7 Best Flipgrid Alternatives for ESL Teachers

Microsoft shut down Flipgrid — rebranded Flip in 2022 — for good on October 1, 2024, deleting every video that wasn’t downloaded by September 30. For ESL teachers, the closest of the Flipgrid alternatives is VoiceThread, which keeps the same asynchronous audio, video, and text replies to a shared prompt that made Flipgrid useful for speaking practice. Padlet’s Backchannel template, Screencastify Submit, Seesaw, and Edpuzzle cover narrower jobs depending on class size, age group, and whether you need students replying to each other or just submitting a single take.

In June 2018, Microsoft bought Flipgrid from a research lab at the University of Minnesota, inheriting a tool already used by more than 20 million students in over 180 countries. Four years later it renamed the product “Flip” at ISTE 2022. Two years after that, it announced the whole thing was closing. By October 1, 2024, the app, the website, and every stored video were gone — including, for a lot of ESL teachers, a full semester of recorded speaking responses that the final grade depended on.

Why Flipgrid Disappeared (and Why ESL Teachers Felt It Hardest)

Microsoft didn’t retire Flip because teachers stopped opening it. It retired Flip because a free, standalone product that doesn’t push anyone toward a paid Microsoft 365 seat doesn’t survive a budget review — and Flip’s actual replacement, Teams for Education video assignments, only works if the school already pays for Teams. Even schools that did make the jump lost features in the move: comments on individual replies and the augmented-reality sticker overlays Flip was known for never made it into Teams. Schools running Google Workspace, or ESL programs and private language schools with no Microsoft contract at all, were left with nothing. That second group is exactly where most of Taiwan’s cram schools and international programs sit.

Mainstream classrooms lost a nice-to-have video tool. ESL classrooms lost the specific format that worked: a low-stakes grid where a shy A2-level student could record a 90-second answer alone, re-record it twice, and post the third take without anyone watching them stumble through it live. That’s a harder gap to patch than “find another video app,” because most video tools weren’t built around re-recording, peer replies, and language anxiety at the same time.

What ESL Classes Actually Lost When Flip Shut Down

Three features made Flipgrid specifically useful for language teaching, and no single successor covers all three. First, the grid format let every student see the prompt and every other reply, so students could borrow phrasing from a classmate’s answer — real scaffolding, not cheating. Second, the multi-take recording meant a nervous speaker never submitted their first attempt. Third, the whole thing lived in a browser tab with no app download, which mattered for programs running on shared classroom tablets.

Every tool below trades off one of those three. Keep that trade-off in mind instead of hunting for an exact clone — it doesn’t exist, and chasing one will waste a planning period you don’t have.

Picture a standard weekly prompt: “Describe your weekend in 60 seconds.” On Flipgrid, a student recorded three attempts in the hallway before class, posted the one where they didn’t trip over “yesterday,” and then watched two classmates’ replies before writing their own comment in English. That loop — private rehearsal, public post, peer response — is the actual unit of instruction. A tool that only lets the teacher watch the recording, or only allows one take, quietly strips out the rehearsal step that made nervous speakers willing to post at all.

VoiceThread: The Closest Replacement for Peer Speaking Practice

VoiceThread is the one tool on this list built around the same idea Flipgrid was: a shared prompt (a slide, an image, a question) that students respond to with voice, video, or text, and that other students can then comment on. For a speaking-practice routine — describe this picture, respond to this classmate, retell this story — it’s a near-direct swap.

The K-12 Single Educator License runs $79 a year (or $15 billed monthly) and covers one teacher plus 50 student accounts, with extra seats at $2 each and 100 export credits a year to pull videos out before a license lapses. A free Educator account caps you at 200 threads and 10-minute comments, which is enough to pilot one unit before committing budget. The tradeoff versus Flipgrid: VoiceThread’s interface is older and takes a class period to teach, where Flipgrid’s grid was closer to self-explanatory. Budget that class period into week one rather than discovering it mid-unit — walk students through posting one comment and one reply before you ever attach a grade to the activity.

Padlet’s Backchannel Template — Microsoft’s Own Fix

When Microsoft announced the shutdown, Padlet’s Backchannel template was the alternative it pointed teachers toward directly, and it’s a fair one. Students post a video response to a shared board, and classmates reply underneath — closer to a comment thread than Flipgrid’s tiled grid, but the same basic workflow. The free tier caps you at three active padlets, so a teacher running weekly speaking prompts will be archiving and reusing boards within a month rather than letting a semester’s worth pile up.

We’ve covered Padlet’s full feature set and pricing tiers separately in our Padlet for ESL Teachers review — worth reading before you commit a whole term’s lesson plans to the free tier.

Screencastify Submit for Fast, No-Login Speaking Checks

Screencastify Submit skips the student-account problem entirely. A teacher generates one link, a student clicks it, records on webcam or screen, and the file lands straight in the teacher’s Google Drive — no sign-up, no app, no password a nine-year-old will forget by Thursday. It made Submit free for every individual educator through the 2024–25 school year specifically to catch Flip refugees, and pricing has kept shifting since, so check the current terms on their product page before building a semester around it.

The catch for language teaching: Submit is one-way. There’s no shared grid, no peer replies, nothing for a classmate to watch and respond to. It’s the right tool for a quick fluency check or an exit-ticket recording, not for the discussion format Flipgrid was known for.

Seesaw and Edpuzzle: Solid Tools, Narrower Fit

Seesaw and Edpuzzle both show up on every “Flipgrid alternative” list, and both deserve a caveat ESL teachers specifically need to hear. Seesaw was built for K-5 portfolios — a young learner records a short video and a parent sees it that night — which makes it excellent for beginner-level speaking snippets but clumsy for a teenager’s two-minute opinion response. Edpuzzle flips the direction entirely: the teacher uploads or embeds a video and drops comprehension questions into it, which is strong for listening practice but doesn’t give students a way to record and post their own speaking video to classmates at all.

Neither replaces the peer-reply grid. Both are worth having in the toolkit alongside VoiceThread or Padlet rather than instead of them. Full breakdowns of each are in our Seesaw for ESL Teachers review и Edpuzzle for ESL Teachers review.

Switching to a Flipgrid Alternative Without Losing a Semester

Switching tools mid-year goes badly when a teacher picks the replacement before checking what the old routine actually needed. Work through it in this order instead:

Pull up your old Flipgrid rubric and mark whether it graded a single take or allowed re-recording — that decides whether you need VoiceThread/Padlet (multi-take, peer-visible) or Submit (one-shot, private).
Count your actual class size against each tool’s free-tier cap before picking one. Fifty students blows through Padlet’s three-board limit in two weeks.
Run one pilot unit — not a full semester — on the free tier of your top pick before buying a license.
Tell students the login process explicitly in the first five minutes of class. Every tool here has a different sign-in flow, and “I couldn’t log in” will eat your first week if you don’t.
If anyone has old Flipgrid videos they downloaded before the September 2024 cutoff, archive them to Google Drive or a shared folder now — they’re the only surviving samples of what “good” looked like for your rubric.

Ignore Any Site Still Selling “Flipgrid 2026”

Search for Flipgrid today and you’ll land on sites like myflipgridapp.com and flipgrids.us, advertising a “Flipgrid 2026” app for students and educators. Flipgrid has had no official product, website, or app since Microsoft deleted it in October 2024 — these are not Microsoft properties, and nothing ties them to the original service or its safety record. Don’t create student accounts or hand over a class list to a site like this just because the name is familiar.

A quick check before trusting any “Flipgrid replacement” you find through a search engine: look up who owns the domain, confirm the company has a named education sales contact (every tool covered above does), and search the company name alongside “data privacy” or “COPPA” before a single student logs in. If a tool doesn’t show up on Microsoft’s own retirement notice or the vendor’s real, long-standing domain, treat it as unverified until proven otherwise — a free video tool with no visible company behind it is exactly the kind of thing that disappears with your students’ recordings a second time.

The students who built real speaking confidence through weekly Flipgrid responses didn’t lose that progress when Microsoft pulled the plug — the tool changed, not the method. Pick based on what your old routine actually needed, not which name sounds closest to the one you’re used to, and pilot it for two weeks before you rebuild a whole term around it.