Migaku vs Anki: do you still need both?

This comparison used to have an easy answer, because for years it wasn't a comparison. Migaku was the thing that made your Anki cards: you watched a show, clipped a sentence, and it landed in Anki with audio, screenshot and definition attached.

Then Migaku built its own SRS — Migaku Memory — and the pairing became optional. So the question changed from "how do I connect these two" to "do I need the second one at all."

What each one is now

	Migaku	Anki
Core job	Turn shows and web pages into study material	Schedule and review whatever you put in it
Cards	Made in one click from subtitles or a page	You build them, or import someone's deck
Scheduler	Migaku Memory, built in	FSRS, built in but off until you enable it
Content	Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, web pages	Content-agnostic; it never sees your source
Languages	11, strongest for JA / ZH / KO	Any; the deck decides
Platforms	Browser extension + iOS/Android apps	Desktop, Android, AnkiWeb free; iOS $24.99 once
Price	~$10/mo Standard, $15/mo Early Access, $499 lifetime	Free (except iOS)
Free tier	10-day trial	Entirely free

Two facts from that table do most of the work. Anki costs nothing and knows nothing about your content. Migaku costs about $10 a month and is built entirely around it.

Migaku on its own

Enough for most people who bought it. Watch something, mine the sentence, review it in Memory, never open Anki. The parsing and pitch-accent support for Japanese are genuinely the best in the category, and the whole loop lives in one place.

What you give up: Anki's ecosystem. No shared decks, no add-ons, no custom card templates, no 20,000-card community deck for your language. And your cards live inside a subscription — exporting them to Anki is possible, but through a community-maintained exporter that produces .apkg files, not a one-click button.

Anki on its own

Free, permanent, and yours. The catch is that Anki does nothing to get content in. You supply that, which in practice means assembling a workflow: Yomitan for dictionary lookups on web pages, asbplayer for subtitle mining from video, plus an Anki add-on to wire them together.

People do run this. It works, it costs nothing, and it's the standard setup in the Japanese immersion community. Budget somewhere between thirty minutes and an afternoon to configure it, and expect to maintain it when something updates.

One thing to fix while you're in there: turn on FSRS. It ships with Anki but isn't enabled by default — the manual tells you to enable it at the bottom of the deck options page, then click Optimize. Plenty of Anki users are still on the older scheduler without realising.

Running both

The case for it is narrower than it was. It makes sense if you already have years of Anki history and a review habit built around it, and you want Migaku purely as a card factory feeding that habit. Your statistics stay in one place, and Migaku becomes the input.

If you're starting fresh, running both mostly buys you two review queues and a sync step.

The money

Over three years: Anki is $0, or $24.99 if you need iOS. Migaku Standard is roughly $360 at the monthly rate, less on the yearly plan. The lifetime plan is $499.

That's not an argument against Migaku — it's an argument for knowing what you're buying, which is the card creation and the content integration, not the scheduling. Scheduling is free everywhere, including in Anki.

The third shape: when your input is text

Both tools assume video is the centre of your study. Migaku is built on streaming subtitles; the classic Anki immersion setup is built around asbplayer and anime.

If what you actually consume is articles, blog posts and the occasional YouTube video, you're paying for machinery aimed at a different habit.

Mossglen (full disclosure: ours) is built for that case: a free Chrome extension that turns any page into a clean reading view in the original language, with YouTube handled the same way. Tap a word, it's saved with its sentence. Reviews run on FSRS with nothing to enable, and a short quiz after reading keeps the next text near your level. 8 languages, no account needed.

What it doesn't do: Migaku's subtitle mining, Anki's shared decks and add-ons.

Deciding in one line

• You mine shows, want one app, $10/mo is fine → Migaku alone
• You want free and permanent, and enjoy assembling tools → Anki + Yomitan + asbplayer
• Years of Anki history you don't want to leave → both, Migaku as the factory
• You mostly read → a browser reader beats both, and costs nothing

If you're weighing Migaku against something other than Anki, we've written Migaku alternatives, LingQ vs Migaku and Migaku vs Language Reactor. If the real goal was getting off Anki entirely, the routes are in spaced repetition without Anki.