Best flashcard maker for lectures and notes in 2026

Short answer first: decide who writes the cards. If you write them yourself, Anki is still the one to beat: free on computers and Android, 24.99 US dollars once for AnkiMobile in the US App Store, and FSRS scheduling built in. If you want an app to write them from a lecture, Quizlet takes recordings of up to 5 hours, RemNote's Lecture Recorder comes with Pro with AI at 216 US dollars a year, and Knowt lists its lecture summarizer under Ultra at 149.99 US dollars a year. Whichever app writes them, edit the cards before you study them.

Every price, limit and algorithm below comes from the vendors' own pages, store listings and help centres, checked on 25 September 2026. Quizlet's main site blocks automated readers, so its numbers come from its help centre and its App Store listing. Where a vendor publishes nothing, we write "not published" rather than guess.

What should a flashcard maker do with a lecture?

A flashcard app has two separate jobs. It turns material into questions, and it decides when you see each question again. Anki only does the second. Most AI study apps lead with the first and say less about the second. The questions below show which app does which, and at what price.

Can it make cards from a recording?

Quizlet, Knowt, RemNote, StudyFetch and Notibo take a lecture recording and return cards. Anki does not record or transcribe at all. The limit that bites is language: Quizlet's summaries from audio come in English, French and German, and RemNote transcribes six languages live. If you only need the text, our transcription app comparison covers the tools that stop there.

Can it make cards from slides, PDFs or typed notes?

Slides often arrive before the lecture, so this is the more common case. Quizlet's Smart Assist turns a file or pasted notes into draft cards you can edit. RemNote makes AI cards from text, PDF and PowerPoint files. StudyFetch takes PDFs and slides, and Notibo takes PDF, PPTX and DOCX. Knowt lists its PDF and PowerPoint summarizer under the paid plan.

Does it schedule the reviews, and with which algorithm?

Making cards is half the work; the schedule is the other half. Anki and RemNote name their algorithms, FSRS and SM-2. Quizlet, Knowt and StudyFetch describe a schedule that brings missed cards back sooner, with four rating buttons, but name no algorithm. Quizlet's schedule runs on its website only, not in the app.

What does it cost, and where does your data go?

Prices below are in US dollars, from the vendors' pages or the US App Store, except Notibo's, which are in euro. On data, Quizlet says its service runs from the United States, Knowt that it mainly uses US data centres, and AnkiWeb that synced cards sit in the EU and the USA. StudyFetch's privacy policy says it may train its AI on your uploads.

How do the apps compare?

One row per app, taken from each vendor's own pages. "Not published" means we looked and found no number.

Two things stand out. Only Anki, RemNote and Notibo name the algorithm behind their schedule. And every app that writes cards for you charges for doing it at volume, while the one that makes you write them charges nothing on a computer.

Is Anki still the best if you write your own cards?

Anki is an open-source flashcard program, and its scheduler has become a reference point: RemNote calls its own default scheduler Anki SM-2. Anki does not write cards. It decides when you see them, and it lets you change the timing of reviews if the defaults do not suit you.

• Free on computers and Android. Anki's download page offers the computer version free for Windows, macOS and Linux, and says AnkiDroid for Android is free and developed by contributors.
• AnkiMobile costs 24.99 US dollars once. The US App Store listing says its sales pay for both the computer and the mobile version, which is why it is priced like a computer program.
• FSRS is built in. Anki's manual calls FSRS an alternative to the older SM-2 algorithm, supported from Anki 23.10, AnkiMobile 23.10 and AnkiDroid 2.17, with a default target of 90 per cent recall.
• Sync goes through AnkiWeb. AnkiWeb's privacy page says it keeps synced cards, media and review history on servers in the EU and the USA.

Anki gives you nothing from a recording. You listen, decide what matters and type it, which is slow, and which the 2023 study further down suggests is also why self-made cards stick. If you have never turned notes into good cards by hand, flashcards from notes shows how.

What does Quizlet make from a lecture recording?

Quizlet now records lectures as well as hosting flashcard sets. Its main site blocked our reader, so the facts below come from its help centre and its App Store listing, both published by Quizlet. The feature that matters here is Audio Notes, which turns a recording into a study guide with a linked set of cards.

• Recordings of up to 5 hours become a study guide and a flashcard set. Quizlet's Audio Notes page accepts MP3, OGG, WAV, M4A and AAC files up to 500 MB. You record in the iOS or Android app and upload on the web.
• Summaries from audio come in English, French and German. Free and Plus users can process a limited number of recordings; only Plus Unlimited has no limit.
• Spaced repetition runs on the website only. Quizlet's spaced repetition page has you rate each card Repeat, Hard, Okay or Easy, and names no algorithm.
• The price is not on a page we could read. The US App Store listing shows Quizlet Plus at 9.99 and 44.99 US dollars and Plus Unlimited at 44.99, without saying which is monthly and which yearly.
• Data is handled in the United States. Quizlet's GDPR page says the service is provided through services located there.

For an English, French or German lecture, Quizlet runs the whole chain from recording to cards. For any other language, test one recording before paying. Age matters too: in Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and ten other countries and territories, study guides are open only to users aged 18 or over.

How far does Knowt's free plan go?

Knowt's homepage calls it a free Quizlet alternative, and its core flashcards are free. The lecture tools are where the paid plan starts, and the plans page is short on numbers for what a free account gets. The prices below are from the student tab; teachers have a tab of their own.

• Basic is free. Knowt's plans page lists unlimited file creation, live collaboration and storage, and 5 million resources to browse.
• The lecture recording summarizer is listed under Ultra. Ultra costs 24.99 US dollars a month, or 149.99 US dollars billed once a year with a 3-day free trial, and adds the PDF, PowerPoint and video summarizers and removes ads.
• Record, stop, then choose notes or flashcards. Knowt's help article on the Live Lecture Note Taker, which sits under AI Summarizers in the app, says you can upload an existing audio file instead of recording.
• Spaced repetition with intervals you can change. Knowt's help centre has you rate cards Again, Hard, Good or Easy and lets you adjust the gaps. No algorithm is named.
• Data sits mainly in the United States. Knowt's privacy policy, updated in March 2026, says it currently uses US data centres for the most part.

So the free plan is a flashcard app with a schedule, and the lecture summarizer is a paid extra. The yearly plan is shown as 12.99 US dollars a month but billed as 149.99 upfront, so read the total before the trial ends.

Is RemNote's Lecture Recorder worth the AI plan?

RemNote is a note app that turns your notes into flashcards. Its Lecture Recorder writes a live transcript you can turn into cards, and you can start it from any folder on a computer or from the + button in the mobile app. It is paid for in AI credits, so the real cost depends on how many hours you record.

• The recorder is listed under Pro with AI. RemNote's pricing page puts Pro with AI at 18 US dollars a month billed yearly, 216 US dollars in total, with 20,000 AI credits a month. Plain Pro is 96 US dollars a year with 1,000 credits.
• About 600 credits per hour of recording. RemNote's help article gives that rate. Neither page says how many hours of recording a plan's credits cover, and the same credits pay for RemNote's other AI features.
• Six languages live, more than 80 from a file. Live transcription works in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. An uploaded recording can be in more than 80 languages.
• Cards from one sentence or the whole lecture. The same article says you can click a sentence to make a card from it, or generate cards for a section or the full document.
• SM-2 by default, FSRS as a beta. RemNote's page on FSRS calls version 6 a beta that you switch on yourself.

RemNote suits a student who wants notes, PDFs and cards in one place and will pay for the AI plan. On data, its privacy policy, last updated in January 2022, names RemNote Inc. of Wilmington, Delaware, as data controller and lists Amazon Web Services under cloud computing services, without saying in which region your notes are stored.

What does StudyFetch cost?

StudyFetch sells an AI tutor, called Sparky, that builds flashcards, quizzes, notes and a study plan from your course material. It publishes no pricing page on its website, so the numbers here come from its App Store listing, which names each plan and its price.

• No prices on the website. StudyFetch's homepage answers its own pricing question by saying that getting started is free.
• The App Store shows the plans. The US App Store listing has Premium at 19.99 US dollars a month, 29.00 a quarter or 96.00 a year.
• Lectures, PDFs, slides and videos go in. The listing promises flashcards, quizzes and notes from uploads, live lecture recording and support for more than 20 languages.
• A schedule with four buttons. Its PDF-to-flashcards page has you rate cards Again, Hard, Good or Easy and says missed cards come back sooner. No algorithm is named.
• Your uploads can train its AI. StudyFetch's privacy policy, updated 13 August 2026, says it may use what you upload and what it generates to train its AI models, except data from Google Workspace and Google Photos.

If a lecture holds anything you would not want in a training set, that last point matters more than the price.

What does the research say about spacing and making your own cards?

Flashcards rest on two well-tested findings: testing yourself beats rereading, and spreading reviews out beats cramming. A newer study speaks directly to the question in this article, which is who writes the cards.

• Practice testing and spacing were the only high-utility techniques. Dunlosky and colleagues' 2013 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest rated ten study techniques, and rereading and highlighting came out as low utility.
• The best gap grows with the time until the test. Cepeda and colleagues' 2006 meta-analysis pooled 839 assessments from 317 experiments and found that the gap giving the best retention grew as the retention interval grew.
• Recall beats recognition. Rowland's 2014 meta-analysis found larger benefits from recall tests than from recognition tests, which favours cards where you produce the answer over multiple choice.
• Cards you make yourself stick better. Pan and colleagues' 2023 study in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition ran six experiments and found self-made flashcards improved memory over premade ones, an estimated d = 0.45 on a test 48 hours later.

That study did not test AI cards. But cards an app writes for you are made by someone else, which puts them on the premade side. The practical reading is to let the app draft, then rewrite each card in your own words and delete the ones you would never have asked yourself. Active recall and spaced repetition cover the two habits behind all of this.

Which should you choose?

Start from how much of the card writing you want to do yourself, then check the language of your lectures.

• If you are happy to write your own cards, use Anki. It is free on a computer and on Android, and FSRS takes care of the schedule.
• If your lectures are in English, French or German and you want cards from the recording, try Quizlet's Audio Notes on a free account first, then look at Plus Unlimited if the limited recordings run out.
• If you want notes, PDFs and cards in one app, RemNote Pro with AI includes the recorder at 216 US dollars a year. Check that your lecture language is one of the six it transcribes live, or upload the file afterwards.
• If your school already uses Knowt, the free plan covers flashcards and spaced repetition, and the lecture summarizer is listed under Ultra.
• If your lectures contain material you would not want used for training, leave StudyFetch out, because its privacy policy allows training on uploads.
• If your lecture language is not on those lists, compare language lists before features: RemNote takes more than 80 from an uploaded file, StudyFetch says more than 20, and Notibo lists 89.

Whichever you pick, run one real lecture through it and study the cards for a week before you pay for a year.

Where Notibo fits

Notibo sits on the side where the app writes the cards. It records a lecture on a computer, or takes an audio file you upload, and returns a transcript, notes and flashcards with spaced repetition. It also turns PDF, PPTX and DOCX files into notes and flashcards. It transcribes 89 languages, Danish and English among them, in the language spoken.

Pro is free for 14 days, with 240 minutes of audio and no card, so you can make cards from a real lecture before you pay anything. After the trial the free plan gives 30 minutes of audio and five documents a month. Pro costs 9.99 euro a month or 88.99 euro a year, for 1,200 minutes. One recording can run for two hours. Files are stored in the EU, in Frankfurt; transcription and the notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses. Notibo does not train on your content.

Given the 2023 study above, treat its cards the way you would treat any app's: read them, rewrite the ones that are not in your words, and delete what you would not have asked yourself. The flashcards page shows what a finished set looks like.