Which revision app should a New Zealand student use?

Short answer first: choose an app that makes you answer from memory and schedules the next review, because practice testing and distributed practice are the two techniques a 2013 review of ten study methods rated high utility. Anki does both and is free on a computer and on Android; its iPhone app, AnkiMobile, costs 49.99 New Zealand dollars once on the New Zealand App Store. Brainscape does both for cards you make, at no cost. Quizlet's help centre puts its spaced repetition on the website only. Notion and the Microsoft 365 that Auckland and Victoria give students hold notes, and neither lists a review scheduler.

This guide is about revision: the weeks of testing yourself on material you already have. The apps you take lecture notes in are compared in the note-taking guide for New Zealand. Prices are list prices as of September 2026, in New Zealand dollars where a New Zealand store page shows them and in the page's own currency otherwise. The evidence comes from published studies, not from the vendors.

What does the research say a revision app should do?

Two findings from memory research carry straight into app design. Answering from memory strengthens what you know more than reading it again, and reviews spread out over time last longer than the same reviews crammed together. An app earns its place when it makes you do the first and takes care of the timing for the second.

Testing yourself beats rereading

• Tested students remembered more a week later. In Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 study, students who took recall tests on prose passages retained substantially more two days and a week later than students who restudied. Restudying did better on a test five minutes later, and it made students more confident.
• Once you know an answer, more testing helps and more study does not. Karpicke and Roediger (2008) found that restudying vocabulary a student could already produce had no effect on delayed recall, while repeated testing had a large positive effect. Students' predictions of their own performance were uncorrelated with how they actually did.
• The effect holds in real classrooms. A 2021 meta-analysis of 222 classroom studies covering 48,478 students found that quizzing raised achievement to a medium extent. Feedback, the number of test repetitions and how closely the practice matched the final test were among the factors that changed its size.

Spacing depends on when the exam is

• The best gap grows with the time to the test. Cepeda and colleagues (2008) taught more than 1,350 people a set of facts, reviewed them after gaps of up to 3.5 months and tested them up to a year later. The best gap was about 20 to 40 per cent of the delay for a test a week away, and about 5 to 10 per cent for a test a year away.
• Both habits earned the top rating. Dunlosky and colleagues' 2013 review of ten techniques rated practice testing and distributed practice high utility, because they help learners of different ages and abilities across many kinds of tests. Rereading and highlighting were rated low.

For choosing an app, this comes down to whether it makes you produce the answer before showing it, and whether it decides when you see the card again. The confidence result matters too. The students who restudied felt surer, yet remembered less on the delayed tests, so an app that feels easy is no proof that it works.

How do the apps compare?

The table sets five tools side by side with Notibo, using the same kinds of facts for each. Prices are the list prices on the pages named, as of September 2026.

Two columns matter most. The second tells you whether the app brings a card back at the right time, and the third whether it saves you writing the cards. Price matters less than it looks: every tool here has a free way in, and the paid tiers add AI volume, extra study modes or, in Anki's case, the iPhone app.

Anki

Anki's site describes it as a flashcard program that helps you spend more time on challenging material and less on what you already know. Its download page says the computer version is free for all major platforms, the AnkiWeb sync service is free, and AnkiDroid for Android is free and built by contributors. The only paid piece is the app for iPhone and iPad.

• AnkiMobile costs 49.99 New Zealand dollars, once. The New Zealand App Store listing shows that price as of September 2026 with no in-app purchases. It says sales fund both the computer and mobile versions, which is why the app is priced like a computer application.
• You rate each card and Anki picks the next date. After you reveal the answer you rate your recall, and Anki schedules the next review for when you are most likely to forget. Its manual describes FSRS, an optional scheduler offered as an alternative to the older SM-2 algorithm, with a desired retention that defaults to 90 per cent.
• The cards are yours to make. Anki's getting-started guide describes writing cards or downloading a deck someone else has shared. None of Anki's own pages read for this guide describes a feature that writes cards for you.

The manual recommends a few weeks on the default settings before you change anything, because a wrong change can make Anki less effective. It also warns that pushing desired retention above 90 per cent raises the workload quickly. Start with the defaults and set a limit on new cards per day that you can keep up with through a busy week.

Quizlet

Quizlet's main website could not be read for this guide, so the facts here come from its help centre and its New Zealand App Store listing. According to the help centre's subscription page, a free account covers flashcards, practice questions, interactive diagrams and activities.

• Spaced repetition works on the website only. The help centre's spaced repetition article says you rate each card Repeat, Hard, Okay or Easy. Okay typically brings a card back in about a day and Easy in four or more days, and the mode is currently only available on the Quizlet website. The New Zealand App Store listing nonetheless advertises spaced repetition among the app's features, and neither page explains the difference.
• Learn is a paid mode, with a way in through classes. The help centre's Learn article says Learn is for Quizlet Plus subscribers, with a free study session for everyone else. Students added to a teacher's class get free access to Learn and Test on the sets in that class.
• AI drafts cards, with an age limit. Smart Assist turns pasted text or an uploaded file into draft flashcards you can edit. Study guides build an outline and a flashcard set from your course materials; in New Zealand they are open to users aged 16 or older, with limited free use and unlimited use on Plus.
• Plus is listed at 12.99 and 59.99 New Zealand dollars. The New Zealand App Store listing shows both as in-app purchases as of September 2026 but does not say which is the monthly and which the yearly price. Prices on Quizlet's own website could not be checked, and the help centre's tax article says advertised prices do not include sales tax.

Quizlet suits a course where sets are already shared, or where a tutor runs a Quizlet class and Learn and Test come free for that class's sets. For your own cards, the help centre places the scheduling on the website while the App Store listing advertises spaced repetition, and those two pages do not settle what the phone app does.

Brainscape

Brainscape schedules cards from how confident you feel rather than from right or wrong. Its free plan covers creating and studying your own cards, and it charges for unlimited AI and for ready-made content.

• You rate your confidence from 1 to 5. Brainscape's help centre explains that it shows a question, you answer in your head, you rate your confidence, and the card's next appearance follows from the rating. As a rough guide, a 1 returns within minutes and a 5 in weeks or months.
• Your own cards are free, with no ads. The help article Is Brainscape free? says you can create and study unlimited flashcards of your own, and cards shared with you, with its spaced repetition at no cost.
• AI card creation is capped on the free plan. Its AI article says free users get a limited amount, measured by file size, and Pro users get unlimited use within a daily limit that resets at midnight UTC. The same article says the AI features currently run on ChatGPT.
• Pro is listed at 31.99, 95.99 and 154.99 New Zealand dollars. The New Zealand App Store listing shows those three Pro prices and a lifetime option at 399.99 as of September 2026, without naming the period each covers. Brainscape's own pricing page shows Pro at $7.99 a month on yearly billing, without naming the currency.

For a student on an iPhone who writes their own cards, Brainscape is the free option in this comparison for scheduled reviews on the phone, since AnkiMobile is paid and Quizlet's help centre places its spacing on the website. The rating only works if you answer honestly; a 5 given to a card you half knew sends it away for weeks.

What do Notion and Microsoft 365 add?

Both are places to keep notes, and both can cost a student nothing. Neither schedules card reviews on the pages read for this guide, so each needs a partner app for revision.

• Notion's Education Plan is free with a school email. Its help centre says students at accredited institutions listed in the World Higher Education Database get it free, with unlimited uploads and 30 days of page history. The school email must be the main address on the account and be verified once a year.
• Notion AI is a trial on the lower plans. Notion's pricing page lists a trial of Notion AI on the Free and Plus plans, and the student offer is the Plus plan for a single member.
• Flashcards in Notion come from other people's templates. The spaced repetition flashcard template in Notion's template marketplace read for this guide is published by an individual creator, not built into Notion.
• Auckland gives you Microsoft 365 Apps free while you are enrolled. Its IT page says you can install the suite, including Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and Teams, on up to five devices.
• Victoria provides Office 365 with your student account. Its Microsoft apps page lists Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, used online or installed on up to five devices.

Neither university page lists a flashcard or review tool among the apps. Microsoft 365 and Notion are where the notes live, and a scheduler has to come from one of the apps above.

Should the app write the cards for you?

Quizlet and Brainscape can draft cards from your material, while Anki leaves the writing to you. Drafting saves time, but the drafts need checking. Quizlet shows Smart Assist cards in a preview to edit or delete before you publish, and Brainscape's help centre notes that ChatGPT does not always produce the number of cards you asked for and can go wrong when converting cards between languages.

The studies above tested whether retrieval helps, not whether the student wrote the questions, so they do not settle this. The classroom meta-analysis does list how well the practice matched the final test's material and format among the factors that changed the size of the benefit. A card that asks for a definition your course never assesses costs review time and returns little, so check drafted cards against the course outline and your lecture notes before you start reviewing.

How do you fit an app into a New Zealand semester?

A semester has teaching weeks and then an exam period, and the app should run through both. A small daily review during teaching spreads the work out, which is the whole point of spacing.

During teaching weeks

Make cards on the day of the lecture or tutorial, while you still know what mattered, and keep them few. Review daily or close to it, and cap the new cards per day; Anki and Quizlet both let you set that number. If you miss a day, Anki's manual says the next day's new-card count goes back to its normal setting rather than doubling up, and it advises stopping new cards until you have cleared any backlog of overdue reviews.

In the weeks before exams

Cepeda's results give a rough rule for the final stretch. When the final test came a week after the review, the best gap between first study and that review was 20 to 40 per cent of the week, which is 1.4 to 2.8 days. A same-evening review is too soon by that measure. The spaced repetition schedule turns this into a calendar, and the exam guide covers how assessment works at each university.

Which one should you choose?

Decide by where your material starts and which phone you carry. The rule below uses only the facts above.

• You write your own cards and use a computer or an Android phone. Anki, free, with detailed control over scheduling.
• You write your own cards on an iPhone. Brainscape's free plan if you want to pay nothing, or Anki with AnkiMobile at 49.99 New Zealand dollars once.
• Your class or tutor already shares Quizlet sets. Quizlet, with the spaced repetition done on the website, where its help centre puts it.
• Your notes live in Notion or OneNote. Keep them there and add one of the three apps above for review.
• You want cards drafted for you. Quizlet's or Brainscape's AI, checked card by card before you rely on them.

Where Notibo fits

Notibo is for revision material that starts as a lecture or a slide deck rather than as typed notes. On a computer it records a lecture, or takes an audio file you upload, and returns a transcript and structured notes. On Pro it also turns the recording into flashcards with spaced repetition. PDF, PPTX and DOCX files become notes and flashcards too.

You get Pro free for 14 days, with 240 minutes of audio, and no card is asked for. After those 14 days the free plan gives 30 minutes of audio a month, returned as a transcript and notes, and each uploaded document makes up to 10 cards, for five documents a month. Pro costs 9.99 euro a month or 88.99 euro a year. Record a lecture only with permission; the recording guide sets out the rules, and the flashcards page shows how the cards work.