Choosing classroom tech shouldn’t be random. Top Hat is popular for live polls, quizzes, and interactive class activities. But universities today need more than clickers and check-ins: they’re looking for simple, high-quality AI tools that support assessment workflows that actually move learning forward. 

Let’s explore how Edvisor is the best Top Hat alternative for universities. We’ll compare the core features side by side so you can see where each platform shines to deliver a smoother, more complete teaching experience. If you’re evaluating options like this, this blog will help you narrow the field and pick the platform that truly fits your courses and your budget.

What Is Tophat Used For?

Top Hat is a classroom engagement platform (web and other devices) that helps instructors make their lectures and online sessions more interactive with the following features: 

• Personalized textbooks
• Live polls
• Quick quizzes
• Live discussion prompts 
• Automated attendance
• Real-time student performance data and analytics 

Edvisor vs. Top Hat for Teaching and Assessment at Universities

Professors are no longer just choosing between fun quiz websites like Kahoot or PollEverywhere, they’re deciding how to AI-proof their teaching process. Platforms shouldn’t just be interactive, they should integrate with AI while supporting authentic learning.

Top Hat goes beyond simple polls and quizzes by combining content, assessment, and student response tools into one cohesive ecosystem. In order to safely use AI in higher education, it must also adapt and align with real instructor goals.

That’s why exploring Top Hat competitors and quiz-based platforms is so essential today. Tools need to help professors design AI-resistant assessments, offer personalized student feedback, and connect seamlessly with LMS systems like Canvas or Blackboard. 

Edvisor and Top Hat serve different priorities in higher education. Top Hat is an active-learning platform built for the classroom (interactive lectures, a wide range of question types, and tools for both formative and summative assessment). Edvisor also offers a variety of assessment types and emphasizes AI-powered, real-time grading and feedback for instructors, while offering AI-driven course content. 

The right fit comes down to your goals. If you’re optimizing for in-class engagement and participation, Top Hat is designed for that environment. If you're looking to personalize education at scale with AI, and optimize assessment workflows, Edvisor is purpose-built for those needs. Let’s compare features and see what suits you more. 

AI-Assisted Course Development 

When it comes to AI-assisted course development, Top Hat and Edvisor take very different paths.

Top Hat (Ace) is built to enhance what you already have. Ace can generate questions from your slides or page content to liven up lectures and course pages. You can embed videos, interactives, images, and audio via the ‘Add to Course’ button, but the workflow remains largely manual. In practice, Ace often drops questions into the middle of slides without broader instructional design support. It’s a strong engagement layer, not an end-to-end course builder.

Edvisor is AI-native and designed for full course creation. Upload a syllabus and Edvisor can auto-generate courseware across the board (modules, readings, quizzes, discussions, even cases, podcasts, and relevant video suggestions with time stamps). It can also transform long-form readings into ready-to-teach lecture slides.

Top Hat’s Ace is a helpful enhancer if you want an AI-assistant forpre-existing content. If you want AI to do the foundational build, then refine it with your expertise, Edvisor delivers the end-to-end, AI-assisted course development workflow. And it doesn’t even take long!

Speed to Launch at Scale

Top Hat offers rich authoring (create and customize textbooks and course materials with multimedia elements) and an eText catalog. This means you can build exactly the textbook you need: original material, customized existing content, personalized OER, or mixing different resources to fit your course. However, this entire course building is reliant on instructors or a services team which can slow things down when subject-matter experts become a bottleneck.

Since Edvisor is AI-native, it’s optimized for quick activation. Instructors can upload a syllabus and get auto-generated courseware aligned to exactly what they plan to teach. That’s why teams see activation in as little as 48 hours and typical full integration in ~2 weeks from demo (see case studies). Because the platform generates the latest content and reduces reliance on external experts, it’s both faster and more accessible from a cost perspective.

Automated Grading vs. AI Grading

Understanding the difference between the auto-grading and AI-grading (rubric-aligned) can help you see why it matters to use AI for grading and have your own rubric guiding the AI grading process.

Top Hat streamlines straightforward assessment grading. It auto-grades polls, quizzes, and tests and rolls results into a gradebook. This is excellent for objective question types where there’s a single right answer. 

Edvisor goes further for the work that typically eats time: short-answer and essays. It uses AI grading that is aligned to your rubric and calibrated to reflect your instructional style. This is how it produces structured feedback students can act on. Instead of stopping at correctness, Edvisor evaluates reasoning against your criteria and returns consistent, rubric-based comments at scale.

If you want to apply your rubric to open-response work and return high-quality, structured feedback instantly to your students, Edvisor’s AI-grading delivers the depth, and the time savings, where it matters most.

AI Support for Students

Top Hat (Ace) acts as a study assistant layered on top of what you already built. It generates practice questions and hints tied to your existing materials. This helps students stay engaged and instructors extend their reach beyond class hours. 

Edvisor pairs a 24/7, course-specific assistant that helps students with readings. Because the assistant and the content are co-designed, students don’t just get generic help; they get guidance that reflects your sequencing, your emphasis, and your learning outcomes. On top of that, students can launch focused AI practice tools right where they’re needed: 

• Generate text-dependent quizzes (MCQ, short answer, higher-order) and answer keys from any passage
• Use a debate-partner mode to stress-test reasoning with pushback and counter-examples
• Spin up vocabulary flashcards that turn key terms into quick study sets
• Work through graded-difficulty math problems with fully worked solutions. 

The result is AI within clear guardrails that keeps learning authentic while encouraging better, more meaningful practice

Academic Integrity

To maintain academic integrity, Top Hat and Edvisor use two very different angles.

Top Hat Test supports integrity through traditional safeguards. It works on bring-your-own-device (BYOD) exams with lockdown and monitoring features to prevent external access during assessments. This is a practical setup for proctored environments where ensuring controlled conditions is key.

Edvisor takes a more adaptive, AI-aware approach. Instead of treating AI as something to block, it’s built to teach responsible use. The platform includes industry leading AI-misuse detection, while also offering AI-resilient question types that require students to explain their reasoning. Students tested through process based assessment can even regain lost points by clarifying their thought process, turning mistakes into learning opportunities. This framework extends across Edvisor’s broader ecosystem of AI tools for students mentioned in the section above.

Tophat works well for live, synchronous learning. For fully online classes or a large portion of take-home assessments in the curriculum, Edvisor can support academic integrity in these asynchronous learning experiences.

Student Data Analytics

Top Hat functions like a live monitor for your class. Instructors create live quizzes, and assign them on students’ devices. The platform captures attendance, participation, and assessment results in real time and these are rolled into a gradebook and analytics dashboard. The professor gets an immediate snapshot of class comprehension, which they can use to steer discussion on the spot.

Edvisor emphasizes depth after the moment of instruction. Instead of centering on live interactions, it analyzes the work students submit in discussions and quizzes, breaking down accuracy, score, and time taken on quizzes, and evaluating the depth of responses in discussion posts. That means you’re not limited to in-class signals, you get performance analytics that continue beyond class, showing how students reason, where they struggle, and how understanding develops over time.

LMS Integration

Top Hat connects with your Learning Management System (Canvas, D2L Brightspace, Moodle, Blackboard, and Sakai via LTI 1.3) to keep classroom activity and grading in sync as instructors get automatically updated class lists (rosters) and grades. The students can also easily access assignments, presentations, and tests through direct LMS links.

Edvisor has a similar LTI 1.3 integration and adds an AI advantage, as the rubric-aligned grading system runs automatically. This AI grading and feedback first goes through the instructor who can review and edit it before it’s shared with the students.  

AI Tools for Professors 

Top Hat doesn’t currently offer the broader AI assistance for professors that Edvisor does. Edvisor treats AI as a holistic companion for both instructors and students, going far beyond simple AI detection, to elevate teaching, feedback, and student support across the course.

Here are the different AI tools Edvisor offers for instructors:

• Behavior Intervention Plans (BIP) and Restorative Reflection: These AI tools are created to offer professors guided workflows that help them respond to student behavior issues in a constructive way.
• IEP Generator: Professors can draft Individualized Education Programs to accommodate different student needs.
• Student Work Feedback: Take any open-response work (not just the auto-graded objective items) and the AI delivers feedback on it to mirror your rubric and give your students actionable next steps.
• Text Scaffolder and Text Leveler: In order to make the material accessible for students, these tools can be used to instantly pull essential vocabulary and questions from any passage and adapt readings to the right grade level.

Licensing and Cost

Edvisor’s pricing starts at $15 for students and bundles 30+ AI tools into eligible courses, positioning it as a high-value, AI-native option out of the box. By contrast, Top Hat charges students $96 for 4 years, with textbook use potentially increasing the total. While Top Hat also offers institution-wide plans, its model centers on student subscriptions. Edvisor’s package emphasizes richer AI capabilities (generation, grading, assistant) within one package. For roughly lower entry cost and more AI included, Edvisor delivers broader functionality per dollar.

Why Edvisor Is the Better Pick for Universities

If your goal is to modernize teaching and assessment, not just make lectures more interactive, Edvisor is the smarter choice. It’s AI-native: upload a syllabus and you’re up and running with full courseware (modules, readings, quizzes, discussions, even slide decks and media) in days, not months. That speed matters when you’re rolling out across multiple departments.

Its rubric-aligned AI handles short-answer and essays with consistent, structured feedback that mirrors instructor style, so faculty can spend more time on mentorship and office-hours. Students get a 24/7, course-specific assistant plus focused practice tools (text-dependent quiz generator, debate partner, flashcards, step-by-step math), which means better practice within clear guardrails instead of generic chatbot help.

Academic integrity is built in. AI-abuse and cheating detection work alongside AI-resilient prompts that require reasoning, with process-based ways for students to recover points by showing their thinking. Post-class analytics go deeper than attendance. Edvisor breaks down accuracy, score, time, and discussion depth to guide targeted follow-ups. And when it’s time to report, grades export cleanly to your LMS (Canvas, D2L, Moodle, Blackboard).

The pricing is student-friendly and the subscription package offers a broad AI toolkit bundled so Edvisor delivers more capability and better learning.

FAQs 

Can Top Hat Detect Cheating?

Top Hat helps curb online cheating by automatically flagging suspicious actions (like taking screenshots, switching apps, or repeatedly refreshing) and can lock students out when those behaviors occur. It also generates clear proctor reports that highlight flagged activity, so instructors can quickly see what happened, who was affected, and take additional action if needed.

How Much Does Top Hat Cost per Year Compared With Edvisor?

Top Hat: $53 for a 12-month student subscription. If you buy term-by-term, it’s $33 per 4-month term (≈ $99/year), or $96 for 4 years (≈ $24/year effective). Textbook use can add to the total.

Edvisor: Starting at $15 for students on Edvisor-enabled courses. It isn’t a traditional annual subscription; pricing starts per student access and includes 30+ AI tools. It also helps students save ~$75 per term.

What Is the Difference Between Top Hat and iClicker?

iClicker limits instructors to five question types, whereas Top Hat provides over fourteen. This flexibility helps students review, engage, and apply their knowledge more effectively. If you want a holistic approach towards AI-proof assessments, Edvisor provides an end-to-end solution to provide readings, assessments, grading and feedback to students under one roof.