If you read one section
Anki
Pick Anki if you want control of every interval
- You want FSRS, a scheduler that fits itself to your own review history, which Anki lets you switch on in deck options.1
- You want to pay nothing: the desktop app, AnkiDroid and AnkiWeb are free, and the iPhone app is a single $24.99 purchase.23
- You review on planes and trains. The desktop app keeps your collection on your own machine and syncs once you're back online.4
- Your course already has a well-known deck among the thousands shared free on AnkiWeb.5
Skolight
Pick Skolight if card-writing is the bottleneck
- You'd rather spend evenings reviewing than typing. Skolight drafts the deck from your slides, PDFs or a lecture you recorded.
- You want cards to come back on a schedule without opening a settings page. Grade Again, Hard, Good or Easy and that's the whole setup.
- You want more than cards from each lecture: a quiz, a timed mock exam, notes, and a tutor whose answers cite your material.
- You want to plan backward from the exam date, not only clear what's due today.
A scheduler and a card factory are different jobs
Spaced repetition has two halves. One is deciding when you should see a card again. The other is having good cards to see. Anki has put its effort into the first half and leaves the second to you: there's no AI in the core apps, so every card is one you typed or one you downloaded.2
On scheduling, Anki is ahead, and we'd rather tell you than have you find out. Its optional FSRS scheduler fits its parameters to your own review history and lets you pick the retention you're aiming for.1 Skolight uses an SM-2-style scheduler, the older approach Anki still offers alongside FSRS. Ours is deliberately simple: a new card you grade Good comes back in 3 days, Easy in 5 days, and a miss the next day. After that each gap grows by the card's ease, which moves between 1.3 and 3.0 as you grade it. Intervals are whole days, and a card counts as mastered once its gap reaches 3 weeks. There's no optimizer and nothing to tune.
What Skolight does instead is the half Anki leaves to you. It reads your slides, a PDF chapter or a recorded lecture and drafts the deck, then uses the same material for quizzes, mock exams and a tutor that answers with citations to your pages. For many students the scarce thing isn't a sharper forgetting curve. It's the card-writing they never get around to.
The two also fail differently. A deck you wrote yourself says exactly what you meant, because you wrote it. An AI-drafted deck is faster, but it can be wrong in ways that are easy to miss, so check it against the source before trusting it (our flashcard makers comparison ends with a ten-minute check). And a backlog builds the same way in both apps: add more new cards than you can review and the due pile wins.
Forty drug facts by Monday
In Anki
Monday evening: open the slides beside Anki and type the cards. Cloze cards suit mechanism pairs, and image occlusion covers the receptor diagram.8
Look on AnkiWeb for a shared deck on the same drug class, and download it if it matches what your lecturer taught.5
Review what's due each day. With FSRS switched on, the gaps follow your own history.1
Wednesday: do the same for the second lecture's twenty drugs.
Weekend: keep reviewing. Anki has no quiz or practice-exam mode, so exam-style questions have to come from somewhere else.9
In Skolight
Monday: upload the slides to your pharmacology space and make a deck. The cards arrive drafted from what's on the slides.
Spend ten minutes checking the drafts. Where one reads oddly, ask Skolar; its answer cites the slide it came from.
Review what's due each day with the keys 1 to 4.
Wednesday: add the second lecture's slides, or record it, and make the second deck.
Saturday: sit a 30-minute mock exam on both lectures and read the breakdown of which drugs you mixed up.
In Anki, the week's time goes into writing and tuning, and the reviews themselves are as good as spaced repetition gets. In Skolight, it goes into checking drafts and sitting practice exams. If you already write fast, accurate cards, Anki's week costs less and may well work better. If you don't, Skolight's week is the one that actually happens.
Row by row
| Feature | Skolight | Anki |
|---|---|---|
| Makes study aids from your files | Skolight Yes. PDFs (scanned too), Word, PowerPoint, text and LaTeX files, captioned YouTube videos, web pages, audio and live lectures.10 | Anki No. No AI: you write cards yourself or download shared decks.2 |
| Flashcards | Skolight Yes. Decks written from your material, graded Again, Hard, Good or Easy.11 | Anki Yes. Basic, cloze and image occlusion cards, with images, audio, video and MathJax.8 |
| Spaced repetition | Skolight Yes. SM-2-style scheduling. Review what's due, the whole deck, or only your misses.11 | Anki Yes. SM-2, or FSRS, which you switch on in deck options and fit to your own reviews.1 |
| Quizzes | Skolight Yes. Up to 30 questions in four types, easy to hard, every answer explained.12 | Anki No. No quiz or practice-test mode in its manual.9 |
| Timed mock exams | Skolight Yes. A server-kept clock that survives reloads, autosave, flagging and a written analysis.13 | Anki No. No timed mock exam in its manual.9 |
| AI tutor chat | Skolight Yes. Skolar answers from your material, with modes for explaining, solving and quizzing.14 | Anki No. None in Anki; AnkiHub's Premium and Lifetime plans, sold separately, add a chatbot.6 |
| Answers cite your sources | Skolight Yes. Numbered citations that open the passage they came from. No web search.14 | Anki No. No AI answers, so nothing to cite.2 |
| Study planning | Skolight Yes. Study plans paced to your deadline on every plan; the calendar from Starter.15 | Anki No. No study planner in its manual.9 |
| Works offline | Skolight No. Needs an internet connection.10 | Anki Yes. Desktop keeps your collection locally and syncs when online; AnkiWeb needs a connection.4 |
| Phone and desktop apps | Skolight Partly. Works in any browser, with a layout built for phones. No native app.10 | Anki Yes. Free desktop and Android apps; AnkiMobile for iPhone and iPad is paid.2 |
| Imports existing decks | Skolight No. Can't import Anki or Quizlet decks. Add the source material and it writes new cards.11 | Anki Yes. Anki .apkg packages, CSV or TSV text and Mnemosyne 2.0; no Quizlet importer in its docs.16 |
| Library of shared sets | Skolight No. No public library of other people's decks. Share links for notes, chats and groups.10 | Anki Yes. Thousands of free shared decks on AnkiWeb, downloadable on desktop and phone.5 |
Where Skolight falls short of Anki
- A plainer scheduler
- There's no optimizer and no retention target. If you've fitted FSRS to years of your own reviews, switching means giving that up.
- No reviews on a plane
- Skolight needs a connection for everything. Anki's desktop app works with no signal at all.4
- Your Anki decks stay in Anki
- Skolight can't open .apkg files, and its own decks don't export. Moving across means making fresh decks from the slides and readings the old ones came from.
- Nothing like add-ons
- There's no plugin system. Anki's desktop add-ons can change almost any part of how it works.17
- A daily cap on the free plan
- Skolight's Free plan makes 3 flashcard sets a day. Anki never limits how many cards you write.
Using both, sensibly
Step 1: Leave your old decks where they are
Years of review history are worth more than any feature on this page. Keep reviewing your existing decks in Anki.
Step 2: Give this term's lectures to Skolight
Upload new course material to a Skolight space and let it draft the decks, quizzes and notes for it.
Step 3: Retype the cards you'll need for years
If a card belongs in your lifelong deck, write it into Anki yourself. Putting it in your own words is a decent way to learn it, too.
Step 4: Let a mock exam choose what to drill
A week before the exam, sit a Skolight mock exam and move the topics you missed into whichever app you review in most.
Step 5: Keep one daily habit
Two apps with two due piles is how backlogs start. Make one of them the place you review every day and treat the other as a source.