Looking for an Anki alternative, or for a way out of making cards?

They are different problems and they have different answers. Almost nobody who searches for this is unhappy with how Anki schedules reviews. They are unhappy that a card takes a minute to write and they have four hundred words waiting.

What people usually mean

Anki does two jobs. It decides what you should see today, and it holds whatever you decided to put in it. The first is excellent and free. The second is entirely on you: you find the word, you find the meaning, you write both sides, you tag it, you do it again.

So before switching, work out which half is failing. If reviews feel random or overwhelming, a different app might help. If the deck simply stopped growing, no scheduler in the world fixes that, because the problem happened before the card existed.

The alternatives, honestly

Quizlet, RemNote and Mochi are the three people usually land on, and all three still have you writing the card. Anki itself is the one to beat on reviews and nothing here beats it. What follows is what each is actually for, and where it leaves you.

Quizlet, for a set you need today

Fast to fill, runs anywhere, easy to share with a class. If you are preparing for a specific test next week it does the job with no setup. You are still typing every term, and once the collection gets large it gets hard to see what is in there.

RemNote, for notes that turn into cards

If you already write notes and want the review to come out of them, this is the closest fit. The cost is that you are adopting a whole knowledge tool to solve a vocabulary problem, and most of it will go unused.

Mochi, for something lighter

Cleaner than Anki, open formats, its own sync. A good landing spot if Anki's interface is what put you off. The card still has to be written by you, so if that is the bottleneck, this moves it rather than removing it.

If making the card is the problem

Then the fix is not another card app, it is not writing the card. Leafy sits behind whatever you are reading. Press ⌥A over a word in a PDF, an ebook, a subtitle or an image, and it saves the word together with the line it appeared in, with the meaning already attached.

Review is deliberately small: it blanks the word out of your own sentence and asks you to fill the gap, a few a day. It is not trying to beat Anki at scheduling. When you want that, export the deck and let Anki do what it is good at.

What you give up

  • No sync between devices. The library stays on one Mac.
  • No shared decks, and no community catalogue to pull from.
  • The Anki export goes one way.
  • Nothing here matches Anki's scheduler, and nothing is trying to.
  • macOS 14 or later, ten languages so far.

What is a good alternative to Anki?

Quizlet if you want a set finished in ten minutes and shared with someone. RemNote if your cards should live inside your notes. Mochi if you want something lighter with its own sync. Leafy if the problem is that you never get round to making the card at all, because it collects words while you read instead.

Is anything actually better than Anki at reviews?

Not really. Anki has years of tuning behind its scheduler and a community that has stress tested it on millions of cards. If reviewing is the part you like, the honest advice is to keep Anki and change how cards get into it.

Can I keep Anki and still use something else?

Yes, and it is the setup that makes the most sense. Collect while you read, then export to Anki as a deck with the sentence on the card. You get the capture from one tool and the scheduling from the one that is best at it. The export goes one way, so treat Anki as where cards end up.

Why do my Anki cards stop working after a while?

Usually because the card is a word on one side and a translation on the other. You learn to answer the card rather than to know the word. Cards built from a sentence you actually read hold up better, because the context is what your memory has to hang on to.

Do I have to pay?

Anki is free on macOS and costs money only on iPhone. Leafy is free for everyday reading, then $6.99 a month or $49 once. Quizlet, RemNote and Mochi all have free tiers with paid upgrades.