The honest answer is that these two tools differ on pacing before they differ on anything else. Kahoot is lockstep: one question on a shared screen, everybody answers it at the same time, and the room reacts together. Quizizz is self-paced: each student moves through the set on their own device at their own speed, and nobody waits. Everything else - the themes, the memes, the report screens - follows from that one decision, so choose it first and the rest stops mattering.
Both have added a version of the other mode over the years, so neither is strictly one thing. What differs is which mode each is built around, and that is what the room feels. This piece is for the teacher deciding between them. If the question is specifically about running a live round on student phones, how to conduct a live quiz in class with students' phones covers the mechanics, and coaching institutes weighing a switch should read the Kahoot alternative for coaching institutes instead.
Lockstep or Self-Paced: What Each One Buys You
A lockstep round buys you a shared moment. The whole class looks at the same question, the answer distribution appears on the wall, and everyone sees where the room split. That distribution is the lesson. The teacher stops, asks why the wrong option looked right, and that discussion is the reason to run the round at all. You cannot get it from a self-paced set, because there is no instant where everyone is on the same question.
A self-paced set buys you a free teacher. While the class works, nobody is driving the screen, so you walk the rows, read over shoulders, and catch the student who has not started. The fast ones finish and move on instead of waiting; the slow ones are not publicly slow. For revision, for a warm-up at the start of a period, and for anything sent home, self-paced is simply the correct shape.
- Choose lockstep when the discussion after each question is the point - a concept check, a trap-spotting drill, the first class on a new chapter.
- Choose self-paced when coverage is the point and you want to circulate - revision, a chapter recap, a mixed drill before a test.
- Choose lockstep when you have one projector and many students on a shared or borrowed device, because the question lives on the wall.
- Choose self-paced when the class is split across a lab period, a staggered timetable, or a batch that cannot all be online at the same minute.
Homework Mode Changes What You Are Measuring
Self-paced tools make it easy to assign a set as homework. Before you do, be clear about what the resulting scores are. A set attempted at home is attempted with no supervision, with no guarantee about whose phone it was answered on, and with nothing stopping the answers from circulating in the class group before the deadline. The number that comes back is evidence of engagement and of which questions the honest attempters found hard. It is not evidence of what any individual child knows.
That is fine - diagnosis and practice are not ruined by a student who looked something up, because they have still shown you which question sent them looking. It becomes a problem only when the homework score is carried into an internal mark. Keep the thing that counts in the room, and treat the homework set as a map of where to spend Monday. How school teachers can create online unit tests works through that boundary in detail.
Shared Devices and Bandwidth Decide It More Often Than Features
Where devices are short, the device question outranks everything on the comparison table. If students are sharing phones in pairs, a lockstep round still works: pairs answer together, which is noisy and can be better teaching than solo. A self-paced set shared between two students is just one of them working and one watching. Count the devices in the room before you count the features.
Bandwidth cuts the other way. Lockstep needs every device holding a live connection at the same moment, for the whole round, on the same school Wi-Fi or on whatever mobile data students happen to have. A dropped phone during a timed question is a lost question, in the middle of the thing you cannot pause. Self-paced is more forgiving: a student who drops off picks the set back up and keeps going, so a weak connection costs seconds rather than an entire round. If the network is the known weak point, self-paced is the safer default and a projector-plus-one-device format is safer still.
Count the devices and test the Wi-Fi before you compare feature lists. The tool that wins on paper is the one that stalls in period three.
Where MockSetu Fits, and Where It Does Not
MockSetu is not a drop-in replacement for either, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. It does have a live format, and it is deliberately lockstep: creating a live exam is a separate choice from creating a mock exam, and the live one unlocks questions one at a time while students compete on a real-time leaderboard. Going live opens a waiting room, nothing is shown until you unlock the first question, and you hold the pace throughout. There is no self-paced assignment mode inside the live format - the self-paced route here is a published mock, a different object with a different job.
What the live room does carry is built for a classroom rather than for a party:
- A separate projector page for the wall, so the cockpit with the controls stays on your laptop. It cannot draw a correct answer while a question is still open, because the key is only released after the server's own clock passes the deadline.
- Students join by link or by typing an eight-character code - the code you can read out or write on the board.
- A scheduled start that puts the class in a lobby with a countdown. Auto-start is off by default, and even when it is on the session starts from your own control room, so nothing ever begins without you in the chair.
- A rehearsal mode that runs the real control room against a simulated class, recording nothing. Use it once before you do this in front of students.
- A quiet confusion button. The student who taps it gets a tick and nothing else - no count, no tally of who else is lost - and the room is shown nothing, which is exactly why the students who need it will press it.
- Standings you can show to the whole room, narrow so each student sees only their own result, or switch off for everyone including yourself. Scores and ranks are always computed whichever you pick, so turning the leaderboard off mid-session costs you no data and no report.
- A post-session report in four tabs: an overview of the session, per-question outcomes with the median answer time, a roster naming who to check on tomorrow, and the pacing question by question.
One honest friction: a student needs a MockSetu student account to enter a live room. There is no anonymous nickname-and-PIN entry the way the big engagement tools do it. That is a real cost on the first day with a new batch, and a non-issue from the second session onward. A published self-paced mock is looser - a student can start one without an account and is only asked to sign in when they submit, so the attempt is saved against a real person.
Engagement Tool Versus Instrument: The Exam-Prep Case
If what you are building is a mock rather than a quiz, the comparison stops being Quizizz versus Kahoot at all, because neither is trying to be an exam instrument. A mock has to reproduce a paper: sections with their own clocks, the exam's own marking scheme including the penalty for a wrong answer, a question palette, auto-submit when the clock runs out, and a sitting that resumes on the question it last touched if the student's phone dies. MockSetu seals and files an abandoned sitting if the student is away longer than five minutes, which is the behaviour a real exam hall has and a quiz app has no reason to.
Claiming otherwise in either direction is the mistake. An engagement tool asked to run a full-length mock produces a cheerful score that teaches a candidate nothing about pacing. An exam platform asked to energise a Friday afternoon produces a quiet room staring at a timer.
The absences matter too, and they are worth stating plainly rather than letting a teacher discover them in week three. MockSetu has no proctoring of any kind - no webcam, no lockdown browser, no tab-switch detection - no question shuffling, and no cap on attempts. Published papers are public: anyone with the link may attempt them, and there is no paid or private delivery to one batch only. There is no CSV or Excel export of results, no per-student report card, no certificates, no Google Classroom or LMS integration, and no email, SMS or WhatsApp notification telling a class that a test exists. You share the link on the group your class is already on. Account email for signup and password reset is the only mail the product sends.
Choosing in One Pass
Run these five checks in order, before you open any comparison table.
- What happens after a question - discussion, or the next question? Discussion means lockstep.
- How many working devices are in the room, and how many students? Fewer devices than students pushes you to lockstep or to one projected screen.
- Will the whole class be online at the same minute on a connection you trust? If not, go self-paced.
- Does the score go anywhere official? If yes, do not run it on any unproctored tool, including this one - keep that paper in the room.
- Is this a quiz or a mock? A mock needs sections, a real marking scheme and a clock that submits itself, and that is a different build entirely.
If the answer to the last one is mock, start from the paper rather than the quiz. Everything a creator can build on MockSetu - sections with their own clocks, per-section marking, bilingual papers, a live room when you want one - sits behind one free account, and a finished paper can be listed in the public mock test library where students searching for exactly that topic will find it. If the answer is quiz, pick on pacing, and let the feature table go.