Best QTI Converter for Instructional Designers

If you build courses for a living rather than teach them, the QTI converter shortlist is shorter than it looks, and the reason has nothing to do with features. Two of the best known tools in this category restrict who is allowed to use them, and instructional designers are the exact group they restrict. Respondus 4.0 is sold to institutions as a campus license and runs on Windows only. GETMARKED Digitaliser publishes a permissions row for non-teaching staff use, with instructional designer given as the example, and marks it not allowed on one of its two paid plans. Sort by licence before you sort by format support, or you will pick a tool you are not entitled to run.

Everything below was read first-party from each vendor on 10 September 2026. Where a vendor publishes no figure, this article says so instead of repeating a number from a directory listing.

QTI converters compared for instructional designers

Tool	Reads	Writes	Price	Can a non-teaching designer use it
text2qti	Markdown based plain text	QTI 1.2, built for Canvas	Free, open source, BSD-3-Clause	Yes, no restriction. Needs Python 3.10 or newer
GETMARKED Digitaliser, Basic	DOCX, PDF, Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, LMS question banks, quiz platform exports, QTI 1.2, 2.1 and 2.2, GIFT, WebCT	The same range, both directions	$29 a year for 50 page credits	Yes. Non-teaching staff use and commercial use are both marked Allowed
GETMARKED Digitaliser, Personal	As above	As above	$40 a year plus a $50 one-time license fee	No. Non-teaching staff use and commercial use are both marked Not allowed
Respondus 4.0	Word with images intact, rich text, QTI, tab or comma delimited	Publishes straight into Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace and Moodle	Campus license by student FTE, $1,695 under 2,500 students up to $2,945 at 30,001 to 40,000, renewing each August 1	Only through an institution that holds the licence. Windows only, no Mac build
Formswrite	DOCX, PDF, Google Docs, CSV and Excel, plain text and Markdown	QTI 2.1 by default, 2.2 on request	Free plan, paid tiers for bulk and API use	Yes. Requires signing in with a Google account
University hosted converters	Usually CSV, sometimes formatted plain text	A Canvas ready QTI zip	Free	Normally only for that institution's own staff, which excludes contractors
VidQuiz	A YouTube link read unaided, an uploaded recording with its transcript, or pasted text on its own	QTI 1.2 zip, plus GIFT, Blackboard tab delimited, Google Forms CSV, CSV and PDF	Free tier, then paid plans	Yes. It is also the only row that writes the questions instead of reformatting them

Read the last column first. It is the one that eliminates options for a contract designer, and it is the column comparison articles never include.

Why is the cheaper GETMARKED plan the one that allows commercial use?

Because the two plans are sold for different things, and the naming runs against intuition. Basic, at $29 a year, is metered: 50 page credits, where one credit converts a page of DOCX or PDF, and imports from other sources spend one credit per four questions. Exporting spends no credits. On that plan the permissions table marks both commercial use and non-teaching staff use as Allowed.

Personal, at $40 a year plus a $50 one-time license fee, removes the metering and gives unlimited personal use. It also marks commercial use and non-teaching staff use as Not allowed. So the more expensive tier buys volume and gives up rights. A freelance designer converting client material wants the cheap plan, and an institution wants the Commercial or Institutional quote.

This catches people because the word Personal reads like a tier name rather than a restriction, and because nobody expects to lose an entitlement by paying more. Check the permissions rows on the plan table before you check the price, especially if you invoice anyone for the work.

Which QTI version should an instructional designer export?

It depends entirely on the destination, and one widely repeated claim about this is wrong. Formswrite describes QTI 2.1 as the version Canvas, Brightspace, Moodle and Blackboard all accept. Two parts of that do not hold up against the vendors' own documentation.

Moodle does not read QTI in any version. Core Moodle ships exactly seven question format plugins, and none of them is QTI: aiken, blackboard_six, gift, missingword, multianswer, xhtml and xml. Six import and xhtml is export only. For Moodle the format to send is GIFT, which is also the only plain text option that carries per question feedback, so the explanation attached to each question survives the import. Our page on how to import questions into Moodle covers the routes in order.

Brightspace is the subtler one, because it has two importers with different support. The QTI importer inside Quizzes and the Question Library supports only up to QTI 1.2, so a 2.1 package fails exactly where most people try it first. The separate Course Import tool does accept 2.x and 3.x, with D2L stating that only a subset of features in those standards is supported. The practical version is in our Brightspace quiz converter guide.

Blackboard runs the other way: its QTI importer wants 2.1 and works in the Original Course View only, so a package built for Canvas is the wrong file, and Blackboard Ultra has no QTI import at all. Canvas is the forgiving one, reading both 1.2 and 2.x. If you support more than one platform, plan on more than one export rather than hunting for a universal file.

What do you do when the questions do not exist yet?

Every tool above needs questions as input. That is worth saying plainly, because the job that actually eats an instructional designer's week is usually not conversion. It is sitting with a two hour recorded session from a subject matter expert and writing forty defensible items about it, then formatting them, then importing them.

The raw material a designer receives is rarely tidy. It arrives as a recording, a stack of reference PDFs and a policy document, and the same source has to become both the teaching material and the assessment. Turning that pile into a deck is its own task, and an AI tool that builds presentations from reports and PDFs handles that half. The assessment half is what VidQuiz does: paste the link to the recorded session and it reads the video, drafts the questions with the correct option marked, adds a short explanation and a timestamp back to the moment the answer came from, and exports the QTI 1.2 package. There is also a paste mode that accepts written source material on its own, up to 60,000 characters, when what you are holding is a chapter rather than a recording.

What comes back is a first draft for a human to review, not a validated assessment instrument, and every question is editable before export. For most people that turns a day of composing into an hour of editing. It does not replace the reformatters: if you already hold a finished question bank in Word or a spreadsheet, one of the tools in the table above is the right answer and we say so on the QTI converter page too.

Does a QTI package work on both Canvas and Blackboard?

No, and this is the most expensive assumption in the category. Canvas reads QTI 1.2 and 2.x. Blackboard's QTI importer reads 2.1 and only in the Original Course View. A single package cannot cover both, and on a mixed campus the safe route into Blackboard is not QTI at all but the tab delimited text upload, which is the only question import supported in both Blackboard course views.

That format has one property worth knowing before you rely on it: it has no feedback column, so per question explanations are dropped on upload. If the explanations matter to your design, the questions need a destination that carries them, which in practice means QTI for Canvas and Brightspace or GIFT for Moodle. Our comparison of QTI, GIFT and CSV quiz file formats lays out what each one keeps and what it silently drops.

Is Respondus 4.0 worth it for a freelance designer?

Almost never, for two structural reasons rather than any judgement about the software. It is Windows only, with no Mac build and no browser version, which rules it out for a large share of the design community outright. And it is sold to institutions: the published pricing is a campus-wide license priced on total student FTE as reported by IPEDS, from $1,695 for institutions under 2,500 students to $2,945 in the 30,001 to 40,000 band, with anything over 40,000 by quote. Licences renew annually on 1 August, and the figures are for North America.

Respondus does sell a single user licence that individual instructors can buy online, and it offers a free 30-day pilot of that single user version, but no figure for it appears on the pricing page. If you work inside an institution that already holds the campus licence, it is an excellent tool and costs your department nothing extra. If you invoice clients from your own laptop, it is the wrong shape of product, and our Respondus 4.0 alternative page covers what to use instead.

The short version

Pick by entitlement, then by input. A staff designer inside a university should check whether the campus already licenses Respondus 4 or hosts its own converter, because both are free at the point of use. A freelance or agency designer converting client material wants GETMARKED Basic at $29 a year, which is the plan that actually permits commercial and non-teaching use, or text2qti if a Python install is no obstacle. Anyone whose real problem is that forty questions still have to be written should start from the source material rather than from a converter, and check the destination's QTI version before exporting anything, because 1.2 and 2.1 are not interchangeable and the failure arrives at import time.