Online Quiz Maker for Teachers: Kahoot, Forms or AI Quizzes?

An online quiz maker is one of the first tools a teacher searches for, and one of the most crowded. Kahoot, Quizizz and Google Forms each have millions of users. Newer tools add AI that writes the questions for you. The hard part is not finding an online quiz maker. It is choosing one that fits the job you need the quiz to do today.

I have built quiz tools, used them as a teacher, and watched my own children play them at home. This post compares the three families of quiz maker for teachers, says what each does well, and gives a short rule for picking one.

Three kinds of online quiz maker

Most tools fall into one of three groups. The group matters more than the brand.

• Live game quizzes (Kahoot, Quizizz): the class plays together, usually with a timer and a leaderboard. Energy is the point.
• Form quizzes (Google Forms, Microsoft Forms): a quiet set of questions with automatic marking. Collection is the point.
• AI quiz generators: you give the tool a topic, a lesson plan or a file, and it drafts the questions. Speed of writing is the point.

Each group has a job it does better than the others. A teacher who uses one tool for everything usually ends up fighting it.

What Kahoot and Quizizz do well

Kahoot is a strong choice when you want ten minutes of noise and attention at the start or end of a lesson. The music, the timer and the podium work. Students who never raise a hand will tap an answer. Quizizz keeps the same game feeling but lets each student move at their own pace, which suits a mixed class better than a shared timer.

What they do less well is show you thinking. A multiple-choice tap under pressure tells you who was fast, not who understood. The report after the game is useful, but it is a list of percentages, not a view of each student's reasoning. For a starter or a revision game, that is fine. For a check before a test, it is thin.

What Google Forms does well

Google Forms is the free quiz maker most schools already have. It marks multiple choice automatically, puts answers into a spreadsheet, and works on any device. If you want every student to answer the same eight questions without a leaderboard, it is hard to beat.

The cost is your time. You type every question, every option and every answer key by hand. Open questions are not marked. And a Form does not know your class: the same quiz goes to every student, in the same words, at the same level.

Where an AI quiz generator fits

An AI quiz generator changes one step: writing. Instead of typing questions, you point the tool at the material. Good ones read a lesson plan, a textbook page or a PDF and draft questions at the level of that text. You then edit, delete and reorder.

Two honest warnings. First, an AI quiz is only as good as the source. "Make a quiz on photosynthesis" gives you generic questions that could come from any book. "Make a quiz from pages 42 to 45 of our Grade 9 biology textbook" gives you questions on what you actually taught. Second, read every question before students do. A language model (the AI that writes the text) can produce a question that sounds right and is wrong. The teacher decides; the AI only drafts.

If you want the step-by-step version, read how to turn a PDF into a quiz.

Online quiz maker comparison: pick by the job

The pattern is simple. Energy: game tool. Collection: form tool. Writing: AI tool. No single online quiz maker wins all three jobs, and many teachers use two of the three in the same week.

A classroom example: Grade 7 fractions, three quizzes in one unit

A Grade 7 maths teacher I worked with ran one unit on adding fractions like this. Monday: a six-question Kahoot on equivalent fractions as a starter, to see what survived the weekend. Thursday: a ten-question quiz drafted by an AI quiz generator from her own lesson plan, with two questions she rewrote because the AI used denominators she had not taught. Students opened it with an access code and the results were marked automatically. The following Monday: a short Google Form with two open questions ("Explain how you found the common denominator") that she read herself.

Three tools, three jobs. The Thursday quiz told her which four students still added denominators. The Monday form told her why.

How TeachBuddy AI helps

TeachBuddy AI has a quiz generator that sits in the third group, with a difference: it reads your class. Pick a classroom profile, then build the quiz from a lesson plan you already made, a resource in your library (a textbook chapter, a set of notes) or a file you upload. You can also write questions by hand, or mix both. Every question is editable before you share it.

Students open the quiz by link or access code. Objective questions are auto-graded and the results come back to you per student. Questions you like can go into a question bank for the next class. If the quiz is one step in a lesson, the same plan can produce slides and a worksheet too. It is free for teachers.

What TeachBuddy AI does not do is replace a Kahoot game. If you want music and a podium, keep Kahoot for that moment. Use the quiz generator for the moment when you need questions that match what you taught.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free quiz maker for teachers?

For a quiet, auto-marked quiz, Google Forms is free and most schools have it. For a game, Kahoot and Quizizz have free tiers. For questions written from your own material, the TeachBuddy AI quiz generator is free for teachers.

Can a quiz generator make questions from my own notes?

Yes, if the tool can read a file or a saved lesson plan. Point it at the exact pages or plan, not only the topic name, and check every question before sharing.

Is an online quiz maker good for formative assessment?

It is good for the collection step. The assessment happens when you read the results and change the next lesson. See formative assessment examples for quick checks that do not need a quiz at all.

Want quiz questions that match the lesson you actually taught? Create a free TeachBuddy AI account and build your first quiz from a plan or a textbook page.