Boards are for collaborating. Links are for handing out.

Padlet and Nippy belong to different categories, and pretending otherwise would help nobody. Padlet is an interactive board: students post, comment, vote and arrange cards, and for genuinely two-way classroom activity it is a lovely tool — if your students contribute to the board, stay with boards.

The friction is the free tier, now capped at three boards with uploads limited to 20 MB each (as of June 2026), which active teachers exhaust in a term. The overlap with Nippy is the other half of what many teachers actually use Padlet for: one-way distribution. Handing out notes, slides, reading lists and recordings doesn’t need a board — it needs one link that stays the same all year. Drop the term’s folders onto Nippy and students get a tidy page in any browser: no accounts, files organised exactly as uploaded, whole folders downloadable as a zip before exams, new handouts added weekly without the link changing.

The free plan hosts one class page with 25 MB; paid plans add space for recordings and a password for class-only access. Honest rule: students posting → Padlet (or another board); students receiving → a handout page.