Zoora vs Skyroom: a live room, or an online classroom system with quizzes?
Skyroom gives you a room to hold class in. Zoora takes the whole path a class travels: the live room, quizzes, assignments, attendance, and grades, in one account. This page explains the difference between the two without overstating it.
If all you need is a room, Skyroom is the right choice
Skyroom has been building live rooms for years, fits up to 3000 concurrent users, and does its job well for webinars and online conferences. If your enrollment, quizzes, and grades are handled somewhere else and the only thing you are missing is a reliable room, moving gains you very little and you are better off staying where you are. The comparison below is for when that somewhere else is still a spreadsheet and a messaging group, or when you are paying for two separate systems.
| Zoora | SkyroomSkyroom | |
|---|---|---|
| What the product does | ZooraAn online classroom and learning management system; the live room is one part of it | SkyroomA platform for running online events: webinars, meetings, and live classes |
| Live class | ZooraUp to 300 people on the Max plan, with a shared whiteboard, screen sharing, polls, a Q&A kept separate from chat, and hand raising | SkyroomUp to 3000 concurrent users, with desktop sharing, a whiteboard, Persian chat, and operator, presenter, and user roles |
| Online quizzes and question bank | ZooraA question bank, multiple-choice and open-ended questions, random selection from the bank, negative marking, and draft questions built from a PDF handout | Skyroom— |
| Quiz anti-cheating | ZooraOn the server: questions and options shuffled per student, question text shown as a noisy image, a deadline, and no going back to a previous question. Alongside it, a report of the signals for the teacher to judge | Skyroom— |
| Assignments, grading, and gradebook | ZooraAssignments with due dates, manual grading with an AI suggestion for open-ended answers, and a gradebook where quiz and assignment scores land on their own | Skyroom— |
| Attendance | ZooraMarked automatically from time spent in the room and from watching the offline class video, and tied to that class's own roster | SkyroomSession report: how long each user was in the room, with an Excel export |
| Session recording | ZooraCloud recording in the school's own storage, kept for up to 365 days depending on the plan | SkyroomCloud recording as a separate package, with 30 GB of space, and videos stay available for up to 30 days after the service ends |
| What the price is based on | ZooraThe number of students at the school, across four feature tiers | SkyroomThe number of concurrent users. There is also a daily service for one-off events |
Four differences that carry weight when you decide
One is the classroom, the other is the class itself
Skyroom has a clear product and does not hide where it stops: it creates rooms, hands out access, and reports on sessions. But the student roster, the midterm quiz, this week's assignment, and the score that has to end up on a report card are none of them inside it. Their own recommended path says as much: they offer a web service so you can connect your site or your own learning system to the panel and have users and rooms created automatically. Which means that after buying Skyroom you still have to decide what your learning system is, who builds it, and who maintains it. Zoora is that system from the start, and the live room is only one part of it.
Online quizzes with anti-cheating that knows its limits
Running quizzes is not Skyroom's job at all, and it should not be expected to do it. In Zoora part of the anti-cheating runs on the server and cannot be worked around from the browser: the order of questions and options is arranged separately for each student, the question text is sent as a noisy image instead of as text, the deadline closes on the server, and if you turn off going back to a previous question, a question that has already been answered is never sent to the browser again. The second part we will say plainly: leaving the quiz page, unusually fast answers, and students who signed in from the same location are only flagged and collected together in one report. Those are signals, not verdicts, and the final call belongs to the teacher. We are not saying cheating gets stamped out. We are saying you can defend the result of the quiz.
Attendance and grades, without moving anything by hand
Skyroom has a session report and gives you each user's time in the room as an Excel export; that genuinely helps, and it is not nothing. But that file is a list of usernames from a room, not your class roster. It has to be matched to student names, lined up with the right session, and then recorded somewhere the grades already live. In Zoora the live room is tied to a session of that same class, so attendance is marked on its own from how long someone stayed in the room. For an offline class it comes from watching the video. Quiz and assignment scores land in the gradebook's automatic columns, and each student sees only their own row. Work that usually drags on until the end of the week is finished the same day.
Priced by concurrent user, or by number of students
Skyroom's price is tied to the highest number of concurrent users, and for one-off events there is a daily service as well. That model makes sense for conferences and webinars, but for a school with four classes running at once at five in the afternoon it means paying for peak usage even when the rooms sit empty the rest of the day. Recording is a separate package too, with 30 GB of space, and its videos stay available for up to 30 days after the service ends, so archiving a full term takes work of its own. Zoora's price is tied to the number of students at the school, and concurrent class capacity along with recording kept for up to 365 days are counted inside that same plan. Which model comes out cheaper depends on your own schedule. Before you decide, work both of them out for the busiest hour of your week.
If you want to move mid-term
You do not have to wait until September to move to an alternative. The order below is written for a school that is in the middle of a term and cannot afford to lose even one session.
- 1
Create your school's space in Zoora. Every organization gets its own subdomain, and the ready-made manager, teacher, staff, and student roles are active from the start. If you need one, you can build a custom role too.
- 2
Import the student and teacher lists from an Excel file so you do not have to create accounts one at a time.
- 3
Create the classes and put only the term's remaining sessions on the calendar. There is no need to reconstruct the past.
- 4
Enter the grades recorded so far as manual columns in the gradebook, so the end-of-term report card is complete instead of starting from the day you arrived.
- 5
Get the question bank going: either add the term's questions yourself, or hand over the PDF handouts and past papers so draft questions are built for you and all you do is approve them.
- 6
Download your Skyroom recordings before the old service ends. Videos stay available for up to 30 days after the service expires. Then publish those same files as offline classes in Zoora so students have the term's archive in one place.
- 7
Move one class first, not all of them. Run a week in parallel so that class's teacher gets comfortable with Zoora's room and whiteboard, then move the rest.
- 8
Keep the old service until the end of the period you already paid for. A few weeks of overlap costs less than one lost session.
See one of your own real classes in Zoora
Instead of a feature list, let us set up one of this term's classes with you: its sessions, its quizzes, and its gradebook. It takes half an hour, and the decision is easier afterwards.
09999931289Common questions about Zoora and Skyroom
If your enrollment, quizzes, and grades are handled elsewhere and that is working fine, then yes. You would be paying for parts you do not use. Zoora is worth it when you want to pull that work out of spreadsheets and messaging groups and put it next to the class.
Up to 300 people in a live class on the Max plan. Skyroom is built for bigger events and supports up to 3000 concurrent users, so if your work is conferences with thousands of attendees, this comparison does not end in our favor.
You can. The question bank, multiple-choice and open-ended questions, random selection from the bank, deadlines, and negative marking are all in Zoora itself, and the score goes straight into that class's gradebook. Open-ended answers get a suggested score with a reason, but the teacher's own score always has the last word.
Part of it is certain and runs on the server: the order of questions and options differs for each person, the question text arrives as a noisy image and is never sent to the browser as text, and the deadline closes on time. The other part is only a report: leaving the page, very fast answers, and several people signing in from one location get flagged so you can decide yourself. We do not promise zero cheating.
In the school's own dedicated storage, and only for the people you have given access to. Session recordings are kept for up to 365 days depending on the plan, so a full term's archive fits inside that same plan.
Run your next class on Zoora
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