Anki Alternatives: Seven Apps Compared, and When to Stay

Image occlusion is built in, since version 23.10 in October 2023. Guides that tell you to install the Image Occlusion Enhanced add-on are describing an older app.

FSRS, the Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler, ships with Anki. It is off by default, lives at the bottom of the deck options page, and can only be switched on for every deck at once.

Anki is free on Windows, macOS, Linux and Android, and AnkiWeb sync is free too. The only money anywhere is the iPhone app, about $25 once.

What Anki does not do is generate cards. AI generation comes from third-party add-ons, and the manual warns that updating Anki can break older ones. The manual itself runs to 26 chapters and advises a few weeks on the defaults before you change anything, which is good advice and also the reason the first reader left. Two AnkiWeb limits before you treat it as your backup: collections are capped at 100 MB compressed, and an account unused for 6 months can have its data deleted after a warning email.

Prices checked on 10 August 2026. Where a vendor publishes no euro price, the figure is the US one, and every price varies by country and store.

🚀 Best for: the reader with a few thousand cards who is tired of making them. A lecture PDF, slide deck, photo of handwritten notes or recording of the class goes in and a finished deck comes out, in six card types including image occlusion. The mechanics are on the AI flashcard maker page.

💰 Costs: the free plan covers flashcards, quizzes and spaced repetition with a monthly allowance of AI generations, enough to try it on your own material. Premium is priced per country; the pricing page shows yours.

🛑 Where it stops: the importer takes .apkg and tab-separated .txt files. Cloze cards become fill-in-the-blank cards and formatting is stripped with the text kept, but images and audio do not come across. A deck built on labelled diagrams arrives as text with holes in it. So split the collection: import the text-heavy decks, rebuild the media-heavy ones from the original slides, and keep Anki for anything you are not prepared to rebuild. Running both for a term is a normal outcome.

🚀 Best for: notes and cards in one sitting. Cards are embedded in your notes, so every card keeps its context. FSRS, proper image occlusion, and .apkg both in and out, so your review history moves with you.

💰 Costs: $8 a month for Pro, with a 25% education discount on web signup.

🛑 Where it stops: the free plan is tight where an Anki user notices, at 5 image occlusion cards and 100 AI credits a month. It is also a notes app with cards in it, so if you only want cards you are paying rent on an outliner.

🚀 Best for: the reader who liked Anki's model and not Anki's surface. Small, quick, plain. Its Diagram cards give each masked region its own review schedule, and .apkg files import with their history.

💰 Costs: free forever with no sign-up. Pro is $5 a month for sync and deck publishing.

🛑 Where it stops: sync is paid, so free is one device. And it will not solve the second reader's problem: the AI writes example sentences and study prompts and does not claim to build decks.

🚀 Best for: studying material somebody else has organised. Confidence-based repetition runs off your own 1 to 5 rating, and the free plan includes up to 2'500 pre-made cards.

💰 Costs: about $96 a year.

🛑 Where it stops: no image occlusion, and Brainscape says so itself: not at this time, although they are working on it. For an Anki user with an anatomy deck that settles it. Images, sounds and export are all paid.

🚀 Best for: a large free plan. Students get unlimited flashcards, notes and every study mode, with only the AI capped, and it generates cards from notes, PDFs and video.

💰 Costs: roughly $20 to $25 a month; Knowt's own pages list two prices.

🛑 Where it stops: it is shaped around US exams, and the website is English only, with language switching in the app. No Anki import is documented; the importer Knowt markets is for Quizlet.

🚀 Best for: a deck that already exists for a standard course. Quizlet's own figure is 900+ million study sets, and if you are leaving Anki for other people's cards, that is the reason.

💰 Costs: free with ads; Plus is €44.99 a year on the German App Store, and even paid base Plus caps Learn at 20 rounds a month.

🛑 Where it stops: the structure. There is no .apkg import, only pasted text on the website, so a large collection arrives as plain text with the media gone. Export is text only the other way too. No page documents image occlusion. The Quizlet alternatives piece has the rest.

Google has renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook.

🚀 Best for: getting on top of a pile of source material. It generates flashcards and quizzes from what you upload, with difficulty levels and an Explain button.

💰 Costs: a free tier of 100 notebooks and 50 chats a day; Google AI Pro is about $20 a month.

🛑 Where it stops: no review scheduling is documented. It remembers your progress and re-serves the cards you missed, and says nothing about intervals. For anyone leaving Anki that is the whole question. Google calls it a research assistant, which is a fair description.

• Stay with Anki if you want control and want to pay nothing. Free on desktop and Android, open source, exports your whole collection, native image occlusion, a built-in FSRS scheduler, and the most configurable scheduling on this page by a distance. Desktop 26.08.1 shipped in August 2026, so it is not going anywhere. If a few weeks on the defaults reads as reasonable, you are the reader Anki is built for.
• Never got started, and want the cards to exist: Studyflash. The deck comes out of material you already have, which removes the step where you stopped.
• Never got started, but happy writing your own: Mochi.
• Notes and cards in one place: RemNote, the only option here that both imports and exports .apkg.
• A library rather than a blank deck: Brainscape's 2'500 free cards, or Quizlet for breadth. Neither takes your .apkg file.
• Understanding the material before memorising it: Gemini Notebook, alongside something that schedules reviews.
• A medical student with a media-heavy deck: different enough to have its own article.

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