Anki is the tool medical students build their whole study system around, and the reputation is earned. Its FSRS scheduler is a genuinely state of the art memory model, trained on hundreds of millions of real review logs, and nothing else schedules reviews as precisely.
What Anki does not do is write the cards, read a written answer, or tell you why you keep missing the same one. That is a design choice rather than a flaw. Anki is a scheduler, not a tutor. It does mean the two tools solve different problems, and the rest of this page is about which problem is yours.
Anki
Spaced repetition, where you write the cards
- Price
- $24.99 once on iOS, free everywhere else
- Free
- Completely freeDesktop, Android and web
What you get
- Free on desktop, Android and web, with free sync. $24.99 once on iOS
- FSRS, a memory model trained on hundreds of millions of real review logs
- Open source, twenty years old, decks stored on your own machine
- Enormous shared decks, including AnKing for medical students
Beats Akono at
- The scheduler. FSRS needs roughly 15 to 20% fewer reviews than SM-2 for the same retention
- High-volume fact recall: vocabulary, anatomy terms, drug names
- Free permanently, with no subscription to cancel
- Close to shortcut-proof. No answer generator, no homework solver, nothing between you and the card
Where it falls short
- You write every card, or inherit a deck built for someone else’s course
- It knows which cards you miss, not which concepts you have misunderstood
- Review is self-rated, so it is only as honest as you are
- Nothing in it resembles producing an answer on a blank page
Akono
A tutor that explains instead of showing the same card again
- Price
- €11.99/mo€59.88/yr
- Free
- Free trial3 days, card required
What you get
- You write no cards. The course is built from the material you upload
- You type answers out instead of flipping and grading yourself
- What gets tracked is the concept you cannot do, not the card you missed
- The plan stops at your exam date rather than running forever
Beats Anki at
- No card authoring at all. The practice is generated from your own material
- It reads your written answer and tells you what was right, what was partial and what you missed
- It diagnoses the concept rather than the card, and keeps it open until you can explain it
- A session looks like an exam question, not a flashcard
Where it falls short
- Its scheduler is not FSRS. For pure long-horizon fact recall, Anki is better
- Nothing here is free. Three days of full access on a card, then a subscription
- Three days out with everything still unread, this is the wrong tool. It plans across weeks
- It cannot import your Anki decks. It generates from source material instead
How Akono is different from Anki
Anki hands you a finished card. You wrote it, or someone else did, and it says the same thing every time it comes back. Get it wrong on the sixth review and the seventh is identical, because the card was written before anyone knew which part you would find hard.
That is fine for a fact. It is a poor way to fix something you have misunderstood, because nothing in the loop ever notices that you have.
Anki deserves real credit here, and more than the other tools we compare against: its scheduler genuinely does adapt, better than anything Akono runs. But what it adapts is when a card comes back, not what the card asks.
A flashcard deck
Anki, and every generated set
You answer
You get the card wrong.
What happens
You rate it Again. It goes back into the queue.
Next time
The same card, word for word, at a shorter interval. Nothing has explained the bit you keep missing.
An answer somebody reads
Akono
You answer
You write the answer out rather than flipping a card over.
What happens
Nobody asks you to rate that. The answer is read and judged for you.
In between
The missing piece gets explained before the next question arrives.
Next time
Not the same card. The same concept asked another way, and it stays open until you can explain it.
At a glance
Anki
vs
Akono
High-volume fact recall on a precise schedule
Best for
Written explanations and concept-level understanding
You write the cards, then self-rate your recall
Core mechanic
You write the answer, it gets read, the next one follows from it
Free. $24.99 once on iOS
Price
€11.99/mo or €59.88/yr
FSRS, best in class
Scheduling
Re-plans around your exam date and open misunderstandings
Per card, flagged as leeches
Weak spots
Per concept, kept open until you resolve it
Hours of card authoring
Setup
Upload your material and start
Who should pick which
These solve different problems, so the honest answer depends on what your exam actually asks of you.
Pick Anki if
- You are doing high-volume rote memorisation: anatomy, pharmacology, vocabulary, named facts
- A shared deck already exists for your course, like AnKing
- You want to still know this in five years, not five weeks
- You are not paying a subscription, on principle or otherwise
Pick Akono if
- Your exams ask for written explanations, not recall of named facts
- You do not have hours to spend authoring cards before you can start
- You keep missing the same thing and want to know why, not just that you did
- Your exam is a few weeks out and you need a plan that works back from it