Migaku vs Yomitan: paid system or free dictionary?

Yomitan is a free dictionary that lives in your browser and hands cards to Anki. Migaku is a paid system that does the lookup, the card and the review in one place. Both hover over the same Japanese word. What differs is everything that happens after.

So instead of a feature table, here's one word going through each of them.

One word, two paths

Say you're reading a blog post and hit 食べられなかった.

In Yomitan, you hold Shift and move the cursor over it. A popup deinflects it back to 食べる, shows the chain it took to get there (potential or passive, negative, past), and lists every dictionary you've installed: definitions, readings, frequency rank, pitch accent if you added a pitch dictionary, and native audio. Click the plus icon and a note goes to Anki through the AnkiConnect add-on, with the sentence filled in. Anki has to be open for that button to work.

In Migaku, you hover or tap the same word. You get the reading, the meaning and pitch accent from Migaku's own parser. One click and it becomes a card in Migaku Memory, the built-in review system, with the sentence attached. The word's colour on the page changes too, because Migaku tracks what you know across everything you read and watch.

That colour is the real split. Yomitan tells you what a word means. Migaku also tells you where you stand with it, and remembers that on the next page and in the next episode. (If your sentences mostly come from video or e-books rather than web pages, other sentence mining tools fit better than either.)

The setup bill

Yomitan out of the box does nothing. The docs say so plainly: it needs at least one dictionary to work. You open settings, pick your language, click "Get recommended dictionaries", and import. For a full Japanese mining setup you'll also install Anki, add AnkiConnect, and map a note type so the fields land where you want them. Budget an evening. You pay for it once, in time.

Migaku installs, asks you to log in, and works. You pay for it every month instead:

Plan	Price
Trial	10 days free
Standard	$10/month, about 20% less yearly
Early Access	$15/month
Lifetime	$499 once

Yomitan costs nothing and is open source (GPL-3.0). It's the community successor to Yomichan, which its original developer sunset in February 2023.

Where each one breaks

Yomitan is a lookup tool. It won't track which words you know, won't schedule anything, and won't touch video by itself. The standard immersion setup pairs it with asbplayer for subtitles and Anki for reviews, which works well and is three tools to maintain. When one updates and the fields stop lining up, you're the support team.

Migaku covers 11 languages. If yours isn't one of them, the comparison ends here. Yomitan lists over 30, from Arabic to Vietnamese, though support depth varies by how much deinflection each language has. Migaku's other cost is lock-in: your cards and word statuses live inside a subscription.

Both struggle with the same thing: text that isn't text. A manga panel is an image, so neither popup has anything to read. That problem gets its own page: reading manga in Japanese.

Running both

Some people do. The usual reason is years of Anki history: Yomitan stays as the fast dictionary on web pages, Migaku handles streaming, and Migaku's cards go to Anki through a community exporter so the reviews stay in one place. It works, but you're paying for Migaku and maintaining Yomitan, and running two word databases that don't know about each other.

If you're starting fresh, pick one. The question is whether you'd rather spend an evening or $10 a month.

When you mostly read and don't want Anki at all

Both tools grew up around the Anki mining workflow, and Migaku still speaks its language. If your Japanese input is mostly articles and web pages, and the thought of card templates makes you tired, there's a third shape.

Mossglen (full disclosure: ours, free) turns any page into a clean reading view. Tap a word and you get the meaning in your language plus the kana reading, and it's saved with the sentence it came from. Reviews run on FSRS with nothing to configure. A short quiz after each text keeps the next one near your level, on a JLPT-style scale.

What it doesn't do: pitch accent, stroke order, EPWING dictionaries, or export to Anki. If those matter to you, Yomitan is the better free tool.

Which one, in the words people actually use

If you say	Pick
"I want free, and I don't mind tinkering"	Yomitan + Anki
"I watch more than I read, and want one app"	Migaku
"I already have 10,000 Anki cards"	Yomitan, or both
"My language isn't Japanese, Chinese or Korean"	Check Migaku's list of 11 first, Yomitan's is longer
"I read, and I never want to see a note type"	A reader with built-in reviews

If Migaku is the one you're leaving, the options are in Migaku alternatives. If the real question is whether you need Anki underneath any of this, see Migaku vs Anki and spaced repetition without Anki. And for places to actually point either tool, start with Japanese reading practice websites.