Anki is one of the strongest free tools for reviewing. acemate starts a step earlier and builds cards, practice questions and mock exams from your lecture notes.
If you study with flashcards at university, sooner or later you end up with Anki. It is open source, runs on almost any device and has a huge community, especially in medicine and law. The price is time: you write the cards yourself, and it takes a while to set Anki up the way you want it.
acemate makes a study app itself, so this comparison is not neutral. We describe Anki from its public documentation as of October 2026 and say clearly where Anki is the better choice. For a wider overview of Anki, Quizlet and other apps, see Best flashcard app for university.
In short: which one suits you?
Choose Anki if …
Choose acemate if …
- you do not want to spend money and like to fine-tune settings
- you study with shared decks, for example in medicine
- you deliberately write your own cards
- your material comes as slides and lecture notes
- you want practice questions and mock exams as well as cards
- the exam is close and you want to practise with exactly this material
What Anki does better
It costs nothing. Anki is free on Windows, macOS, Linux, the web and Android. Only the iOS app is a one-off purchase. For many students that settles it.
You control everything. Card types, cloze deletions, intervals, learning steps, daily limits: you can set almost everything yourself in Anki. Plenty of add-ons extend it further.
There are ready-made decks. On AnkiWeb, users share decks for many subjects. In medicine in particular, many students learn with shared, community-maintained decks.
It is mature. Anki has been around for many years. Since February 2026 its creator has been handing operations and open-source stewardship to AnkiHub step by step. According to the announcement, the core stays open source and AnkiDroid stays independent.
What you accept in return: Anki has no AI of its own. You write cards yourself or rely on add-ons and third-party services. And you have to switch FSRS on yourself in the deck options.
Where acemate takes a different approach
acemate starts with your material. You upload slides, lecture notes or past papers (PDF, PowerPoint, Word), and acemate generates flashcards from them. You can edit them and add your own cards, images included. Reviews are scheduled with FSRS as well.
On top of that, acemate covers ways of studying that Anki does not:
- Practice questions, multiple choice and open, where AI grades your answer against criteria.
- Mock exams in the style of your past papers, exportable as PDF with or without solutions.
- A tutor that answers from your material and cites the document and page. Anything beyond your material is labelled as general AI knowledge.
- The Knowledge Graph colours your course topics by your results, so you can see where the gaps are.
What acemate does not have: other students' shared decks, add-ons and a native mobile app (the web app works on your phone). You start for free with weekly limits, and Pro removes them.
acemate and Anki compared
| Anki | acemate | |
|---|---|---|
| Free to use | ✓iOS app is a one-off purchase | ✓with weekly limits |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ |
| FSRS scheduling | ✓switch on yourself | ✓ |
| AI cards from PDFs and slides | ✗add-ons or third parties only | ✓ |
| Practice questions with AI feedback | ✗ | ✓ |
| Mock exams from past papers | ✗ | ✓ |
| Tutor that cites sources | ✗ | ✓ |
| Other users' shared decks | ✓ | ✗ |
| Add-ons | ✓ | ✗ |
| Native mobile app | ✓ | ✗ |
| Anki import and export | ✓ | ✓ |
As of October 2026.
The algorithm is no longer a difference now that both offer FSRS. In an open benchmark with around 10,000 Anki users, FSRS predicted recall better than Anki's SM-2 for 99.5 percent of collections (srs-benchmark).
Flashcards alone rarely get you through the exam
Flashcards mostly train facts, terms and definitions. Many university exams ask for more: applying a formula, solving a case or comparing two concepts. For that, it helps to test yourself on questions that look like the real exam.
Research backs this up. A review of ten study techniques rated practice testing and spaced practice as the two most effective (Dunlosky et al., 2013). A meta-analysis of 272 effect sizes found that practice tests work better than restudying the material (Adesope et al., 2017). Flashcards are one form of practice testing, mock exams are another.
In Anki you can turn application questions into cards, but it is manual work, and you have to break past papers down into cards yourself. This is the biggest day-to-day difference: acemate reads past papers, writes model answers and generates new exams in the same style, while Anki is very good at reviewing whatever you give it.
Using both together
If you like Anki, you don't have to give it up. One approach that works well in exam season:
- Upload your slides. Add the lecture to acemate as a PDF or PowerPoint file.
- Generate and check the cards. Delete cards that don't matter for your exam and sharpen unclear questions.
- Export as an Anki deck. The cards land in your usual collection.
- Review in Anki. Keep doing mock exams and practice questions in acemate.
It also works the other way round: import your Anki decks into acemate if you want cards, practice questions and mock exams in one place.
Which one is for whom?
- Anki if you don't want to spend money, like to configure things yourself, study with shared decks (in medicine, for example) or deliberately write your own cards because it helps you understand.
- acemate if your material comes as slides and notes, the exam is close and you want practice questions and mock exams from exactly that material alongside your cards.
Whichever you choose, only upload your lecturers' slides to tools that don't use your input for training, and check your university's rules if in doubt. There is more on this in Is AI allowed at university?
