The short answer
Turbo AI
Pick Turbo AI if you live on your phone
- You want a native iPhone, iPad or Android app to record with. Skolight runs in the browser.1
- Your notes are full of formulas, tables and diagrams, and you want them laid out well without touching them.2
- You'd rather pay one flat price with no published caps: $120 a year on yearly billing.3
- You want a crash course on a topic you haven't been taught yet, which its Learn Mode builds from a few words.4
Skolight
Pick Skolight if there's an exam at the end
- You want flashcards that come back on a schedule, instead of a pile you sort by hand.
- You want to sit a timed mock exam built from your own lectures, then read a breakdown of what you got wrong.
- You want a study plan worked back from the exam date and paced to the minutes you actually have.
- You want the free plan's limits in writing before you rely on it: 30 minutes of recording a month, listed on the pricing page.
One lecture, Tuesday to Friday
In Turbo AI
Open the app and record the lecture on your phone.2
Get structured notes with the pathway, tables and equations laid out, and tidy them in the Docs-style editor.2
Generate flashcards from the notes, choosing how many.5
Each night, move cards between New, Learning and Mastered yourself and pick which pile to drill.6
Thursday: run multiple-choice practice questions until they feel easy.2
In Skolight
Record in a laptop browser and watch the transcript appear as the lecturer speaks. A session runs up to 90 minutes, in English.
Make notes and a flashcard deck from the transcript, inside the course's space.
Each day, review only the cards that are due. Grade them Again, Hard, Good or Easy, and the scheduler sets when each returns.
Wednesday: ask Skolar about the step that didn't click. Its answer cites the line of the transcript it came from.
Thursday: sit a 20-minute mock exam on the lecture and read the analysis of your weak points.
Neither week is wrong. Turbo AI hands you strong material and trusts you to run the review. Skolight runs more of the review for you, which matters most in the weeks you're too busy to decide what to study.
Feature by feature
| Feature | Skolight | Turbo AI |
|---|---|---|
| Records lectures | Skolight Yes. Records in the browser with a live English transcript, up to 90 minutes a session.7 | Turbo AI Yes. Records in the app. No published length cap or monthly minutes.2 |
| 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.8 | Turbo AI Yes. Lecture recordings, audio files, PDFs, Word files, slides, YouTube videos and websites.2 |
| Notes | Skolight Yes. Concise or detailed notes in a rich editor, exportable to PDF, Word, Markdown or HTML.9 | Turbo AI Yes. Formatted notes with tables, diagrams and equations, in a Docs-style editor.2 |
| Flashcards | Skolight Yes. Decks written from your material, graded Again, Hard, Good or Easy.10 | Turbo AI Yes. Generated from your notes; you choose how many.5 |
| Spaced repetition | Skolight Yes. SM-2-style scheduling. Review what's due, the whole deck, or only your misses.10 | Turbo AI No. You sort cards into New, Learning and Mastered yourself; no review scheduling in its docs.6 |
| Quizzes | Skolight Yes. Up to 30 questions in four types, easy to hard, every answer explained.11 | Turbo AI Yes. Multiple-choice quizzes and practice questions from your notes.2 |
| Timed mock exams | Skolight Yes. A server-kept clock that survives reloads, autosave, flagging and a written analysis.12 | Turbo AI No. No timed mock exam in its docs.2 |
| AI tutor chat | Skolight Yes. Skolar answers from your material, with modes for explaining, solving and quizzing.13 | Turbo AI Yes. A chat that answers questions using your uploaded materials.1 |
| Answers cite your sources | Skolight Yes. Numbered citations that open the passage they came from. No web search.13 | Turbo AI Partly. Answers draw on your uploads; passage-level citations aren't documented.1 |
| Audio / podcasts | Skolight Yes. Two-host podcasts on Pro and Max; talk to the hosts by voice on Max.14 | Turbo AI Yes. Podcasts generated from your notes.2 |
| Study planning | Skolight Yes. Study plans paced to your deadline on every plan; the calendar from Starter.15 | Turbo AI No. No planner or calendar in its docs.2 |
| Phone and desktop apps | Skolight Partly. Works in any browser, with a layout built for phones. No native app.8 | Turbo AI Yes. Native iPhone, iPad and Android apps; Learn Mode was mobile-only in July 2026.1 |
The difference is what happens after the notes
Lecture notes are the part of studying that feels like progress, and the part that counts least on exam day. Reading good notes again builds familiarity, and familiarity is easy to mistake for knowing something. What moves exam scores is retrieval: answering questions from memory, spread out over days. There's more on that in why re-reading fails.
Turbo AI is built around the first half. It's quick, its notes handle STEM content well, and it gives you flashcards and quizzes to practice with.2 What its documentation doesn't describe is scheduling: cards live in New, Learning and Mastered piles that you manage.6 That works if you're disciplined about it. By week ten of a semester, most people aren't.
Skolight spends more of its effort on the second half. Cards are scheduled with an SM-2-style algorithm, the method Anki's original scheduler was built on, so the deck tells you what's due today. Quizzes and mock exams come from the same lecture, and a mock exam ends with a written breakdown of what to revise, which you can turn into a study plan in one step. The notes are good too. They're just where the work starts.
If you already have a review habit you trust - your own Anki deck, or a study group that quizzes each other - Turbo AI's notes may be all you need from an app. If you don't, the review loop is the part worth paying for.
What it costs
Turbo AI2
Free: Notes, flashcards and quizzes, with limits Turbo AI doesn't publish.
Unlimited3
$20 a month or $120 a year · $10/mo yearly
Unlimited use of every feature.
There's no pricing page; this is the price Turbo AI's blog gives. In-app prices vary, and in 2025 TechCrunch reported the founders were testing different price points.
Skolight16
Free: 1,500 AI words, 1 generation a day and 3 flashcard sets a day, 1 space and 30 minutes of lecture transcription a month. No card needed.
Starter
$7.99 a month or $59 a year · $4.92/mo yearly
15 generations a day, 10 flashcard sets a day, 3 hours of transcription a month
Pro
$12.99 a month or $89 a year · $7.42/mo yearly
25 generations a day, 50 flashcard sets a day, 8 hours of transcription a month, 1 hour of podcasts
Max
$24.99 a month or $179 a year · $14.92/mo yearly
unlimited generations, unlimited flashcard sets, 20 hours of transcription a month, 3 hours of podcasts
Yearly billing saves at least 38%. One-time top-up packs of AI words never expire.
On price alone, Skolight's Starter plan is the cheapest way into either app's paid tier, at $59 a year against $120 for Turbo AI's yearly plan. Starter includes the calendar, groups and 3 hours of transcription a month, and podcasts start on Pro; Turbo AI publishes no caps. If you record more than a few hours a month, compare the minutes as well as the price.
What Skolight doesn't do
- No app-store app
- Skolight runs in the browser, with a layout made for phones that you can add to your home screen. If you want a native app to record with, Turbo AI has one and we don't.
- English-only live transcripts
- Live transcription is for English-language lectures. Turbo AI doesn't list its languages either, so try both on your own lecturer before you commit.
- A ceiling on each recording
- One recording session runs up to 90 minutes, so a three-hour seminar takes two sessions.
- No course from a single topic
- Skolight's tutorials build a short course from material you've added. Turbo AI's Learn Mode can start from a few words, before you have any notes at all.4
- The calendar isn't free
- Anyone can make a study plan, but the calendar view starts on Starter.