If you're a high school or college student or just someone who loves learning new sh**, you’ll probably have heard of Anki (or Quizlet or Brainscape). All of them are digital flashcard apps (with a web-based study platform) that make learning super efficient and convenient.
While Brainscape has a sophisticated, scientifically optimized learning algorithm, and Quizlet is like Candy Crush to high schoolers, Anki is a popular competitor of both… but does Anki work? Does it really make learning an order of magnitude more efficient?
Die-hard users of Anki (and the Anki app) will say “heck yes!” and vehemently stand by it, but then, at the same time, many people flee its complicated, Windows 1996-reminiscent user interface. So what’s the “tea”?
In this article, we'll answer all of these questions, including what Anki is, how it works, and the pros and cons of its flashcard app. Let's dive in!
What is Anki?
Derived from the Japanese word for "memorization", Anki is a free and open-source flashcard program that uses active recall testing and a spaced repetition algorithm to help you learn and retain information more effectively. These are both essential learning techniques with deep roots in cognitive psychology, the idea being that the human brain is wired to learn through (1) necessity and (2) repetition.
The necessity arises when you’re prompted by a flashcard question to answer from scratch. The brain must search for and retrieve that information in its memory bank. (Read more about active recall here.) The more frequently it does that, the stronger the neural pathways to that information. This is where spaced repetition comes into play…
Spaced repetition is the systematic delivery of information at precisely the right time interval to optimize your brain’s retention of that information. Every time you’re on the cusp of forgetting it, the system will deliver that information to you again, ensuring that your memory is refreshed and strengthened until, eventually, with enough well-timed repetitions, the facts become permanently embedded in your brain.
Think about it: it’s why practicing guitar chords, math sets, or foreign vocabulary repeatedly allows you to become better, proficient, and then expert at these skills. It’s through repetition—and, importantly, necessity-driven repetition—that many people still remember their childhood home phone number or address.
Active recall and spaced repetition are core concepts behind flashcard apps like Brainscape and Anki. If you’re interested in a detailed breakdown of which would be better suited to your needs, check out: Brainscape vs Anki flashcard app or watch this video...
How does Anki work?
Create Decks: You start by creating "decks" of flashcards. These decks can be organized by subject, topic, or any way you prefer.
Add Cards: Within each deck, you create "cards" with a question or prompt on one side and the answer on the other. These flashcards are what you'll be studying using spaced repetition.
Reviewing: Anki schedules your flashcards for review based on its spaced repetition algorithm, calibrated by time. Initially, you'll see cards every minute, but as you correctly recall the information, the app spaces out the reviews to increasing intervals. If you struggle with a particular card, it'll reappear sooner for additional practice.
Adjustment: Anki allows you to adjust the difficulty of each card, so if you find a concept stupidly easy, you can mark it as such, and Anki will show it less often. Conversely, if you find something hard, you can mark the card as complex, and the app will increase the frequency of review.
Sync Across Devices: Anki offers synchronization across multiple devices, which is handy for studying on the go. (Although Brainscape offers this too, as does Quizlet, so it’s not a stand-out feature.)
Community Contributions: Anki has a vast library of user-created decks and cards that you can download to augment your learning. The problem is these aren’t organized in any kind of helpful way, so you have no way of knowing if the flashcards you’ve found for a particular subject or topic are reliable, complete, or even accurate at all.
Now that you understand how Anki works, let's explore the pros and cons of using this flashcard app…
The pros of Anki flashcards
Efficient Learning: Anki’s spaced repetition algorithm allows you to learn much more efficiently, ensuring that you review material at the optimal time intervals for retention, reducing the time and effort needed to remember information.
Flashcard Customization: Anki allows you to customize your flashcards with images, audio, and LaTeX formatting.
Customization of Repetition Intervals: Anki has great customization of repetition intervals for concepts you've already seen. But sometimes, you want the ability to create a study mix and customize the frequencies of NEW concepts you want to see, from different subjects that you're learning from scratch. Anki doesn't have that like other platforms (like Brainscape) do.
User Community: Anki has a vast user community that shares decks and cards for various subjects. This allows you (free) access to already-made flashcards, saving you a lot of time and effort in creating your study materials.
Cross-Platform Compatibility: Anki is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, making it accessible on most devices.
Offline Use: Anki works offline, a huge advantage for students who want to study without an internet connection. (And so does Brainscape’s mobile app 😉)
Free (mostly): Anki is free to use on most web platforms, which is great for cash-strapped students. However, if you want the iOS app, it’ll set you back about $24.99 (at the time of writing - check the link for the latest price).
The cons of Anki flashcards
Steep Learning Curve: While Anki is a powerful study system, it can be overwhelming to new users. Scrap that. It IS overwhelming for new users. Its user interface is notoriously complicated to figure out, so before you’ve even had a chance to start learning your study materials, you’re forced to learn how to use your study platform, customize cards, download plugins, watch YouTube tutorials, configure your settings, and come to grips with the algorithm.
Cumbersome for deadline-driven learning: Sure, Anki is great for setting absolute intervals to repeat each concept that you've already seen (likely because you created the cards yourself). But if you have a deadline like a test or exam and thus need to repeat the concepts sooner than Anki wants you to, it requires manually overriding your interval configs every time.
No free online backup. Since Anki is a desktop app, if you want to keep your content and progress backed up, you need to constantly save it somewhere else, like in Dropbox or another online storage system. This is in contrast to browser-based flashcard apps where your data is permanently backed up in the cloud. (The positive, though, is that this does allow Anki to have offline desktop study and creation ability.)
A “unique” aesthetic: Some call Anki’s UI/UX experience “vintage” and “minimalist”. Others find it outdated and cumbersome. It does help to remember that Anki is a FREE flashcard program. The problem is, if the UI/UX trips up your motivation, adoption, and study consistency, then the time you save—and the results you get—with a paid app would more than justify the money you save with the free one.
Time-Consuming: Anki's effectiveness relies on consistent “reviews” or study sessions. If you fall behind on your studying—which it recommends you do every day—the spaced repetition system loses efficiency. This may be great for a small deck of, like, 20 or 30 flashcards, but if you’re required to review hundreds of flashcards to not lose progress, it just becomes unsustainable.
No Central Repository: While there's a wealth of user-contributed content, there needs to be an official central repository for Anki decks, making it difficult to find high-quality materials for some subjects. Compare this with Brainscape’s Knowledge Genome: a library of user-generated and expert-curated content organized by subject and then by popularity (just like a Google search lays out the most reliable and popular results first), and you’ll get an idea of what Anki is missing.
No Collaboration: Anki doesn't support user collaboration for deck creation or editing. So, while you can share decks with other users, you can’t—for example, as a study group—create and edit flashcards together. (True at the time of writing.)
Wrap up: does Anki work?
Yes. Anki works.
It’s a powerful study platform and flashcard app with a proven track record in improving information retention. Overall, its spaced repetition algorithm makes it among the best flashcard programs out there, and its flexibility and customization options make it a valuable tool for many subjects, especially those that require you to memorize a lot of information. The downside to Anki is a cumbersome UI/UX that takes a while to master and may deter some users who prefer a more streamlined and intuitive study system.
(Read Brainscape vs Anki for a much more detailed comparison of these two adaptive flashcard apps.)