Home › Study Guides › Looking for an Anki Alternative? Read This First
When Anki is worth its setup cost, when it is not, and five switching cases with a different answer each.
Start with the uncomfortable part: if you have already sunk forty hours into Anki, built your card templates, tuned your intervals and installed the right add-ons, you probably should not switch. Anki at cruising altitude is the best pure spaced repetition tool ever built, it is free, and your review history is an asset you would be throwing away.
Most people searching for an Anki alternative never reached cruising altitude. They downloaded it, stared at the empty deck screen and a settings panel offering graduating intervals and lapse leech thresholds, made thirty cards, missed four days, came back to a review pile that felt like a debt collection notice, and quit. That is not a character flaw. It is a product design choice, because Anki optimises for power rather than onboarding, and it filters out a lot of people who would genuinely benefit from spaced repetition.
Full disclosure: we make CoStudy, one of the alternatives below, and we built it partly because of that exact filtering problem. On prices, this market moves constantly, so exact figures appear here only where we verified them against the provider directly; everywhere else you get a description of the tier rather than a number, because a stale price is worse than none.
The complaints about Anki are consistent across years of forum threads and app reviews. It ships empty, being an engine with no fuel, so you either spend hours making cards, which to be fair is itself effective studying, or you download shared decks of unknown quality and provenance, because there is no vetted library. The learning curve is real: the default settings are fine but nothing tells you that, so new users fall into forums debating interval modifiers before they have reviewed a hundred cards. The interface looks like 2009 because it basically is, functional but not inviting, and on mobile especially it feels like operating lab equipment. The iOS app costs 24.99 dollars, which is how the volunteer-run project funds itself and is a fair deal for what you get, but it surprises people who expected Anki to be free everywhere. And missed days compound, because the scheduling that makes Anki effective also makes it unforgiving: a week off can mean an eight-hundred-card backlog, and backlogs are where Anki habits go to die.
None of this makes Anki bad. It makes Anki a tool with a specific user in mind: someone studying one high-stakes domain for months or years who will amortise the setup cost. Medical students. Language learners going to fluency. If that is you, honestly, stay.
Whatever you switch to should keep the two things that make Anki work, meaning active recall and real spaced repetition scheduling, and fix the part that made you leave. That usually means one of three things: pre-made content, a gentler interface, or a lighter daily commitment. Rank those three for yourself before reading on, because the right pick follows directly from the order.
CoStudy is our app, so discount appropriately. The one-line version is that it runs SM-2 spaced repetition, the same algorithm family Anki's scheduler descends from, but instead of an empty deck screen you start with 222 curated question banks holding 73,642 questions across school subjects, admissions tests and professional certifications, with practice exams and multiple-choice modes Anki does not natively do. There is nothing to configure: no interval settings, no add-ons, no card templates. You pick a deck, answer questions, and the scheduler resurfaces what you are about to forget. The trade-off is real and worth naming: you give up Anki's infinite customisability and its card-creation depth, so if your study method depends on hand-crafted cloze deletions from your own lecture notes, Anki remains the better tool. On pricing, there are two academic subscriptions, an elementary tier covering third through fifth grade and an educational tier covering grades three to twelve plus advanced-placement subjects, admissions tests and novels, each with a seven-day free trial. Professional certification decks are bought individually rather than by subscription, with family bundles available. The first ten questions of every deck are free, which is the fastest way to judge whether our pre-made content beats what you would have built.
Brainscape offers simpler scheduling and a decent library, replacing pass-fail grading with a five-point confidence rating that drives spacing. That is less precise than SM-2 in theory and easier to be honest with in practice, and its certified decks for advanced-placement subjects, medical admissions and bar preparation are usable out of the box. It runs a monthly subscription over a free tier that runs out quickly.
RemNote suits people who left Anki because of card creation. If making cards was the bottleneck, it attacks the problem differently: your notes are the cards, so flagging a line in your lecture notes puts it in the spaced repetition queue. There is still a learning curve, but it is the note-taking kind rather than the settings-panel kind, and there is a paid pro tier over a solid free one.
Mochi is Anki for the design-conscious: markdown-based cards, a clean interface, sane defaults and real spaced repetition, popular with developers. Like Anki it ships empty, so this is the pick if you liked Anki's philosophy but not its aesthetics, with sync behind a modest subscription.
SuperMemo is included for completeness, since it is where the algorithms come from and its newer ones out-schedule SM-2. It is also harder to use than Anki rather than easier, so if you are reading an Anki-alternatives piece, this is the wrong direction.
Quizlet and Knowt sit at the convenience end. Both have huge user-made libraries and near-zero learning curve, but their spaced repetition is shallow or paywalled and deck accuracy is a coin flip because nobody reviews user content. Fine for a vocabulary quiz on Friday; a downgrade for board preparation.
The decision comes down to five cases. If you are studying medicine, or one subject for a year or more, and are willing to invest setup time, stay with Anki, because the community decks for board preparation plus the surrounding ecosystem are unmatched. If you left because making cards took longer than studying, take RemNote if you take heavy notes and CoStudy if you would rather the cards just exist already. If you left because of the interface and settings, take Mochi if you will bring your own content and CoStudy if you want content included. If you are studying for a professional certification on a budget, this is where we argue hardest for our own app, because certification prep pricing is genuinely hostile, with the major question banks and review courses running from several hundred dollars into the low thousands, and a single-certification deck at our price is a rounding error against that even if you use it alongside other materials. And if you are studying a language to fluency, use Anki with a frequency deck or Memrise, because that is Anki's home turf.
One more thing about switching: whatever you leave Anki for, do not abandon spaced repetition itself. The scheduling is the part that works, and the forgetting curve does not care which app you open. A simpler tool you use daily will outperform a perfect tool gathering dust, which is the entire case for switching and also the entire case for staying if Anki is already a habit.
A few questions come up repeatedly. On the best alternative, it depends why you are leaving: for pre-made content with the same SM-2 scheduling, ours; for turning notes into cards, RemNote; for a cleaner Anki-like experience where you still make your own cards, Mochi; for guided decks with confidence-based spacing, Brainscape. There is an Anki alternative with pre-made decks, since CoStudy ships 222 curated banks and Brainscape offers certified decks for major exams, while Anki's own shared decks exist but are community-made and unreviewed. On whether Anki is worth the learning curve, for long-horizon high-volume memorisation such as medical school, law or language fluency usually yes, since the setup cost amortises over thousands of reviews, but for a single course or a certification exam six weeks out usually no, because you will spend a meaningful fraction of your preparation time on configuration. On why Anki costs money on iPhone, the iOS app is the primary funding source for development that is otherwise free and open source on desktop and Android, and it is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. On the algorithm, both are built on SM-2, the 1987 SuperMemo algorithm where correct answers expand a card's review interval by its ease factor and misses reset it, with Anki adding deep configurability and an optional newer scheduler while ours runs SM-2 with no user configuration. And on switching without losing progress, your Anki review history cannot transfer its scheduling state to other apps, so mature cards start fresh anywhere you go, which is the strongest argument for staying if you are deep into Anki and a reason to switch sooner rather than later if you are not.
Read this in the CoStudy app →