Koji vs Sphinx (Le Sphinx) for Course Evaluation (2026): A Fair Comparison
Sphinx (Le Sphinx / Sphinx iQ) is a mature French survey and analysis suite many universities already use for teaching-evaluation campaigns. Koji is an AI-native platform that replaces the static questionnaire with an AI-moderated interview and automatic thematic analysis. Here is an honest, buyer-focused comparison of where each one fits.
Koji Education Team
Product ·
Sphinx (also written Le Sphinx or Sphinx iQ) is a well-established French survey and data-analysis suite, published by Le Sphinx Développement and widely used across French higher education for satisfaction surveys, graduate-outcome studies, and teaching-evaluation campaigns (évaluation des enseignements). Koji is a newer, AI-native platform built specifically to replace the static questionnaire itself: instead of a fixed Likert form, each student is interviewed by an AI moderator that probes and follows up, then every conversation is analysed thematically and automatically.
Short answer: if your priority is in-house statistical control, a general-purpose survey tool that also handles institutional and market-research surveys, and the option to keep everything on French-language, on-premise infrastructure, Sphinx is a strong, credible choice — and if your team already runs it, it does the job. If your priority is richer qualitative signal, far less manual analysis, standardized bias-aware moderation, and closing-the-loop evidence you can put in front of an accreditor, Koji is built for that. This guide compares the two fairly and says plainly where each wins.
What each tool actually is
Sphinx is a survey software suite, not a course-evaluation product specifically. The current generation (Sphinx iQ 3, with the older Sphinx iQ 2 still in wide use) covers questionnaire design, multi-mode distribution (paper, web, smartphone, tablet), and a deep statistical explorer. Universities such as the Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour and the Université de Limoges document institutional Sphinx deployments for exactly these purposes. Its Sphinx Quali module adds lexical and semantic analysis of open-ended text. In short, Sphinx is a mature, methodologically rich toolkit that an institutional-research (IR) or quality office drives.
Koji is a purpose-built evaluation platform whose core is an AI-moderated interview. Where a survey asks "Rate the feedback on this course, 1–5," Koji asks the question conversationally and then follows up — "You said feedback was slow; was that on the coursework, the exam, or both?" — for every respondent, at scale. It then runs automatic thematic analysis across all transcripts, surfaces the themes and their prevalence, and tracks the actions an institution commits to in response. Koji shares its AI interview engine with the main Koji platform (koji.so) used for customer and user research, so the same conversational-research technology sits under both.
Comparison table
| Dimension | Sphinx (Le Sphinx / Sphinx iQ) | Koji for Education |
|---|---|---|
| Core method | Static questionnaire (Likert, open text, matrix) | AI-moderated conversational interview |
| Follow-up probing | None — fixed items; branching by pre-set logic only | Dynamic, per-student follow-up on vague or notable answers |
| Qualitative analysis | Sphinx Quali: lexical/semantic text analysis, analyst-driven | Automatic LLM thematic analysis with prevalence and quotes |
| Statistical depth | Very strong — Chi², correlation, PCA, regression, SEM | Focused on evaluation reporting, themes and trends |
| Who runs it | IR / quality team with survey-methods expertise | Course leads and quality office, low methodological overhead |
| Bias handling | Depends on how the team designs the questionnaire | Standardized moderation applied consistently to every student |
| Languages | 40+ via automatic translation | Multilingual conversational interviews |
| Distribution modes | Paper, web, mobile, tablet | Web / mobile conversational link |
| Data residency | On-premise option; EU hosting | EU / GDPR-aligned hosting |
| Closing the loop | Report out; action tracking is manual | Built-in action tracking against themes |
| Best for | In-house control, mixed institutional surveys, stats | Rich qualitative signal, low-effort analysis, accreditation evidence |
As of publication, Le Sphinx did not publish standard pricing; licensing has historically been perpetual-plus-modules and quoted per institution. Confirm current terms directly with the vendor.
Where Sphinx genuinely wins
Being fair to Sphinx matters, because for some institutions it is the better answer.
- Statistical control. Sphinx's analysis layer is genuinely deep — principal component analysis, multiple regression, even structural equation modelling. If your quality office has trained methodologists who want to run those techniques on evaluation data themselves, Sphinx hands them the controls. Koji deliberately abstracts most of that away.
- A general-purpose survey estate. Many universities do not want a course-evaluation-only tool. They want one platform for course evaluation and graduate surveys, staff surveys, open-day feedback and market research. Sphinx covers that breadth; Koji is focused on evaluation and research interviews.
- Paper and offline. Sphinx still does paper questionnaires with scanning well. If you evaluate cohorts without reliable device access, that matters.
- On-premise data residency. Sphinx can be deployed on institution-controlled infrastructure — attractive to French and other European universities with strict data-governance postures. Koji is EU-hosted and GDPR-aligned but is a managed platform.
- Incumbency. If Sphinx is already embedded in your workflows and your team is fluent in it, the switching cost is real and worth weighing honestly.
Where Koji wins
- The data you actually get. A Likert form tells you that "assessment and feedback" scored 3.4. It rarely tells you why. Koji's AI interviewer probes the "why" for every student, so you get specific, actionable qualitative signal instead of a number plus a scatter of vague free-text comments an analyst still has to read.
- Analysis is automatic, not a project. With Sphinx, open-text analysis — even with Sphinx Quali — is analyst-driven work: someone codes, models and interprets. Koji runs thematic analysis automatically across every transcript and reports themes with their prevalence and representative quotes. That collapses the time from close-of-survey to insight from weeks to effectively immediate.
- Standardized, bias-aware moderation. Because the same AI moderation is applied to every student in every course, the way the evaluation is conducted is consistent — reducing the variation you get when questionnaire quality depends on who wrote the form. (This mitigates rather than eliminates bias; no instrument removes it entirely.)
- Formative, not just end-of-term. Koji supports mid-cycle collection so teaching teams can act before a cohort leaves, not just after.
- Closing the loop for accreditation. Koji tracks the actions an institution commits to against each theme, producing the "you said, we did" evidence trail that quality frameworks increasingly demand — something a survey tool leaves you to assemble by hand.
When to choose which
Choose Sphinx if you want maximum in-house statistical control, a single tool spanning course evaluation and every other institutional survey, strong paper/offline support, and on-premise data residency — and you have the methodological capacity to exploit it.
Choose Koji if your bottleneck is insight, not collection: you already get scores but not the "why," your quality team is drowning in manual open-text analysis, and you need standardized, closing-the-loop evidence for ESG/ENQA-aligned quality review and national accreditation. Many institutions also run both — a general survey tool for institutional surveys and Koji for the course-evaluation conversations that need depth.
For a broader market view, see our guide to the best course evaluation software for European universities and the underlying question of AI course evaluation vs traditional SET surveys. If you are specifically in the French system, our note on course-evaluation evidence for Hceres and CTI accreditation maps feedback to the French QA framework.
The honest bottom line
Sphinx is not a weak product — it is a serious, mature survey suite, and for a French university that wants control, breadth and on-premise data it can be the right call. But it belongs to a generation of tools built around the static questionnaire. Koji is built around the conversation and the analysis of it. If what you need is deeper qualitative signal with far less manual work and accreditation-ready follow-through, that is the gap Koji is designed to close.
Ready to see the difference on your own courses? Explore Koji for Education or talk to our team.
Data protection and the French context
For French institutions, data governance is often decisive. Sphinx's on-premise deployment lets a university keep evaluation data entirely on infrastructure it controls, which some data-protection officers strongly prefer and which simplifies certain GDPR arguments about hosting and transfer. Koji answers the same concern differently: it is an EU-hosted, GDPR-aligned managed service, so the institution avoids running and securing the software itself but does rely on a processor. Neither posture is inherently "more compliant" — they are different trade-offs between control and operational burden. The right choice depends on your DPO's risk appetite and whether you have the in-house capacity to host and patch survey infrastructure. What matters for course evaluation specifically is that both keep student responses in the EU and support the anonymity and confidentiality practices students expect.
Switching from Sphinx, or running both
You do not have to rip Sphinx out to adopt Koji, and for many institutions the pragmatic path is to run both. Keep Sphinx as the estate-wide survey and statistics platform — graduate destination surveys, staff surveys, market research, and the paper questionnaires it handles well — while using Koji for the course-evaluation conversations where depth and automatic analysis matter most. Because Koji exports its themes, prevalence data and transcripts, its output can feed the same programme-review and accreditation reporting your team already builds. If you do decide to consolidate on Koji, the migration effort is mostly about redesigning fixed questionnaires as interview briefs — a shift in mindset from "which items do we ask" to "what do we want to learn" — rather than a heavy technical project. Whichever route you take, decide based on where your real bottleneck is: collection, analysis, or closing the loop.