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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

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24 alternatives to Anki-like flashcards for non tech-savvy users (language learning)

Hi HN, I have been studying languages as a hobby for a large portion of my life. Hence, I decided to create a spaced repetion app with the techniques that have helped me the most so far. It's aims to be made simple for the regular user to plug and play. I'd love to hear your feedback!

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Hi HN, I watch A LOT of educational YouTube videos but wasn't forgetting a good chunk of the details because I was only really passively watching. So I made a tool that generates quiz questions/flashcards from YouTube videos, and uses spaced repetition like Anki or Duolingo to keep it in memory. Let me know if you find it cool/useful (or terrible ) or if you want to know a bit about the details!

    2024 · platoedu.org · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Create flashcards for spaced repetitions in Notion

    2023 · philippstelzel.gumroad.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Learn more efficiently and remember things longer with the power of science. CleverDeck includes 3000-word decks for most major languages.

    2014 · cleverdeck.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Memorization made simple and super-efficient

    2022 · ankimono.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    AnkiApp▲94

    Learn faster with better flashcards 🧠⚡

    2018 · algoapp.ai · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Here is a tool I built initially for myself to help with my German and Greek language studies. It started as a hack for creating Anki cards from native language audio. It extracts the words, finds their base forms (lemmas) and groups the examples by the lemma. At some point I realised that I have a transcription with word level timestamps that opens a lot of other opportunities. So I added a mode to click the first and last word in the transcript and it starts looping with the right gap and repeat count. Another feature I use a lot is selecting an audio fragment, sending a predefined prompt…

    Jun 2026 · lingochunk.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    Decks▲182

    I’m building Decks, an application where you create study decks that consists of notes, flashcards, YouTube videos, and ChatGPT conversations. Notes and flashcards can be attached to YouTube videos. And your ChatGPT conversations are searchable and organizable through tags and folders. The concept is that this is study application where you can keep all your materials related to a subject in one place. Would appreciate any feedback you might have. Thanks!

    2024 · decksapp.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Learn languages more efficiently with spaced repetition

    2017 · cleverdeck.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Owl is built a spaced repetition app. We built it for ourselves mostly because we were unhappy with Anki from a UX perspective, and are now releasing it to everybody else. It is super tiny, but - we think - also pretty good. You can add your own decks manually, or generate them from a PDF (think academic papers, which is how I use that feature) or a prompt. There are no emails except study reminders (when there are cards to study). You can also use our "AI tutor" to review cards conversationally. Looking forward to your feedback!

    2025 · owl.cards · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    The flashcards app without distractions

    2023 · spaced.sh · its alternatives →

  11. 11
    Anki▲86

    Friendly, intelligent flash cards. Remember stuff.

    2014 · apps.ankiweb.net · its alternatives →

  12. 12YT

    Hey HN, this is my first product launch. I built You2Anki along my language learning journey to aid my vocabulary from any content I want. Most tools I tried weren’t particularly made for language acquisition. You2Anki was designed with that focus in mind. Simple, intuitive and distraction-free. I hope it helps you!

    2025 · you2anki.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    I’ve been tinkering with Ricotta for about a year now and I'm happy to announce it’s ready to for others to use officially. Largely the time has been spent making the project a framework to spin up newer projects quickly which I can share details around if anyone is interested. The app was born out of my frustration with Duolingo drilling me on words I knew. I moved on to creating custom Anki cards and found myself spending ages creating decks. It’s free, uses spaced repetition under the hood, and focuses on helping you learn what you want to without a course structure. I'd love to hear your…

    2025 · ricotta.affineur.io · its alternatives →

  14. 14AF

    I'm a long time lurker that recently quit my job to work on my own projects, a lot due to the inspiration from Hacker News. Now I have published my first serious project, an app for learning how to write Japanese characters. It's the app I always wanted but couldn't find when I was studying. It tries to be simple to use, you just start the quiz and go with the flow. There's no need to plan and manage your studies, and it uses spaced repetition for better retention. There's a promo page with more details up at http://www.kanjibyhand.com. It's only for Android so far. The free version includes…

    2012 · kanjibyhand.com. · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hello! I love anki and have been using it for years to learn mandarin, but I'm lazy and always struggled to get over the "motivation hump" to sit down and create a deck. Recently I've been consuming a lot of AI content from youtube, and spent 3 days creating a deck for Andrej Karpathy's "Deep Dive into LLMs" video. This is impractical - so I built a little youtube to anki converter @ asimpleai.com It's rough around the edges... but I would like it to eventually become something useful to community. Feedback and suggestions are welcome! peace

    2025 · asimpleai.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hi HN, I recently got the AnkiMobile app for iOS for Mandarin. It was buggy and feature-lacking in my opinion, so I made a nice looking Anki-compatible alternative app, with more features. It uses a tuned FSRS5 algorithm and supports image occlusion out of the box. You can import your existing Anki decks into it or create a new one. Pretty quick to add cards with the image feature. I'm using it right now and will add more to it so let me know what you think. FYI, it has a one-off purchase of $14.99 to unlock it for lifetime (no taksies backsies) after a test period of seven days.

    Dec 2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17IM

    Recently moved to Egypt, and in dire need to get the numbers down. Great excuse to explore learning software some more. Possibly very niche, but maybe it is useful for someone else out there. Feedback is always welcome.

    2023 · arabic-numbers.koljapluemer.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hey there! Out of the necessity to teach my son a new language, I developed an app just for him. After months of use and realizing how effective it was, I decided to make it available to the public. Now, I’m looking for your support, feedback, and possibly help in reaching potential customers. Take a look and let me know your thoughts! Thank you!

    2024 · voiczy.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19
    Dekki▲9

    AI spaced repetition study app

    2024 · dekki.ai · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Since learning about spaced repetition 7 years ago, I've leaned heavily on Anki to streamline my process of learning languages and memorizing bits of factual information in general. After taking up piano as a hobby, I've been designing an approach to my music practice that would help me develop a habit of jumping into daily practice sessions without thinking too much about what to play next. I envisioned a system that would: - store my entire repertoire, including exercises, pieces, and chord sequences to improvise over - manage spaced repetition scheduling to balance learning new material…

    2024 · phiano.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21TO

    Tl;dr: I built an alternative iOS/macOS app to Anki/Quizlet for learning vocabulary. You can write, collect and review example sentences with which you learn words more effectively than by just reviewing their definitions. A few years ago I wanted to improve my writing. As part of the learning process, I also wanted to expand my vocabulary. I’d highlight unknown words as I was reading books, and I’d saved them to flashcard apps. I’d reviewed them daily and for a long time I thought I was making good progress: during reviews, I’d usually guess correctly the meaning of words. My…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  22. 22IB

    Hey HN! I’m Alex, and one of my favorite ways to learn languages is by reading novels. Currently I’m reading 三体 (3 body problem), but one problem I've always had is it takes ages to look up words, and add them to Anki flashcards so I can remember them. 三体 is especially brutal with so much sci-fi vocab. That’s why I built Readly. I snap a pic of the page I’m reading, it loads the text in-app and lets me lookup words, add to Anki-style flashcards, or ask AI questions about the text, all in a single tap. It's a huge time saver. My specific learning strategy, if anyone wants to replicate it: 1.…

    2025 · readly.ink · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Anki, but simpler.

    Jul 2026 · allisterkohn.openstatus.dev · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    AI Study & Spaced Repetition

    Dec 2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →