Most “best flashcard app” lists are affiliate-driven, undated, or paid placements. This one is dated, sourced, and includes us — Peek — with our limits next to everyone else’s. The six apps below are the ones worth installing in 2026: they have real spaced repetition, active development, and a non-trivial user base. We will be specific about who each one is for, where it loses, and where it wins.
A few notes before we start. We rank a working scheduler above feature count: an app without real SRS is a Notes app with flipping. We weight free-tier honesty heavily; a “free” tier that disables the core scheduler is not free. We do not include apps that shut down (Tinycards in 2020, StudyBlue at the end of 2020, Chegg Prep in 2022) or that pivoted away from flashcards. Every claim links to a primary source.
Anki and AnkiDroid
Anki is the power user’s flashcard system. The desktop client is free and open source on Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD; AnkiDroid is free under GPLv3 on Android; AnkiMobile is a one-time $24.99 on iOS. The current stable version is 25.09.4 (Anki on Wikipedia).
The scheduler is based on SM-2, an algorithm Piotr Woźniak published in 1987 for SuperMemo. Since Anki 23.10 (October 2023) you can switch to FSRS, a newer scheduler from a KDD 2022 paper that models difficulty, stability, and retrievability per card. FSRS is opt-in, not the default. Anki’s maintainer has said the default switch is blocked partly because many users press “Hard” instead of “Again” when they fail a card, a habit SM-2 forgives and FSRS does not. The same distinction shows up in our explainer on spaced repetition.
Wins: free, open source, plugin ecosystem, customisation, FSRS support, shared decks for niche subjects. Loses: punishing learning curve, dated UI, iOS paywall is unusual for an open-source project. Best for: medical and law students, language learners willing to invest a weekend into setup, anyone who already lives in Anki.
Quizlet
Quizlet has the widest reach in this list and the heaviest monetisation. Founded in 2005, it now operates as a freemium product with deep AI integration (Quizlet on Wikipedia). The free tier still lets you make and study sets, but the meaningful study modes (Learn rounds, practice tests, AI grading) are metered and behind Quizlet Plus.
Plus is $7.99 per month or $35.99 per year. Quizlet Plus Unlimited is $9.99 per month or $44.99 per year. Free users get 20 rounds of Learn per month and 3 practice tests. The strategy is clear: the company would rather have a smaller paying base than a large freeloading one.
Wins: huge shared-deck library, polished UI, classroom integrations, the AI add-ons are useful for school work. Loses: SRS is paywalled in practice; if you wanted Quizlet for spaced repetition specifically, you are paying. Heavy upsell pressure inside the app. Best for: high-school and undergrad students who study from shared sets and tolerate the subscription, classroom teachers running quizzes.
RemNote
RemNote answers “what if my notes were my flashcards?”. You take notes in an outliner, mark anything inline as a card, and RemNote schedules it. Tiers: Free, Pro at $8/month ($96/year), and Pro with AI at $18/month ($216/year) (RemNote pricing). The free tier covers unlimited notes and flashcards on unlimited synced devices but caps PDF annotations at three, image-occlusion cards at five, and AI credits at 100 per month.
RemNote uses FSRS under the hood, the same algorithm Anki ships as opt-in. Scheduling quality is close to a properly configured Anki. The difference is workflow: in RemNote your cards never leave their source context.
Wins: notes and cards in one tool, FSRS scheduling, excellent for medicine and law where you read PDFs all day. Loses: steep Pro paywall, learning curve for the outliner if you have never used one, mobile app is weaker than desktop and web. Best for: students and researchers who already prefer outliners (Roam, Logseq, Obsidian veterans), exam prep where notes and cards belong together.
::, and the same line becomes a scheduled card. Notes and cards never separate.Memrise
Memrise is now a language-learning app first and a flashcard tool second. The company spent 2024 moving community-made courses out of the app and refocused on its own video-driven courses in 35+ languages with a GPT-3 powered AI partner. Co-founder Ben Whately returned as CEO and brought user wordlists back in a limited form in 2026 (Memrise on Wikipedia). 80 million registered users.
Subscriptions vary by platform; annual plans run roughly $89.99 per year with a lifetime option around $199.99. The free tier is a teaser.
Wins: gamified, polished, video clips from real native speakers, the AI Language Partner is genuinely fun. Loses: not a general flashcard app, you do not pick what to learn, Memrise does. Subscription required for almost everything. If you want custom cards or scientific subjects, the wrong tool. Best for: language learners who want a guided experience and do not want to build their own decks.
Brainscape
Brainscape does not run SM-2 or FSRS. It runs Confidence-Based Repetition: after each card, you self-rate confidence on a 1–5 scale and the scheduler uses that signal instead of timing-based recall models (Brainscape Academy on CBR). The approach has its own academic backing — Cohen (2010) and Waterman (2013) — and University of Denver’s ed-tech guide describes it as a “cloud based adaptive flashcards platform” using “intelligent personalization and cognitive science research”.
Pro is $7.99/month. The free tier is unusually generous: spaced repetition is included, plus hundreds of AI-generated cards and 2,500 pre-loaded ones. Pro adds unlimited AI generation, multimedia, and certified content.
Wins: free tier includes real SRS, polished mobile app, the confidence rating is honest about what your brain is doing. Loses: confidence-based scheduling is harder to reason about than time-based scheduling, and there is no public head-to-head benchmark against FSRS. The Pro paywall blocks the “smart” content layers. Best for: learners who already have study material organised, anyone who wants spaced repetition without a learning curve.
Peek
We built Peek because we wanted spaced repetition for a language without the setup tax. The app is free, requires no sign-up, and is mobile-first on Android. The forgetting curve on our home page is the same one in a textbook.
We are honest about the gaps. There is no iOS app yet, no plugin ecosystem, no shared-deck marketplace. Peek is scoped to language learning, not anatomy or law. If you need image occlusion or PDF annotation, this is not your tool.
Wins: zero friction (no sign-up, no payment), built for language learners. Loses: language-only, Android-only today, no power-user customisation. Best for: someone who wants to learn vocabulary or phrases without learning the app first.
Which one is right for you?
Use case beats feature count. If you want deep customisation and do not mind a weekend of setup, install Anki. If you study from shared sets and live in school, Quizlet does the job if you accept the subscription. If your notes and cards belong in the same outliner, RemNote earns its price. If you want a guided language course with video, Memrise. If you want a polished mobile app that respects a free tier, Brainscape. If you want language learning with zero friction, try Peek — it is free and there is no sign-up.
The honest answer to “what is the best flashcard app?” is “the one you will actually open tomorrow morning”. We built ours to be that one for language learners. The other five each have a real reason to exist.