Piazza
Where students get answers and instructors scale support
| Vendor | Piazza Technologies |
|---|---|
| Categories | Communication, Learning Management |
| School types | Higher Education, K-12 |
| Pricing | Freemium — Free for academic courses; Piazza Careers and advanced institutional features on paid plans |
| Deployment | Cloud, Mobile |
| Free trial | Yes |
| Rating | 4.4/5 (8234 reviews) |
| Website | https://piazza.com |
About Piazza
Piazza is a Q&A and class discussion platform widely used in higher education and advanced high school courses, particularly in STEM disciplines. Founded at Stanford University, Piazza is built around the insight that students often learn best from peer explanations — and that in large courses, instructors simply cannot answer every individual question. On Piazza, students post questions anonymously or with their name, and classmates collaborate to write a single crowd-sourced answer that the instructor can then endorse, edit, or supplement. This wiki-style answer model means students benefit from collective knowledge and the best explanation rises to the top, rather than the class being flooded with repeated queries. Instructors can post lecture notes, announcements, and polls, and can see live participation data showing which topics are generating the most confusion. Piazza is particularly powerful for large lecture courses where office hour capacity is limited: the platform effectively extends instructors' reach by enabling peer teaching at scale. Integrations are available with Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, and other LMSs for single sign-on and grade passback. Piazza is free for instructors and students in most academic settings, with career and recruiting features (Piazza Careers) available for universities as an additional service.