Which revision app should an Australian student use?

Short answer first: pick Anki if you will write your own cards, because the scheduling is free on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android, and the iPhone app is a single purchase of 39.99 Australian dollars. Pick Quizlet if you want the cards made from your notes and you accept a subscription. Before either, check whether your unit already has Echo360 study cards switched on. The app matters less than the habit: Dunlosky and colleagues rated practice testing and distributed practice high utility, and rated rereading and highlighting low utility.

Every price here is a list price as of September 2026, taken from the Australian App Store or, where there is no Australian page, from the vendor's own page with the currency it showed. The evidence for testing yourself and spacing the reviews comes from published papers, not from vendor claims. Which app should hold your lecture notes is a different question, answered in the best note-taking app for Australia.

What does the research actually say works?

Two habits pay for themselves, and both are older than every app here. You answer questions from memory instead of rereading, and you spread those answers out over weeks. All an app adds is the bookkeeping: which card is due today, and which one you can safely not see for a month. How that fits a semester of continuous assessment is in how Australian universities assess you.

• Two techniques out of ten came back with a high utility rating. In a review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham worked through ten learning techniques and rated practice testing and distributed practice high utility, because they benefit learners of different ages and abilities and lift performance across many kinds of test, including in educational settings. Summarising, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery for text learning and rereading were all rated low utility.
• Testing wins once time passes, and loses when it does not. In Roediger and Karpicke's experiments, students read prose passages and then either took free recall tests without feedback or restudied the passage the same number of times. On a final test five minutes later, restudying came out ahead. On the tests two days and a week later, the students who had been tested retained substantially more.
• The right gap depends on when you sit the paper. Cepeda, Vul, Rohrer, Wixted and Pashler taught more than 1,350 people a set of facts, gave them a review after a gap of up to 3.5 months, then tested them up to a year later. Measured as a proportion of the delay before the test, the best gap fell from about 20 to 40 per cent for a one week delay to about 5 to 10 per cent for a one year delay.
• Students who test themselves score better, on the evidence of one cohort. Deng, Gluckstein and Larsen surveyed 72 medical students about how they prepared for a licensing exam. Thirty-one per cent used Anki and 49 per cent used Firecracker, the number of practice questions completed was a significant independent predictor of the score alongside prior academic performance, and the authors concluded that these self-initiated practices, often with spaced repetition, are associated with better performance. Test anxiety predicted in the other direction.

None of that names an app. It tells you what the app has to make easy: answering a question cold, and coming back to it later than feels comfortable. Choose the tool whose friction you will still tolerate in week nine, when the assignment is due and the last thing you want is a card that takes four minutes to write.

How long should the gap be?

Cepeda's proportions are a rule of thumb, not a timetable. If the exam is a week away, 20 to 40 per cent of that week is a gap of a day or two. If the exam is a year away, 5 to 10 per cent of a year is roughly three to five weeks. Anki, Quizlet and Brainscape all set the interval for you, which is most of what you are paying for or, with Anki, not paying for. A schedule you can run by hand is in the spaced repetition schedule.

What does your university already give you?

Look at your enrolment before your wallet. Recording platforms have grown study features, and your university may have paid for them already.

• Echo360 has flashcards attached to the recording. Echo360's support page for study aids describes Study Cards as digital flashcards of terms and definitions for active recall, and Practice Quiz as multiple choice questions that test comprehension of the material. Instructors and media owners can write them, or AskEcho can draft them from the transcript of the recording. By default they are visible to instructors and media owners only, so the content can be checked before a class sees it, and the page describes creating them as the instructor's or media owner's job.
• ANU runs the platform underneath. ANU describes EchoVideo, formerly known as Echo360, as a university wide system that captures and records lectures and carries lecturer videos into Canvas, with polls and quizzes on top. Whether your own university records with Echo360 is on its lecture recording or IT page.
• UNSW tells its first years to do exactly this. UNSW's first year guide tells students to "use spaced learning and active repetition tasks" and to make palm cards, physically or online on Anki or Quizlet, then take small preparation quizzes.

So the first email is to your unit coordinator: are study aids switched on for this unit? If they are, you get questions written against the actual lecture, which no generic deck can match. If they are not, you are building the cards yourself, and the rest of this article is about what to build them in.

Anki

Anki gives the scheduling away and charges for one app. Its own site says the free computer version is available for all major platforms, that AnkiDroid for Android is free and developed by contributors, and that the free AnkiWeb synchronisation service keeps cards in step across devices.

The scheduler is the product. The Australian App Store listing names the SM2 and FSRS algorithms and says they prompt a review before you forget the material. The same listing mentions decks of more than 100,000 cards, offline study with stored media, LaTeX and equations, and Apple Pencil drawing.

What Anki does not do is write the cards. You type them, or you import a deck someone else typed, which is how most medical and language students start. That is the real cost: an hour of card writing for a week of lectures.

Anki on an iPhone

AnkiMobile is listed at 39.99 Australian dollars on the Australian store, as a single purchase with no in-app purchases beside it, sold by Anki Software LLC. On Android the app is free, so an Android phone plus a laptop is a system that costs nothing at all. Apple's listing also describes AnkiMobile as intended as a companion to the computer version rather than a replacement, so plan to build decks on a laptop.

Quizlet

Quizlet is free to install and sells the rest. Its Australian App Store listing shows in-app purchases of Quizlet Plus at 12.99 and at 59.99 Australian dollars, Quizlet Go at 59.99 and Quizlet Teacher at 47.99, with no billing period printed beside any of them. The listing's own text says a Quizlet Plus subscription is monthly or annual, but the price list does not say which price is which, so read the period on the purchase screen before you confirm.

The listing is also where the feature claims live: upload class notes to make flashcards, practice tests and essay prompts with Magic Notes, retain material with spaced repetition, and turn cards into quizzes with Learn and Test modes. Quizlet's own pricing page would not load for us, so the limits of the free plan are not documented here. Check them in the app on a real unit before you pay for a year.

Brainscape

Brainscape asks you to rate your confidence and sets the interval from that. Its Australian App Store listing describes rating each concept from 1 to 5, after which the app decides when to show the card again, more often for the ones you rate low.

The prices depend on where you look, so check before you subscribe. The Australian listing shows Brainscape Pro at 29.49, 87.99 and 139.99 Australian dollars, plus a lifetime purchase at 299.99, again with no billing periods. Brainscape's own pricing page shows a different ladder: 19.99 billed every 1 month, 59.94 every 6 months, 95.88 every 12 months, which it also writes as 7.99 a month, and 199.99 for lifetime access. That page shows a dollar sign and never says which dollar, and there is no Australian version of it, so the App Store is the one that tells you what your card will be charged. The free Basic plan on the same page includes unlimited flashcards, AI card making, spaced repetition and study reminders.

Notion

Notion's pricing page switches between euro and US dollars, with no Australian dollar option, and showed Free, Plus at 9.50 euro and Business at 19.50 euro per member a month when we read it. Those are the prices on yearly billing, which the page opens on. Paid monthly, Plus is 11.50 euro and Business 23.50, so check which one is selected before you compare. Nothing on that page mentions flashcards, spaced repetition or review scheduling.

That is the point about Notion. It is a good place to keep a unit's notes, reading list and assignment tracker, and it is not a revision app. If your notes live there, pull the facts out into something that schedules them rather than building a review calendar by hand and abandoning it in week six.

Who makes the cards, and does that matter?

Card writing is where most systems die. Be honest about how much of it you will do, because a perfect scheduler with sixty cards in it is worth less than a rough deck covering the whole unit.

• You write them: Anki, and Brainscape if you ignore its AI feature. Slowest to start, and the questions end up in the words your unit actually uses.
• The app drafts them from your material: Quizlet's Magic Notes from uploaded class notes, Brainscape's AI card making on the free plan, and Notibo from a recording, a PDF, a PPTX or a DOCX.
• Someone else already wrote them: shared Anki decks and Quizlet sets. Fast, and only as accurate as the stranger who made them, which matters when an Australian unit examines a different syllabus.
• Your lecturer released them: Echo360 study cards, where the questions follow the recording your exam is based on.

A middle path works for most people: let a tool draft cards from the slides or the recording, then delete half of them and rewrite the ones that survive. The rewriting is the revision. How to do that from a set of notes is in turning notes into flashcards.

How do the apps compare?

Prices as of September 2026, from the pages linked above. Australian dollar amounts come from the Australian App Store, where no billing period is shown against an in-app purchase.

The decision rule

1. Ask whether Echo360 study aids are on in your units. If they are, start there for one week and see whether the questions are any good.
2. If you own an Android phone, install Anki tonight. The desktop app, the Android app and the sync are all free, so the only cost is the hour you spend writing cards.
3. If you own an iPhone and you will not pay the 39.99, use the free desktop Anki and review on your laptop, or accept a subscription that includes a phone app.
4. If you will not write cards, pay for card making rather than for scheduling. Quizlet and Brainscape both make them from your material, and so does Notibo.
5. Check the currency and the billing period before you confirm. The App Store charges Australian dollars with no period printed on the listing. Notion and Notibo bill in euro.
6. Review on the days the app says, not the night before. Every app in this table is built on the two techniques that came out of the research well, and none of them works if you open it twice a semester.

Where Notibo fits

Notibo starts a step earlier than a flashcard app. It records a lecture on a computer, or takes an audio file you upload, and returns a transcript, structured notes and flashcards with spaced repetition. It also turns PDF, PPTX and DOCX files into notes and flashcards, so the slides and the readings end up in the same deck as the lecture. It transcribes 89 languages, and the transcript comes back in the language that was spoken.

The first 14 days of Pro are free, with 240 minutes of recording and no card. When the trial ends, the free plan gives 30 minutes of recording a month. Pro is 9.99 euro a month or 88.99 euro a year, in euro rather than Australian dollars, with the local amount shown at checkout. Uploads are capped at 50 MB and one recording can run for up to two hours, with long recordings saved in smaller parts as they run and joined into a single transcript. The transcript and notes export as PDF or Word, so a deck is not the only thing you are left with.

Files are stored in the EU, on Supabase in Frankfurt, while transcription and the AI notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses, and the audio file is deleted from storage once the transcript and notes are generated. Recording a class needs your university's permission, which differs by university, and no tool changes that. If you want the cheapest scheduler and you are happy writing cards, Anki is still the answer. If the card writing is what stops you, compare one lecture's worth of Notibo cards against an hour of your own typing, and the plans are on the pricing page.