The best flashcard app for your exam, your phone and your notes

What is the best flashcard app?

It depends on how long you need to remember the material and where your cards will come from. If you have your own lecture notes and the slow part is writing cards, try Top of Class, the app I build. For a cumulative final, a licensing exam or a language, use Anki, which is free except for its iPhone app. If your class already shares sets, use Quizlet, or Knowt to get its study modes for free. If you take notes on a computer, RemNote puts the cards inside them.

What any flashcard app has to do

A flashcard app should make you answer before it shows the answer, and it should bring each card back after a gap that grows as you keep remembering it. Both rules come from studies that measured recall days later, not right after studying.

In Roediger and Karpicke's experiment, students who took recall tests on a passage remembered more of it two days and a week later than students who reread it. Rereading won on a test five minutes later, and it made students more confident (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). A review of 317 experiments on verbal recall found that the gap between study sessions that gives the best retention grows the further away the test is (Cepeda et al., 2006).

Nate Kornell tested this with flashcards. Students learning GRE-type word pairs remembered more from one large stack than from four small stacks studied one at a time, and more from spacing than from cramming on the last day. Spacing worked better for 90% of the participants, yet after the first session 72% of them believed massed study had worked better (Kornell, 2009).

So you can't judge an app by how studying in it feels. Pick one that schedules the reviews for you, and answer each card before you flip it. Every app below has a spaced repetition mode. They differ in who writes the cards, what they cost, and which devices they run on. The first of the rules for writing cards by Piotr Wozniak, who created SuperMemo, is not to learn what you don't understand (Wozniak, 1999). Cards help you keep what you already understand. They don't replace learning it from the lecture or the book.

Choose by time, card source and device

How long do you need to remember it? A quiz this week and a final that covers the whole semester need different tools. For months of material you want an app that keeps a schedule for every card.

Where will the cards come from? You can write them yourself, use a set someone else made, or have an app draft them from your notes.

Which devices do you study on? Anki costs $24.99 on iPhone and nothing on Android. Top of Class has no Android app. Anki, RemNote and Mochi have desktop apps, and Top of Class and Knowt run in a browser. The table below lists the platforms for every app.

1. Top of Class: if your own notes are the starting point (ours)

I build Top of Class, so this entry has a conflict of interest. I used Anki for about eight years, for studying and for learning new material when I changed jobs. I built Top of Class because I wanted a nicer experience, a better iPhone app and less manual work, while keeping Anki's core learning functionality.

You paste lecture notes or a textbook passage, and Atlas, the AI card writer, drafts recall cards from it. You decide which ones to keep. Reviews use spaced repetition with two buttons, Again and Good, and the app decides when each card comes back. Tend finds the cards you keep missing, and with Scholar, Atlas suggests a clearer version that you can accept or ignore.

Writing cards by hand and reviewing them is free on iPhone and on the web. Atlas drafting, Atlas's Tend repairs and sync between iPhone and web need Scholar, a subscription bought in the App Store, which shows the current price before you buy. On iPhone you can import an Anki deck with its review history and images; audio is not imported. Atlas reads pasted text only, not PDFs, and there's no Android or iPad app.

2. Anki: if you need to remember a course for months

Anki is free on Windows, Mac and Linux, AnkiDroid on Android is free, and syncing between them through AnkiWeb is free (Anki). You can also review in a browser on AnkiWeb (Anki manual). The official iPhone and iPad app, AnkiMobile, costs $24.99 once on the US App Store (App Store). I bought it, and it was worth it to me because I used Anki for so long.

Every card has its own schedule. With FSRS turned on in the deck options, Anki brings a card back when your chance of recalling it drops to a target you set, 90% by default, and its optimizer fits the schedule to your own review history (Anki manual). You grade each card with Again, Hard, Good or Easy (Anki manual). People share decks for common exams, so the deck you need may already exist. The cost is time, because you write or import every card yourself.

3. Quizlet: if your class already shares sets

A free Quizlet account covers flashcards, practice questions, interactive diagrams and activities. Study Guides, Learn, Test, Expert Solutions and offline studying need a subscription (Quizlet help). You can start one free Learn session to try it, and if a teacher adds a set to a Quizlet class, everyone in the class can use Learn and Test on it for free (Quizlet help).

The iPhone app has a spaced repetition mode. Its in-app purchases on the US App Store start at $9.99, and the listing doesn't say which price is monthly and which yearly (App Store). Check the upgrade screen for your price before you pay. Quizlet also runs on the web and Android (Google Play). For how it compares with Anki on a long course, read Anki vs Quizlet, and for what the free plan covers, Is Quizlet free?.

4. Knowt: if you want Quizlet's study modes without paying

Knowt says you can study a set for free, as many times as you want, in any of its five study modes: Learn, practice tests, matching, flashcards and spaced repetition. Its Chrome extension copies a Quizlet set you have open into Knowt (Knowt). Those are Knowt's own claims. The paid plan, Ultra, adds no ads and AI summaries of PDFs, videos and lecture recordings for $149.99 a year or $24.99 a month (Knowt plans). It runs on the web and has apps for iPhone (Knowt) and Android (Google Play).

5. RemNote: if you take notes on a computer

RemNote makes flashcards inside the notes you write, so a lecture page and its cards are one document. The free plan has unlimited notes and flashcards, five AI card generations from text, PDFs or slides, and five image occlusion cards. Pro is $96 a year and Pro with AI is $216 a year (RemNote pricing). It runs on desktop, iPhone and Android (RemNote), and it imports an Anki deck with its review history and media (RemNote help).

6. Mochi: if you want decks and cards written in Markdown

Mochi organizes cards in decks and schedules their reviews, as Anki does, and you write the cards in Markdown. It runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone and Android, and in a browser (Mochi). The free plan has unlimited cards and decks, works offline, and imports and exports. Pro adds sync between devices for $5 a month billed yearly (Mochi pricing). It imports Anki decks with their review history, and it converts styled cards to Markdown, so they may look different (Mochi docs).

7. Brainscape: if you want fewer choices per card

After each card you rate your confidence from 1 to 5, and Brainscape times the next review from that (App Store). The free plan covers unlimited cards you make, importing existing cards, AI to make hundreds of cards, and 2,500 of its ready-made cards. Pro is $7.99 a month billed yearly on its site (Brainscape pricing). In the US App Store, Pro purchases run from $19.99 to $95.99, plus a $199.99 lifetime option. It runs on the web, iPhone and Android (Google Play).

If you already have cards somewhere

An Anki deck carries two things: the cards and the review history that decides when each one comes back. Export it as a deck package (.apkg) with "Include scheduling information" checked and both are in the file (Anki manual). Mochi, RemNote and Top of Class on iPhone keep that history. Quizlet builds a set from pasted text instead (Quizlet help), and apps that take only text start every card over. Anki alternatives goes through each route.

Quizlet exports sets you created yourself as text, without images, and not sets you copied from someone else (Quizlet help). Quizlet alternatives says where those sets can go.

Which one to pick

Pick by how long you need to remember the material, then by who writes the cards and which device you study on.

• You have lecture notes and keep putting off making cards: Top of Class.
• A cumulative final, a licensing exam or a language, and you will write or download the cards: Anki.
• Your class or teacher already uses Quizlet: Quizlet, and ask the teacher to add the sets to a class.
• You want Quizlet's study modes without paying: Knowt.
• You take notes on a computer and want the cards inside them: RemNote.
• You want Anki-style decks with cards written in Markdown: Mochi.
• You want one confidence rating per card instead of choosing between buttons: Brainscape.

How this article was made

Researched and drafted with AI assistance from each app's pricing page, help pages and app store listings and from the studies linked above, then fact-checked against those sources on 21 October 2026. Top of Class details come from its product documentation and code. I haven't run a scored test of these apps side by side, so no app is ranked on test results.

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