Anki vs Quizlet: which flashcard app to use
Flashcards earn their place in a study routine because they are boring and they work. You write a word on one side and its meaning on the other, and you come back to it at the right intervals until you stop forgetting it. The intervals are the whole trick: reviewing something just before you would have forgotten it is what moves it into long-term memory. That is spaced repetition, and it is the reason a good flashcard app beats a stack of index cards.
Two apps dominate. Anki and Quizlet both do flashcards, and they are aimed at almost opposite people. Here is how they compare.
What we looked at
- Ease of use: can you work out what to do without reading a manual?
- Study modes: plain card flipping, or quizzes, matching and typing tests?
- Making decks: how much work is a card, especially in a language with accents or a different script?
- Spaced repetition: does the app decide when to show you a card again, and is that in the free version?
- What it costs: which platforms are free and what is behind a subscription.
- Platforms: desktop, web, iPhone, Android.
Anki
Anki has been around for a long time and is the default recommendation among people who take memorisation seriously — medical students in particular.
Its scheduling is the best part. You see a card, decide whether you knew it, and rate it. Anki uses that rating to decide when to show it to you next, stretching the interval each time you get it right and shortening it when you do not. You are not choosing what to review; the app is, and it is better at it than you would be.
The interface is plain and mostly sensible, but it does not explain itself. You will meet terms like "filtered deck" and have no idea what they mean until you look them up. Making a card is manual work: you type both sides yourself, including the translation you are trying to learn, which is slow for a language with accents or a script you cannot type quickly.
In exchange you get customisation that no other flashcard app comes close to. Card templates, note types with several fields, cloze deletions, add-ons for almost anything. The cost is that you have to learn how all that works before it helps you.
There is also a large library of shared decks made by other users, listed with their size and subject, which saves you building a deck from scratch for a common language or exam.
Anki is free and open source on Windows, macOS and Linux, and AnkiWeb is free for syncing and studying in a browser. AnkiDroid on Android is free and community-maintained. The official iPhone and iPad app, AnkiMobile, is a paid one-time purchase, and the money from it funds the rest of the project.
Quizlet
Quizlet is the friendlier one. You can be studying within a minute of arriving, and it has more ways to study than Anki: plain flashcards, a matching game, written tests and an adaptive Learn mode that mixes question types based on what you keep getting wrong.
Making a set is straightforward, and pasting vocabulary and foreign characters in from a spreadsheet works without trouble — easier on a computer than on a phone. Quizlet can add audio to cards automatically for a number of languages, which Anki will not do for you.
The catch is what the free account gets. According to Quizlet's own help pages, a free account can study a set with Learn for a limited number of rounds and take one practice test per set; unlimited Learn rounds, full practice tests and ad-free studying require Quizlet Plus. Since Learn is the mode that does the adaptive, spaced work, the free tier is closer to a card-flipping app than a memorisation system. Students whose teacher has added a set to a class get free access to Learn and Test for those sets.
As with Anki, there is a large library of user-made sets. Quality varies, so budget a few minutes to find a good one rather than using the first result.
Which one should you use?
- Choose Anki if you are in this for the long term, you have a lot to memorise, and you would rather spend an evening learning the tool than pay a subscription. It is free where it matters and the scheduling is the reason people stay.
- Choose Quizlet if you want to start now, you like variety in how you are tested, and you are studying for something with a date on it. Just know that the part that produces long-term retention is the paid part.
There is no rule against using both. Quizlet for a course, Anki for the vocabulary you intend to keep for years, is a common arrangement.
Getting your words in without typing them twice
The slowest part of either app is entering cards. If you are collecting vocabulary while reading, you can skip most of that work.
Translate a word with Mate — select it on a page, in a PDF or in any app — and save it to the Phrasebook. Keep a list per subject or per language pair. When you have enough, open Mate's browser extension, go to the Phrasebook, and export the list as a CSV file. Both Anki and Quizlet import CSV: map the first column to the front of the card and the second to the back, and ignore the rest.
The export also carries the transliteration and synonyms, which are worth keeping for languages in another script. Export is a Mate Pro feature, and the steps are in Export your History and Phrasebook to a CSV file.
Collecting words where you actually meet them, rather than from a list someone else wrote, is also the reason they stick.