When it comes to leveraging the power of spaced repetition for serious learning, few flashcard apps bear up to the reputations of Brainscape and Anki.
And since you’re here, you’re probably curious about which of these—Brainscape vs Anki—is the best flashcard app to help you learn your subject more efficiently.
You might have noticed the obvious conflict of interest.
Don't worry. We're not going to praise Brainscape and trash Anki with no regard for the facts. We're all experts who love learning.
Here's our informed guide on how Brainscape is different from Anki and which flashcard app is best suited to your specific needs in 2025.
Let’s start with a 30,000 foot view of Brainscape vs Anki …
What’s the Difference Between the Brainscape and Anki Flashcard Apps?
Anki and Brainscape are flashcard apps that use spaced repetition to help students learn. Both platforms deliver a similar study experience: they enable you to break down mountains of information into collections of individual facts. You study these facts in a question-and-answer format, employing:
- Active recall to remember each answer from scratch (prompted only by a question)
- Metacognition to self-assess how well you knew the answer using one of five possible “buckets”, ranging from 1 (didn’t know it at all) to 5 (knew it very well).
Then, using spaced repetition algorithms, Brainscape and Anki drill you on the facts—with a frequency based on your self-assessed confidence—until the information is deeply ingrained in your memory.
That’s the basic, shared premise of the two flashcard apps.
Both use proven cognitive learning principles like spaced repetition, active recall, and metacognition to help users learn a lot of information more efficiently.
The important differences between Brainscape and Anki arise in the areas of content creation, curation, collaboration, trustworthiness, and delivery. So, let’s take a closer look at these differences.
Brainscape Review: What Brainscape Offers that Anki Doesn’t ...
Brainscape Review: Flexible Flashcard Format
Brainscape's content creation formats are more flexible than Anki's. Instead of just an image or a vocabulary word in a small text box, Brainscape flashcards have an open canvas for much richer types of questions and answers of various lengths and formats. This fosters the creation of content that promotes a deeper understanding of the subject as a whole and not just isolated names, dates, and vocabulary.
Brainscape Review: Easy to Curate and Organize Knowledge
Brainscape fundamentally makes it easier for users to organize their knowledge by:
- "Curating" flashcard collections from various sources (both within Brainscape and from outside),
- Organizing flashcards into decks and decks into “classes”,
- Editing cards in real-time from any device,
- "Bookmarking" particularly important cards from across various subjects or decks, and
- Creating study mixes across lots of different subject areas.
Improving the way that learners and educators organize their knowledge is a major part of Brainscape's mission.
Brainscape Review: Easy to Collaborate with Other Learners
Brainscape is also a more collaborative platform. Multiple editors can easily work on the same flashcard deck like a shared Google Doc, holding each other accountable for content creation. This inspires teams of students, employees, and other users to work together to make great flashcards for a shared class or learning experience.
With the Anki flashcard app, on the other hand, only one author is permitted per deck, which puts the kibosh on collaborative learning.
Brainscape Review: Trusted Certified Content
Because of these collaboration tools, Brainscape is able to work with subject-matter experts to create certified flashcard collections that are comprehensive for a particular exam, professional certification, subject, or language. These are formatted in a way that fosters the best possible learning experience, while constant feedback loops allow other users to suggest edits for further improvement, i.e., you know you can TRUST this content.
With Anki, however, there is no certified content, only user-generated content, and this isn’t ranked according to quality and popularity, so you have no idea what you’re getting when you access another user’s flashcards.
Brainscape Review: Trusted User-Generated Content
Brainscape DOES rank its user-generated content in order of popularity (which indicates quality, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and usefulness). So, when you search for a subject on Brainscape's Knowledge Genome, you can trust that the flashcards that appear first in the search results are the best in their category, second only to Brainscape’s certified content (if there is a class for that subject).
Brainscape Review: Opportunities for Partnerships
Another benefit of Brainscape’s collaborative tools is that they support reseller partnerships, school licenses, and enterprise licenses in a way that isn't possible with the Anki flashcard app.
What this means is that if you’re an “influencer” in your field, you could become a reseller of Brainscape’s flashcards; or, if you have proven expertise, you could partner with Brainscape to create certified content; or you could make your own content private and sell it, which could generate a passive income for you. Anki simply doesn’t support any of these opportunities.
Brainscape Review: Artificial Intelligence
What if you want to go straight from your study notes to studying flashcards without all the hassle? Brainscape's AI toolkit reads your content, intelligently divides it into individual flashcards, and presents you with a customized set of flashcards. Just show it your notes and you'll be ready to study within minutes.
While individuals have attempted to code janky third-party add-ons to convert study notes to Anki flashcards, they're not a part of its platform.
Brainscape Review: A Better User Experience
Brainscape has a beautiful and simple user interface with a well-tested and implemented user experience. One of the biggest criticisms of the Anki flashcard app is that it’s clunky and complex, hard to navigate, and delivers a poor user experience. And, fair enough, being free and open-sourced means that it doesn’t have the funding for more sophisticated design, features, and customer service. (That said, Anki is always evolving and may improve in this respect.)
Anki Review: What Anki Offers that Brainscape Doesn’t ...
Anki Review: Prescriptive Spaced Repetition Algorithm
To its credit, the Anki flashcard app is a very sophisticated tool that uses a more prescriptive spaced repetition algorithm, actually allocating a set number of days to each repetition, for example, "You must study this card again in 4 days." Many extreme knowledge hackers prefer this degree of control.
With Brainscape, the spaced repetition isn’t quite so prescriptive. For example, if you rate a card a 4 and keep studying that day, it may eventually show up again once you’ve circled through all of the 1, 2, and 3-rated cards. Most of our users prefer this "relative" method of repetition scheduling rather than Anki's "absolute" scheduling method, which won't show you that card again for x number of days (and where you have to remember to come back in exactly X days or else that scheduled repetition is moot).
[Read more about Brainscape’s spaced repetition algorithm.]
Anki Review: Open-Source Software
Anki is an open-source software tool, which means that it’s free and open to all to use (except a $25 fee for the iOS app). Some people philosophically prefer this to contributing to the growth of a profit-seeking company. While Brainscape’s basic features are also free, it does offer a Pro subscription model to help fund future innovation. This money is largely invested into paying subject matter experts to write new flashcards on their field, so you can at least rest assured that your usage (even free usage) contributes to the field of education.
Naturally, a free and open-source product won't have the polish and flexibility that larger-scale operations like schools and businesses might want from a flashcard app. However, if, as an individual, you like the charm of a free, open, and minimalist app, as well as even geekier study algorithm customizations than Brainscape—which thinks for you—then the Anki flashcard app may be the perfect choice for you.
Summary: “Brainscape vs Anki” Points of Comparison
To help you better visualize the differences between our platforms, we've made this handy chart for you:
Feature
Anki
Brainscape
- Only offers user-generated content (UGC).
Content
- UGC isn’t organized based on popularity (quality, accuracy, and thoroughness) and so you don’t know if you can trust what you find.
Trustworthiness
- Requires a lot of work to set up because you can’t trust UGC, so you have to make your own flashcards from scratch.
Work load
- No collaboration between creators supported.
Collaboration
- You can only view your own learning data.
Learner analytics
- Open source and not as optimized by user experience (UX) designers. Some say it's harder to use.
User experience
- Requires scheduling and discipline, and can be quite prescriptive about when you can study.
Spaced repetition
- No option to sell your study assets.
Reseller opportunities
- Anki iOS app costs $24.99 for lifetime use. Otherwise, web and Android (for some reason) are completely free.
Cost
- Offers both user-generated and expert-curated (certified) content.
- UGC is organized based on popularity and quality so you can gauge the trustworthiness of what you find, depending on its ranking.
- Trusted, pre-made flashcard collections (both certified and UG) as well as AI creation tools save tons of time on getting started.
- Collaboration between creators supported and encouraged.
- Offers a rich stats dashboard for your learning and for tracking other students’ progress, if you’re an educator.
- iOS, Brainscape has a beautiful and simple user interface with a well-thought-out UI/UX experience.
- Can be used anytime, anywhere for consistent, intentional, and opportunistic study, which eliminates boundaries.
- You can make your content private and/or sell it!
- Brainscape is free to use unless you want a Pro subscription to access unlimited UGC and certified content.
FAQ: Brainscape vs Anki in 2025
Which is better, Brainscape or Anki?
It depends on your needs. Brainscape is ideal for learners who value an intuitive interface, collaborative features, trusted expert content, and smart automation. Anki may appeal more to those who prefer full control over scheduling, customization, and a free, open-source environment.
What is the best free flashcard app for 2025?
If you're looking for effective, ad-free studying with a clean interface and access to high-quality flashcard libraries, Brainscape’s free version is a top contender. For those who want extreme customization and don't mind a steeper learning curve, Anki also remains a strong choice.
Why is Brainscape so expensive?
Actually, you can make and study as many flashcards as you want FOR FREE, for always (without ads). But if you want to play with its advanced features like rich content formats, certified flashcard collections, AI flashcard creation tools, and robust data privacy, you'll need to upgrade to a Pro subscription. For many, the time saved and study efficiency gained justify the cost. Plus, its annual and institutional packages offer significant savings.
Is Anki overhyped?
Not necessarily. Anki is incredibly powerful for users who enjoy customizing their own system and want fine-grained control. However, for learners who prefer ease of use, better organization, and collaborative features without needing to tinker with plugins or settings, other tools may be more practical.
A Final Review of Brainscape vs Anki
Fundamentally, Brainscape and Anki are two different flashcard apps that do the same thing very successfully: help serious students who are studying high-stakes subjects to learn much more efficiently.
Some people are die-hard fans of Anki, while others swear by Brainscape for life. So, it’s more about which one works best for you, the individual.
Naturally, we think we’ve done an excellent job of creating a scientifically optimized study system that is also a total pleasure to use (not to mention delivering a beautiful and seamless user experience). But, well … call us biased.
Hopefully, with the information laid out in this Anki and Brainscape review, you are empowered to know which is the best flashcard app for you in 2025. We wish you the very best with your studies!