They solve different problems
Kahoot! starts from the moment you press Host live. The questions go up on the board, students join with a PIN on their own phones or laptops, and everyone answers at once while the timer runs down. The energy in the room is the point, and nothing we make tries to copy it. If your lesson plan says “ten-minute game to finish the unit”, Kahoot! is the tool for that slot.
AI Quiz Maker starts one step earlier, with the questions themselves. Most teachers do not lack a way to play a quiz; they lack the forty minutes it takes to write a good one from this week's reading. You upload the material you are teaching from, the AI writes the questions and the explanations, and you get a link students take on their own. It is closer to a self-marking worksheet than to a game show.
Writing the questions
Kahoot! has its own AI creation tools. Its plans page lists a PDF-to-kahoot generator, a URL converter, creation from topics and scanning handwritten notes, starting on the paid Kahoot!+ Bronze plan, with larger page limits on Silver and Gold. If you already pay for Kahoot!+, try those first: keeping everything in one place is worth something.
AI Quiz Maker generates on the free plan as well as on Pro, and it has two modes for a source. “New questions from my content” writes fresh questions on what the material covers. “Turn my worksheet into a quiz” does the opposite: it keeps your existing questions exactly as written, in your order, and only works out the answers, writes the explanations and, for multiple choice, the wrong options. That second mode matters when the worksheet is one you have refined over years and do not want an AI to rewrite.
There are nine question types, including matching, ordering, fill in the blank, short answer and written answers marked with AI suggestions, and you can edit any question before sharing. Maths is written with real symbols such as x², √ and ×, so it reads properly on screen and on paper.
Checking the answers before the class does
Any AI can get an answer wrong, and a wrong key in a game is especially painful: the student who was right watches the leaderboard tell them otherwise. So after AI Quiz Maker generates a quiz from a topic, text, PDF, photo or web page, a second, separate reasoning model solves the questions again without seeing the key. Where it confidently disagrees, the question is marked “Check this answer” in the editor, with its working, and you decide who is right.
That check is a safety net, not a promise, and you should still read a quiz before you use it. But it is the reason some teachers generate here even when they play in Kahoot!: the questions arrive already checked.
What you learn from the results
A live game tells you who won. Kahoot! also offers reports, with more detail on higher paid tiers according to its plans page, and its assign feature lets students play at their own pace before a deadline.
AI Quiz Maker's results are built around one question: what should I teach again tomorrow? For each question you see how many students got it right and, for multiple choice and true/false, which wrong answer they chose and how many chose it. The most common wrong answer is usually a shared misconception, and that is something you can teach from. From the same screen you can make a short reteach set aimed at the questions the class missed. Students see only their own score and the explanations, never each other's results.
Students, devices and privacy
Neither tool needs student accounts for a normal session. Kahoot! players enter a PIN and a nickname; the host can turn on a player identifier when names matter. AI Quiz Maker students open a link; you choose whether a name is off, optional or required, and you can add a password, a closing date or an attempt limit. Questions and answer choices can be shuffled per student, which helps when students sit side by side.
The difference is the pace. A live Kahoot! game needs everyone present at the same moment. A quiz link works for the student who was absent, the one who needs extra time, and the class you only see twice a week. On the student page, AI Quiz Maker also offers reading support: the Lexend font, larger text, extra spacing and read-aloud through the browser.
Cost
Kahoot!'s plans page lists a free Kahoot! Go plan and paid Kahoot!+ plans priced per teacher and billed for the year: Bronze at $36, Silver at $84 and Gold at $144, with higher participant limits and more game experiences as you go up. AI Quiz Maker's free plan includes 20 AI generations in total, up to 15 questions each, and every export format. Pro costs $10 a month or $72 a year and includes 300 AI generations a month with up to 50 questions per quiz. If you only ever play live games, you may not need us at all; if you write a lot of quizzes, the two together can cost less time than either alone.