DeepRevision vs Anki: Which Is Better for Exam Revision?

If you're serious about spaced repetition, you've heard of Anki. It's free, open source, endlessly customisable, and it has helped millions of students — especially in medicine and languages — remember huge amounts of material.

DeepRevision comes at the same problem from a different direction. Instead of making cards yourself, you upload your notes, slides, textbook or lectures, and it writes practice questions from them — then schedules them, tracks your mistakes, and plans your revision toward an exam date.

We make DeepRevision, so we're not neutral. But Anki is genuinely excellent, and it's the better choice for some students. Here's an honest comparison.

At a glance

Where Anki is better

Customisation and control

Anki lets you control almost everything: card templates, styling, scheduling options, deck structure. Add-ons extend it further. If you like to build your own system, nothing comes close.

Community decks

For some subjects — medical school especially — there are large, well-maintained shared decks covering entire curricula. If your course maps onto one of them, you get thousands of high-quality cards for free.

Price and platforms

Anki is free on desktop and Android, open source, and runs on Linux. That matters.

Long-term, lifelong decks

For vocabulary and knowledge you'll keep for years, Anki's simplicity and longevity are real strengths.

Where DeepRevision is better

You don't have to make the cards

The biggest cost of Anki is time. Turning a lecture into good cards can take as long as the lecture itself — and many students give up. DeepRevision writes questions from your own material in minutes, and every question links back to the page it came from, so you can check it.

More ways to be tested

Anki is built around flashcards. DeepRevision also gives you multiple choice, true or false, fill in the blanks, matching and image labelling — closer to how most exams actually ask questions. Image labelling uses auto-trace to outline the parts of a diagram for you. (See how to study anatomy.)

It tracks why you get things wrong

Anki knows when you forgot a card. DeepRevision keeps every wrong answer, files it by subject, topic and subtopic, labels how it went wrong (conceptual, careless, time pressure and more), and can explain why you missed it. (See learning from your mistakes.)

It plans toward your exam

Add your exam date and a DeepRevision study plan counts down, works out how many minutes a day you need, and shows which sections you've mastered — with a cram mode for the final night. (See how to make a study plan.)

Everything else around the questions

An AI tutor that answers from your pages (PinPoint), lecture recording that turns into questions, two-voice podcasts, mind maps and teach-back — all built on the same material.

Spaced repetition: a closer look

Both apps can use FSRS, the modern open-source scheduler. In Anki it's an option you turn on (it was added in version 23.10); in DeepRevision it's how every question is scheduled, whatever the format. If you want the details, read FSRS explained.

The practical difference is what gets scheduled. In Anki, it's the cards you made. In DeepRevision, it's every question you answer — multiple choice, fill in the blanks, image labels — written from your syllabus.

Which should you choose?

Choose Anki if:

• you enjoy building and customising your own cards
• a well-maintained community deck covers your course
• you want a free, open-source tool on every desktop platform
• you're building a lifelong deck (languages, general knowledge)

Choose DeepRevision if:

• you don't have time to make cards from every lecture
• your exams use multiple choice, short answer or diagrams, not just recall
• you want to know which topics and mistakes are costing you marks
• you're working toward a specific exam date

Or use both. Plenty of students keep a community deck in Anki and use DeepRevision for their own course material. The best tool is the one you'll actually use every day.