teaching and learning:

AI-moderated interviews. Each student has a brief, adaptive conversation. When an answer is vague, the AI asks a neutral follow-up — surfacing the reason behind a score, not just the score.
Bias-aware standardized moderation. Every student is probed to the same standard, which reduces the inconsistency you get when only the most motivated students write long comments — and helps mitigate well-documented biases in traditional student evaluations of teaching.
Automatic thematic analysis. Koji clusters thousands of responses into themes with representative quotes, so a programme director sees the three issues that actually matter in a course, not a spreadsheet of raw text.
Closing-the-loop and longitudinal reporting. Actions taken in response to feedback are tracked over time, producing the cohort-over-cohort improvement narrative accreditation reviewers look for.
Evidence by standard. Outputs are structured so they can be exported as accreditation-ready evidence aligned to the ESG and national frameworks.

When SoSci Survey is the better choice

Honesty matters with an evidence-driven audience, so here is where a competitor genuinely wins. Choose SoSci Survey when:

Your primary need is academic research or experiments, not recurring institutional evaluation.
You need complete methodological control over questionnaire logic, randomization, and experimental design.
You have research staff who will analyse the data themselves and want raw exports for SPSS or R.
Budget is the binding constraint and the free academic tier covers your use case.
You want a German-hosted, white-label survey tool for one-off or project-based studies.

If that describes you, SoSci Survey is a great tool and you should use it. Koji is not trying to replace a research survey platform.

When Koji is the better choice

Choose Koji when:

You run course evaluation every semester across many courses and need comparable, standardized results.
You want the qualitative "why," not just average scores, without hand-coding thousands of comments.
You need accreditation-ready evidence and closing-the-loop documentation for your national agency or AACSB/EQUIS.
You want to reduce manual analysis for a small QA or institutional-research team.
You care about bias-aware, consistent collection across cohorts and instructors.

Data protection and GDPR

Both tools take EU data protection seriously, which is one reason German-speaking institutions consider them. SoSci Survey is German-hosted with a strong GDPR posture; on its free public server it deliberately restricts personal-data collection, and personal data is handled on the paid pro-server (under a data-processing agreement) or a university's own instance. Koji is designed for EU/GDPR-aligned data handling for institutional evaluation. As with any procurement, confirm the current data-processing terms, hosting location, and sub-processor list with each vendor before signing — do not rely on a blog post for a compliance decision.

The honest bottom line

SoSci Survey and Koji are not really competing for the same job. SoSci Survey is a best-in-class survey and research tool that happens to be usable for course evaluation. Koji is a purpose-built course-evaluation platform that happens to collect data conversationally. If your need is flexible research surveys on a tight budget, SoSci Survey is an excellent, principled choice. If your need is standardized, low-effort, accreditation-ready course evaluation that captures the reasoning behind student ratings, that is exactly what Koji was designed to do.