Which revision apps are worth it for UK university students?

Short answer first: two are worth paying for and the rest are already free. Anki is free on Windows, macOS, Linux and Android, costs 24.99 pounds once on the UK App Store, and schedules the next review for you. Gemini Notebook makes flashcards and quizzes from your own lecture files, and eligible UK university students get a free year of Google AI Plus, 4.49 pounds a month afterwards. Quizlet bills in dollars. Notion keeps your notes and never tests you. Seneca, the app that carried half of you through A levels, stops at A level.

Every price below came off the vendor's own page in September 2026, in the currency that page showed. Where a page showed dollars we have given the dollar figure rather than guessing at a conversion.

What counts as a revision app at university?

A revision app is one that asks you questions. That is the whole definition, and it rules out most of what students install. A note app stores; a revision app tests. The distinction matters more at university than at school because the assessment changed shape: modules, coursework weightings and an exam window in December or January, set out in how UK university exams actually work.

Three questions separate the tools below, and they are the columns of the table further down.

• Does it make the cards, or do you? Writing cards is itself revision, and it is also the reason most decks die in week three.
• Does it schedule the reviews? An app that shows you a card today and again when you happen to open it is not scheduling anything.
• What does it cost in pounds? Only two of these publish a sterling price at all.

Everything else, the widgets and the streaks, is decoration. Pick on those three and you will not need to read a feature list.

Anki

Anki is the oldest and least friendly of these, and it is the one that does the scheduling properly.

The desktop version for Windows, macOS and Linux is free. AnkiDroid on Google Play is free to install, published by the AnkiDroid Open Source Team, and its listing says it shows cards "just before you would forget" using the SuperMemo 2 spaced repetition algorithm, with syncing to AnkiWeb. The iPhone and iPad app is the exception: AnkiMobile on the UK App Store is 24.99 pounds, a one-off purchase rather than a subscription, usable on other devices in the same household on the same Apple ID.

The Anki manual describes the scheduling in one sentence: you tell the program how well you remembered, and it uses that feedback to decide the optimal time to show you the question again. The intervals it gives as an example are today, then three days, then fifteen, then forty-five. That is the mechanism explained in spaced repetition, implemented rather than described.

You write the cards. You can also download shared decks, of which there are thousands, and for a UK degree that is usually a false economy: someone else's deck is someone else's module. Writing your own is covered in turning notes into flashcards.

Getting a deck onto your phone

The setup that survives a term is a free AnkiWeb account, the desktop app for writing cards at a keyboard, and the phone app for reviewing on a bus. On Android that costs nothing. On iPhone it costs 24.99 pounds once, which is less than three months of most subscriptions on this page.

Quizlet

Quizlet is the one most UK students already have an account for, usually from sixth form.

Its upgrade page, read in September 2026, priced in US dollars. Quizlet Plus was 2.99 dollars a month billed at 35.99 a year, with three practice tests a month, three textbook or question-and-answer solutions a month, twenty rounds of Learn questions a month and ad-free studying. Quizlet Plus Unlimited was 3.75 dollars a month billed at 44.99 a year, with no caps on those. A 14-day free trial comes with the annual plan, and the page states that the monthly plan is not eligible for it.

What you do not get is a schedule. The page sells rounds of Learn questions, practice tests and the removal of adverts. Nothing on it says a card you answered today will be brought back to you in nine days because that is when you are likely to forget it. You can revise well in Quizlet by choosing to come back on your own timetable, and most people do not.

You also write the cards, or use a set someone else made. The upgrade page prices the paid tiers only. It does not set out what the free plan allows, beyond making clear that ad-free studying is one of the things you are paying for, so read your own account screen rather than a comparison table.

Gemini Notebook

This is the one that makes the cards for you, and for a UK student it is also the cheapest paid option by some distance.

Google's help page sets out the mechanics. You open the Studio panel in a notebook and choose Flashcards or Quizzes. You can set the difficulty to easy, medium or hard, or write a prompt describing what you want the cards to cover. They generate in the background while you carry on working. When you study, you pick fewer, standard or more cards, mark each one "Got it!" or "Missed it!", and come back later to only the cards you missed. Progress is remembered between sessions.

Progress is not a schedule. The help page says nothing about spacing reviews out over days or weeks, and nothing about spaced repetition, so treat it as a smart quiz generator rather than a memory system. If the material has to survive until a May exam, you are supplying the calendar yourself.

On price, Google's student offer gives eligible university students aged 18 and over a free year of Google AI Plus, with 4.49 pounds a month afterwards and a redemption deadline of 31 December 2026. Eligibility is re-verified each year. The UK subscriptions page lists the same 4.49 pounds for AI Plus, 18.99 for AI Pro and 79.99 upwards for Ultra. Sterling prices, on a UK page, which almost nothing else here manages.

Notion

Notion belongs on this page because students keep putting it here, and it is worth being clear about what it is.

Notion's education plan gives students and educators at accredited colleges and universities a free Plus plan for a one-member workspace: unlimited pages and blocks, file uploads and 30-day version history. You need a school email address; personal addresses and school-level accounts are not eligible. The pricing page showed euro where we read it, with Plus at 9.50 and Business at 19.50 per member a month on yearly billing, so for a student the education plan is the only figure that matters.

Neither page names a flashcard feature or anything that schedules a review. Notion is where your notes live, and people build card-like toggle lists by hand, which is a filing system with a quiz painted on it. Keep it, and put the testing somewhere else.

Are Seneca and the other GCSE apps any use at university?

This is the question nobody warns UK students about, and the answer is a clean no.

Seneca says its courses cover about 95 per cent of the exams taken in the UK, from primary up to A level, and that it can be used for free without limit. That is an enormous amount of content, mapped to exam boards, written by people who know the specifications. None of it is your degree. There is no undergraduate tier, and there cannot really be one: a first-year physiology module at one university is not the same module at another, and nothing is mapped to a specification because there is no specification.

The same goes for the rest of the school-level shelf. The change at university is that nobody writes the questions for you any more. Either you write them, from your own lectures and reading, or you use a tool that generates them from your own material. That is the actual difference between the two halves of this article.

How do they compare?

Checked in September 2026 on each vendor's own page, in the currency that page showed.

What does the research actually say?

Two findings carry most of the weight, and neither is about an app.

The first is that being tested beats rereading. A 2021 review in Psychological Bulletin, pooled on Europe PMC, integrated data from 48,478 students across 222 independent studies of classroom quizzing and reported an overall effect of g = 0.499, which the authors describe as medium. The size of the effect moved with things you control: whether you got corrective feedback, how many times you were tested, and how well the test format matched the real exam. Practice questions in the format of your actual paper are not a stylistic preference. The mechanism is covered in active recall.

The second is that spreading the sessions out beats bunching them. The 2006 meta-analysis by Cepeda and colleagues, also on Europe PMC, found 839 assessments of distributed practice across 317 experiments, and concluded that the gap between study sessions and the delay before the test work together: the gap that produced the best retention grew as the retention interval grew. In plain terms, the further away the exam, the longer the gaps should be.

What that means for a Tuesday evening

Both findings point at the same routine, and it is boring. Answer questions instead of rereading. Let days pass between attempts on the same material. Get feedback each time so you are not rehearsing a wrong answer. An app that grows the interval does the second part for you. Nothing does the first part for you except sitting down.

Which one should you pick?

If you want one app and no subscription, use Anki. Free on a laptop and on Android, 24.99 pounds once on an iPhone, and the only one here whose whole design is the schedule. The cost is the interface and the hour it takes to learn it.

If writing cards is what stops you, use Gemini Notebook. It turns your own lecture files into flashcards and quizzes, and the free student year makes it the cheapest paid option available to a UK undergraduate. Add your own calendar, because it will not give you one.

If you already live in Quizlet, keep it and change how you use it. Set a day of the week for each module and revisit older sets on purpose. The app will not prompt you.

If your problem is the lecture rather than the cards, the bottleneck is upstream: you need the material in a usable form before any of this starts.

The first week of term

1. Pick one app and delete the other three.
2. Make ten cards from the first lecture of each module, in that first week.
3. Put a fifteen-minute review slot in your calendar every weekday.
4. Add cards weekly, from the module you are actually sitting in.
5. In January, you revise. You do not build.

Where Notibo fits

Notibo records a lecture, 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 a slide deck or a downloaded reading becomes a deck without you typing it out. It transcribes 89 languages. You can try Pro free for 14 days, with 240 minutes of recording and no card. After that the free plan is 30 minutes of recording a month. Pro is 9.99 euro a month or 88.99 euro a year, and those are euro, not pounds, so the local amount appears at checkout. Uploads are capped at 50 MB, and long recordings are saved in smaller parts as they run and joined back into one transcript.

It sits at the expensive end of this page, and it is honest to say so: Anki does the scheduling for nothing on a laptop. What Notibo does that Anki does not is write the first draft of the cards from the lecture you just sat in, which is the step where most decks are abandoned. Files are stored in the EU, on Supabase in Frankfurt, and the transcription and the AI notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses. Ask permission before you record anyone. What the flashcards do once they exist is on the flashcards page.