You have watched NotebookLM turn a folder of lecture PDFs into a podcast that sounds like two people who read them, and you are wondering whether your flashcard app still has a job.
NotebookLM vs Quizlet comes down to one thing they share: neither decides when you should see a card again. NotebookLM is the best of the three apps below at making sense of a pile of sources, Quizlet is where you go for a deck somebody already built, and a study app with spaced repetition is what gets you to the exam in week eleven. Which one you need depends on whether your problem is understanding the material or still knowing it in eleven weeks.
One thing before you go searching: Google has renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook. Same product, new name. Most people still type the old one, so that is the name used here.
It makes flashcards now
The line you will still read on most comparison pages is that NotebookLM cannot make flashcards. That stopped being true. Google's help centre has a page on generating flashcards and quizzes in Gemini Notebook: cards and questions are grounded only in your sources, you choose easy, medium or hard and how many you want, and every card carries an Explain button. Generating cards is not the gap.
No review scheduling is documented
When you come back to a set, Gemini Notebook remembers your progress and lets you re-run the same cards, all cards, or only the ones you missed. That is a bookmark and a filter, and both are about the session you are in. The page that documents the feature says nothing about spaced repetition, review intervals, or a card coming back after a delay, so deciding when to return to a card is left to you.
For a week of reading that is fine. For a module examined in eleven weeks it is the whole problem, because choosing what to review today is exactly the decision you are worst placed to make.
Side by side
| NotebookLM, now Gemini Notebook | Studyflash | Quizlet | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Refining and organising your ideas, in Google's words | Your own lecture material, reviewed across a term | Studying decks, mostly ones other people made |
| Cards from your files | Yes, from your sources, with difficulty and question count | Yes, from PDFs, slides, photos of notes, pasted text or a recorded lecture | Yes, via Study Guides, in English, French and German only |
| Review scheduling | None documented; progress remembered, missed cards re-run | Spaced repetition, plus a cram mode | None documented; Learn is a free taste, then Plus |
| Audio | Audio Overviews, 4 formats, over 80 languages, 3 a day free | A podcast from a deck, two voices, with a synced searchable transcript; Premium | None documented |
| Free plan | 100 notebooks, 50 sources each, 50 chats a day | Flashcards, quizzes, spaced repetition, a monthly allowance of AI generations | Flashcards and Match, with ads |
| Paid | Google AI Pro, about $20 a month | Premium, priced per country, see /pricing | Plus, €44.99 a year on the German App Store |
| Phone | Google recommends the desktop version; Audio Overviews download for offline | iPhone, iPad and Android; generated decks work offline, podcasts need a connection | Offline on the phone apps for your 8 most recent sets |
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.
NotebookLM
Google calls it an AI research assistant for refining and organising your ideas. Research rather than study, and that is a fair description of the difference.
🚀 Best for: volume. The free tier is generous for something this capable: 100 notebooks, 50 sources per notebook, 50 chat queries a day, 3 Audio Overviews a day. Put 15 papers in one notebook, ask questions across all of them, and listen to an Audio Overview on the tram. Those come in 4 formats and over 80 languages, which matters if your reading list is not in English. For a literature review, NotebookLM is better at the job than Quizlet and better than Studyflash. Use it for that.
💰 Costs: the free tier is the one most students will use. Google AI Pro is about $20 a month and the paid prices vary by country.
🛑 Where it stops: the scheduling gap above, which leaves retention over a term to you. Google recommends the desktop version, and on a phone only the Audio Overviews download for offline. On a personal Google account, free or paid, Google says notebook content is not used to train its models unless you submit feedback, and feedback is reviewed by people. Workspace for Education accounts get the stronger guarantee that nothing is reviewed at all, so if your university issues one, upload with that.
Studyflash
🚀 Best for: the part neither of the others covers: your own material, turned into cards, then scheduled. Upload the PDF, the slides or a photo of your handwritten notes, or record the lecture, and you get flashcards in six types including image occlusion, a quiz and a summary. Spaced repetition then decides which cards come back and when; cram mode drops the schedule for the night before. Mock exams run at course level and can be modelled on a past paper you upload.
💰 Costs: the free plan carries flashcards, quizzes and spaced repetition with a monthly allowance of AI generations. Premium is priced per country.
🛑 Where it stops: there is no public library of ready-made decks. Sharing is by link, so if what you want is a finished deck for a standard course by tomorrow morning, Quizlet's library is the reason to stay on Quizlet. Podcasts and mock exams are Premium.
Quizlet
🚀 Best for: the library. Quizlet publishes a figure of 900+ million study sets, and for a standard course somebody has already made the deck. Flashcards and Match are free, with ads.
💰 Costs: Plus is €44.99 a year on the German App Store, and base Plus is itself capped at 20 rounds of Learn and 3 practice tests a month. Unlimited is the tier that is actually unlimited.
🛑 Where it stops: the two modes that test you rather than show you sit behind the paywall. Learn is a free taste of unstated size, then Plus; Test is one free practice test per set. Ask Quizlet, the chat that reads your uploaded files, is US-only, which rules it out for most of Europe. Sets are public by default. The Studyflash review against Quizlet goes through the free plan row by row.
The two podcasts are different products
Google's Audio Overview is free at 3 a day, comes in 4 formats and runs in over 80 languages. It is generated from your sources, so it works as a briefing on the reading.
Studyflash's podcast is two voices working through a deck you are already studying, with a transcript that stays in sync: tap a line to jump the audio, or search it when you cannot listen. The episode and the cards are the same material, so the tram ride feeds the review session later. Audio Overviews download for offline listening and Studyflash podcasts need a connection, so if your commute has no signal, Google wins that row.
Who should pick what
- Reading 15 papers for a literature review: NotebookLM, and you do not need to pay.
- A deck for a standard first-year course by tomorrow: Quizlet. Somebody has already made it. Expect to pay to be tested rather than shown.
- Examined on your own lecturer's material in ten weeks: a study app that schedules reviews. That is the case for Studyflash, and for Anki if you would rather configure everything yourself.
- All three at once, which is what most terms look like: understand the hard reading list in NotebookLM, then move what you have to retain into something that schedules it.
- Studying in a language other than English: Ask Quizlet is US-only and Study Guides is three languages. Audio Overviews in over 80 languages make NotebookLM the strongest multilingual option here.
Questions and answers
No. Google has renamed it Gemini Notebook, and the help centre has moved with it. Most people and most search results still use the old name.
On a personal account, free or paid, Google says notebook content is not used to train its models unless you submit feedback, and feedback is reviewed by people. Workspace and Workspace for Education accounts get a stronger guarantee that uploads are never reviewed. Paying for a personal plan does not move you to the stronger policy.
Partly. Google recommends the desktop version for the full experience, and only Audio Overviews download for offline use.
Base Plus is capped at 20 rounds of Learn and 3 practice tests a month. If you study daily during an exam period that cap arrives early, and Unlimited is the tier that removes it.
Yes, and it is the sensible pattern. Read and interrogate the sources in NotebookLM, then build the cards you have to retain in an app that schedules them.