10 Free Anki Alternatives

Anki is free, powerful, and genuinely hard to start with. If you want spaced repetition without deck options, template syntax, and three YouTube tutorials before your first card, these ten alternatives all have a real free tier you can use today.

The short list:

1. Scholarly for turning a PDF, lecture, or video you already have into cards.
2. Knowt for the free Quizlet-style experience, including a Quizlet set importer.
3. Brainscape for confidence-based review and certified decks.
4. Cram for a simple, free, ad-supported deck library.
5. Quizlet for the biggest catalog of pre-made sets.
6. RemNote when your cards should live inside your notes.
7. Vaia for a free all-in-one study app with community sets.
8. Memrise for languages specifically.
9. Mnemosyne for open-source, no-frills spaced repetition.
10. Quizlet Live for group review sessions.

One warning before the list: several apps with "Anki" in the name are not Anki. Skip to the section on knockoffs if you are about to download one.

If Anki is the tool you are replacing rather than abandoning, Scholarly's Anki alternative guide covers the tradeoffs in more depth, and PDF to Anki cards exports into the .apkg format so you can keep Anki's scheduler and skip the typing.

#1. Scholarly - Cards from the material you already have

What it does well:

• Generates cards from your actual source. Upload a lecture PDF, a textbook chapter, or a recording, and the cards come from that document rather than from a generic topic prompt.
• Keeps everything in one workspace. The same upload also becomes quizzes, notes, and a cited AI chat, so you are not moving files between five apps.
• Fast first deck. From a PDF to something reviewable takes about a minute, and every card stays editable.
• Free spaced repetition. Per-card scheduling is included on the free plan with no ads.

The reality check:

• The free plan is capped at 1 lifetime AI generation and 1 lifetime file upload, with an 8 MB file limit, and PDF-to-flashcards reads the first 32 pages. Paid plans lift those caps.
• The public set library is small. Scholarly assumes you bring your own material, so it is the wrong pick if you want someone else's pre-made deck.
• Exporting a deck to .apkg or PDF requires a paid plan.

Best for: anyone whose material starts as a file. Students with a 40-page biology chapter, professionals prepping for a certification, researchers turning papers into review. Start with PDF to flashcards if that describes you.

#2. Knowt - The closest thing to old free Quizlet

What it does well:

• A free tier that still includes the study modes Quizlet now gates, including Learn mode and practice tests.
• One-click import of your existing Quizlet sets, which makes switching close to costless.
• AI flashcard generation from notes, PDFs, and lecture videos.
• A familiar interface if you are coming from Quizlet.

The reality check:

• AI generation is capped on the free tier, and card quality varies enough that you should read through a generated set before trusting it.
• Published prices for the paid tiers differ across review sites. Check Knowt's own plans page rather than a comparison article.

Best for: students with years of Quizlet sets who want the free study modes back without retyping anything.

#3. Brainscape - Confidence-based repetition

What it does well:

• After each card you rate your confidence from 1 to 5, and that rating drives when the card comes back. It is intuitive and it keeps you honest.
• The free tier lets you make or import unlimited flashcards and study them with spaced repetition, which is more generous than most.
• You can upload PowerPoint, PDF, Word, Excel, and video files and have AI generate a set from them.
• Certified expert-built decks for professional exams: real estate licensing, bar prep, AP courses, languages.

The reality check:

• The certified catalog, images and sounds, study reversals, and unlimited AI generation all sit behind Pro, which is $7.99 per month billed yearly as of July 2026.
• Free AI generation is a fixed allowance, not an ongoing workflow.

Best for: professionals studying for a certification where a vetted deck beats building your own, and anyone who finds Anki's four-button rating harder to judge than a 1-to-5 confidence scale.

#4. Cram - Simple and free, ads included

What it does well:

• Free to create and study, with a large library of community decks.
• Offline study, so a flight or a dead Wi-Fi zone does not stop a session.
• Folders and tags for organising a semester's worth of decks.

The reality check:

• The free experience is ad-heavy.
• Community deck quality varies, and the app has drawn complaints about study modes being removed in recent updates. Check that the mode you rely on still exists before you commit a semester to it.

Best for: students who want something free and simple, and do not mind ads.

#5. Quizlet - The biggest library, a narrower free tier

What it does well:

• The largest public set library there is. For a common course or a standardized test, a usable set almost certainly exists.
• Polished apps and familiar modes: Flashcards, Learn, Match, Test.
• Classmates and teachers already use it, so sharing inside a class takes no setup.

The reality check:

• The adaptive Learn mode that made Quizlet famous is now a Quizlet Plus feature. Free users get limited access rather than unlimited rounds.
• Ads throughout the free experience.
• Studying a stranger's set means studying what their class covered, not yours.
• Quizlet does have AI features now, but most of them are attached to Plus.

Best for: grabbing one pre-made set for tomorrow's quiz.

#6. RemNote - Cards that live inside your notes

What it does well:

• Write a line of notes, mark it as a card, and it enters your review queue. Note-taking and card-making become one action.
• The free tier covers unlimited notes and flashcards across unlimited synced devices, which is unusually generous.
• Spaced repetition, image occlusion, and PDF annotation all in one tool.

The reality check:

• It is a knowledge-base tool first, so there is a real learning curve, and large knowledge bases can feel slow.
• The free tier gives only small monthly allowances of the premium extras (a few annotated PDFs, a handful of image-occlusion cards, a monthly pool of AI credits). Pro is $8 per month or $96 per year, and the AI tier is $18 per month, as of July 2026.

Best for: heavy note-takers, especially med students, who want their notes and their review queue to be the same document.

#7. Vaia (formerly StudySmarter) - Free all-in-one study app

What it does well:

• Free access to community study sets, notes, and flashcards across a wide range of school and university subjects.
• Spaced repetition is one of the built-in study modes, and you can create your own sets rather than only consuming others'.
• Works on web, iOS, and Android.

The reality check:

• Coverage is deepest for common curricula. Niche or graduate-level topics thin out quickly.
• There is a premium tier, so expect upsells in the free experience.
• The rename from StudySmarter means older reviews and guides use the previous name, which makes searching for current information mildly confusing.

Best for: school and undergraduate students who want one free app for notes and cards together.

#8. Memrise - Languages specifically

What it does well:

• Free to start, across a very wide range of languages.
• Teaches through short clips of native speakers rather than textbook sentences, which is the part Anki decks usually lack.
• Review scheduling is built in, so vocabulary comes back before you lose it.

The reality check:

• Languages only. It is not a general-purpose flashcard tool, so it will not help with anatomy or contract law.
• The paid plan unlocks extra features, and the free tier nudges you toward it.

Best for: language learners who want vocabulary review without building a deck by hand.

#9. Mnemosyne - Open source, no frills

What it does well:

• Free and open source, with a research-driven scheduling algorithm and no subscription anywhere.
• Cross-platform, with multimedia support and detailed statistics.
• Your data stays yours, in an open format.

The reality check:

• The interface is spare and the project moves slowly.
• There is effectively no shared-deck community, so you are typing your own cards.

Best for: people who like Anki's philosophy but want something leaner, and anyone who wants an open-source tool with no commercial layer at all.

#10. Quizlet Live - Group review

What it does well:

• Turns an existing Quizlet set into a team game everyone joins from their phones.
• Genuinely effective for a last-minute group review session, and far more engaging than reading notes aloud together.

The reality check:

• Useless if you study alone, and it needs an existing Quizlet set, so it is a companion to the rest of your setup rather than a replacement for it.

Best for: study groups and classroom review sessions.

A warning about Anki lookalikes

Several subscription apps use Anki's name and are not connected to Anki in any way. Anki's official FAQ names them directly: AnkiApp, since rebranded as AlgoApp, and Anki Pro, since rebranded as Noji. They came years after Anki, they do not sync with Anki, and Anki's maintainers point out that the names were chosen to borrow the brand recognition.

The practical consequences matter if you download one by mistake. Your decks will not open in Anki, AnkiDroid, AnkiMobile, or AnkiWeb, and you may end up on a subscription while believing you are using free software. The genuine Anki apps are Anki on desktop, AnkiDroid on Android, AnkiMobile on iOS, and AnkiWeb in a browser, all linked from apps.ankiweb.net.

This is not an argument against paying for a study app. It is an argument for knowing which one you are paying for.

Apps that are no longer worth searching for

Two names still show up in older lists of Anki alternatives and are worth crossing off:

• StudyBlue. Chegg acquired it in 2018 and shut it down at the end of 2020, migrating users to Chegg Prep, which Chegg later retired as well. Chegg still hosts flashcards on its site, but the standalone product people remember is gone. Do not build a workflow around it.
• Learn.xyz. It still exists, but it repositioned toward corporate and organisational training rather than individual students, and it no longer advertises a free student tier. If you found it on an older student-focused list, that recommendation is out of date.

Which one should you actually use?

There is no single winner, so pick by what you are starting from:

Your material already exists as files. Start with Scholarly. Upload the PDF or paste your notes, get cards grounded in that source, and start reviewing. That is the structural difference from every card-only tool here: the upload is a source, not just a deck, so the same file can also become a quiz or a set of notes.

You have a pile of Quizlet sets. Knowt imports them and gives the free study modes back.

You want a huge existing library. Quizlet remains the safe pick.

Your notes are your system. RemNote, so cards and notes never diverge.

You are prepping for a professional certification. Brainscape, for the certified decks and the confidence rating.

You want maximum control and do not mind the learning curve. Stay on Anki, or use Mnemosyne for a leaner open-source version. Neither is beaten on power. They are only beaten on setup time.

Your next step

The best flashcard app is the one you will still open in week six, so do not spend an evening comparing them. Pick one, bring in your most recent source, and review something today.

The real lever is not the app. It is the habit of retrieval practice on material you actually need to understand. If the part you keep avoiding is building the cards, that is the specific problem Scholarly's generation step removes.

Try Scholarly's AI flashcard generation

Free to start. No credit card required.