Quizlet is still the most-installed flashcard app around, and its free tier still lets you flip cards. What it meters is the part that makes words stick: Learn rounds, practice tests, and an ad-free session. If you use Quizlet for vocabulary and are tired of hitting the paywall mid-session, here are five apps worth switching to. We include ourselves, with our limits listed next to everyone else’s.
What you are actually leaving behind
Free accounts can “study with flashcards, practice questions, interactive diagrams and activities” (Quizlet help center). Learn, the mode that quizzes you with typed answers and multiple choice, “is available to Quizlet Plus and Quizlet Plus for teachers subscribers”; non-subscribers can “start a free study session in Learn to see what it’s like” (Studying with Learn). The help center does not publish the exact number of free rounds, so treat any figure you read elsewhere as a snapshot.
The paid tier is also capped. Quizlet’s own description of Plus is “extended access to premium study tools with monthly usage limits”. The upgrade page lists Plus at $35.99 per year with 20 Learn rounds and 3 practice tests per month; Plus Unlimited at $44.99 per year removes the caps (Quizlet upgrade page). On iOS the in-app prices run higher (App Store listing). Ads go away only with a subscription, or if a teacher adds you to a class they manage (Free student access).
One thing has improved. Quizlet now offers a real spaced repetition option inside Flashcards mode: you rate each card Repeat, Hard, Okay, or Easy, and “Easy” pushes the card out “four or more days”. The catch is in the first footnote: “Spaced repetition is currently only available on the Quizlet website” (Studying with Spaced Repetition). On your phone, where most vocabulary review actually happens, you still get flipping and sorting, not scheduling. We covered Quizlet’s broader position in our roundup of flashcard apps; this post is about where a language learner should go next.
What a language learner should demand from a replacement
Four criteria, each backed by evidence rather than preference.
Retrieval, not re-reading. In the classic Swahili study, “repeated studying after learning had no effect on delayed recall, but repeated testing produced a large positive effect” (Karpicke and Roediger 2008). An app that lets you flip without committing to an answer is easier on the ego and worse for memory. We go deeper in active recall vs passive review.
Scheduling on the free tier and on your phone. Spaced reviews are one of the two techniques Dunlosky and colleagues rated highest across learners and materials (Dunlosky 2013). A double-blind classroom study found that about three minutes a day of scheduled vocabulary review tripled long-term retention (Chukharev-Hudilainen and Klepikova 2016). Which scheduler matters less than having one; our spaced repetition explainer covers the differences.
Recall, not just recognition. A 2024 study of 138 Japanese students using Quizlet found that multiple-choice items “result in a 20% overestimation of knowledge relative to gap-fill posttests” (Sevigny et al. 2024). Multiple choice makes you feel fluent. Producing the word tells you the truth. The case for typing over flipping is weaker: a pre-registered study found no difference between recalling, repeating, and restudying spoken word forms (Krishnan, Watkins and Bishop 2017), so treat typing modes as useful, not mandatory.
Audio. A controlled study of 86 university students found digital flashcards with built-in pronunciation and scheduling beat paper cards and word lists on the post-test, and the authors cite prior work showing “pictures and audio pronunciation simultaneously improve learning outcomes” (Xodabande et al. 2022). For a language, a card you cannot hear is half a card.
A fifth, practical criterion: can you bring your Quizlet sets with you? We cover that per app below.
Anki and AnkiDroid: free, powerful, heavy
Anki is the reference implementation of spaced repetition. Desktop builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux are free and open source, AnkiDroid is free on Android, and the current stable release is 26.09.2 from September 2026 (Anki on Wikipedia). Since version 23.10 you can switch the scheduler from SM-2 to FSRS, which fits its parameters to your own review history. AnkiMobile on iOS is a one-time $24.99 (App Store).
Import from Quizlet is a two-step job. Anki’s desktop app imports plain text with “commas, semicolons or tabs” as separators (Anki manual), which is exactly what a Quizlet export produces. AnkiDroid cannot do this on its own: “AnkiDroid can’t directly import text files. If you wish to do that, you’ll need to do that with the desktop program, and then import your collection into AnkiDroid” (AnkiDroid manual). Plan for a laptop session.
Wins: the deepest free scheduler available, audio on cards, shared decks for almost every language, no ads, no subscription. Loses: setup takes an afternoon, the interface is dense, and the mobile path to importing goes through desktop. Best for: learners who want maximum control and are willing to learn the tool first. We compare it with our own app in Anki vs Peek.
Knowt: the closest Quizlet clone
Knowt was built as a direct Quizlet replacement. The free Basic plan covers unlimited sets and study; the paid Ultra plan is $24.99 per month or $149.99 per year, and its headline features are an “Ad Free Experience” and a stack of AI summarizers (Knowt plans). So the free tier is ad-supported: you trade Quizlet’s caps for Knowt’s ads.
The reason to switch is Learn. Knowt states that “Learn mode is always free on Knowt” and lists free spaced repetition among its modes (Knowt Learn mode). We could not find a public description of how its scheduler picks intervals, so we cannot compare it with SM-2 or FSRS on evidence.
Migration is Knowt’s strongest card. A free Chrome extension copies any Quizlet set in one click, with a manual fallback where you “paste your text in the space provided and use the same separators as on Quizlet” (Knowt help). The same article warns that the extension breaks whenever “Quizlet blocked us again”, and that sets over 100 cards need an extra step. Anki and CSV import work the same way (Knowt help).
Wins: free Learn and practice tests, painless Quizlet import, familiar layout. Loses: ads on the free tier, an AI upsell on every screen, general-purpose rather than language-focused, and an undocumented scheduler. Best for: students who liked Quizlet’s Learn mode and mostly want the paywall gone.
Memrise and Brainscape: guided course vs confidence-rated cards
Memrise is a language course that happens to use spaced review. It reports over 87 million registered users, official courses in 35 languages, and a product built around “native-speaker videos of locals pronouncing words and phrases” plus a GPT-powered conversation partner (Memrise on Wikipedia). In 2024 the company moved community-made courses out of the app.
On price, the help center lists monthly, annual, and lifetime plans without numbers (Memrise help); the iOS listing shows $24.99 per month, $61.99 per year, and a $329.99 lifetime plan that is often discounted (App Store). There is no way to import your Quizlet sets, because you do not pick the words. Memrise does.
Wins: real native audio and video on every item, a curated path, no deck building. Loses: almost everything worth having is paid, and your own vocabulary list has no home here. Best for: a beginner who wants a course, not a card box.
Brainscape is the opposite: a card box with an unusual scheduler. The free plan includes “Learn faster with spaced repetition” and “Import existing flashcards”; Pro is $7.99 per month on the pricing page, with iOS prices from $19.99 monthly to a $199.99 lifetime (Brainscape pricing, App Store).
The scheduler is Confidence-Based Repetition: after each card you rate yourself from 1, “not at all”, to 5, “totally confident”, and the interval follows your rating (Brainscape Academy). One detail matters for language learners: “Add images and sounds to flashcards” is a Pro feature, so free cards are silent.
Wins: scheduling on the free tier, polished mobile app, import of existing cards. Loses: no audio without Pro, general-purpose subjects, and no head-to-head data on how the confidence scheduler compares with SM-2 or FSRS. Best for: someone who already has a clean word list and wants a nicer mobile review loop than Anki.
Memrise: a guided course
Brainscape: your own cards, rated 1 to 5
Peek: spaced repetition for one job
We built Peek for one user: the language learner who wants scheduled reviews on a phone with nothing to configure. It is free, there is no sign-up, and it is scoped to languages. You type the word you met today, rate the recall when the card comes back, and the schedule adjusts. Audio is on the card. Besides the plain flip, there are reverse, multiple-choice, and type-the-answer modes, plus an intensive drill that pushes every card through all four in turn, so the recall-level practice from the criteria above is there when you want it.
Bringing Quizlet sets over is a two-column CSV or TSV import into an existing deck, with a preview before anything is saved. If Quizlet’s export button is there for you, use it: the help center says set creators can “export the terms and definitions from your own sets” on the website (Exporting your sets). Knowt’s documentation claims export now requires a subscription, so if you do not see the option, copy the set into a spreadsheet and save it as CSV. Images and audio never survive a Quizlet text export, whichever app you land in.
Wins: zero setup, no ads, no subscription, scheduling and audio on the free tier, on your phone. Loses: Android only today, no shared-deck library, no plugins, and no use outside languages. Best for: a language learner with a growing list of words who wants the review loop handled. Our home page walks through how the schedule works.
Which one should you switch to
Pick by what you valued in Quizlet.
- You loved Learn mode and the shared sets. Knowt keeps both free and imports your sets in a click. Accept the ads.
- You want the best scheduler and do not mind a setup weekend. Anki, with a desktop session to import.
- You want a course with native video, not a card box. Memrise, if you will pay for it.
- You have a clean list and want a nicer mobile review loop. Brainscape, with the caveat that audio is paid.
- You want scheduled vocabulary review on your phone, free, with no account. Get Peek on Google Play and import your CSV.
Quizlet’s paywall is not a reason to stop using flashcards. It is a reason to pick a tool where the scheduler is the free part, not the premium part.