Spaced repetition without Anki: four routes that work

Almost nobody searching this wants to abandon spaced repetition. They want the schedule without the second job that Anki quietly hands you.

Worth separating the two things, because they get bundled: spaced repetition is an idea — review a word right before you'd forget it, and each success buys a longer gap. Anki is one implementation of that idea, with a particular set of chores attached.

What people are actually running from

Three specific costs, in the order they show up:

Making the cards. This is the real one. Reading is fun, and then you stop reading to build cards about what you read. A 40-minute study session turns into 25 minutes of data entry. Everyone underestimates how fast this kills the habit.

The iOS price. Anki is free and open source on desktop, Android and AnkiWeb. On iPhone and iPad, AnkiMobile is a one-off $24.99. Fair enough as funding for the ecosystem, but it's a surprise if you started on desktop.

The setup. Here's the part that catches people out: FSRS — the modern scheduling algorithm, and genuinely better than what came before — is bundled with Anki but not turned on for you. The manual's instruction is to "enable FSRS under the 'FSRS' section, at the bottom of the deck options page," then click Optimize to fit the parameters to your review history, and re-optimize about once a month. A proposal to enable it out of the box has been sitting open on the Anki tracker since December 2024.

So a lot of people running Anki are running it on the older scheduler, doing more reviews than they need to, and don't know it.

Route 1: let the reading collect the cards

The most direct fix for the biggest cost. Instead of reading, then building cards about the reading, you tap the word while you read and the card already exists — word, sentence, source.

This is the model behind LingQ, Migaku Memory, Readlang and browser readers generally. The scheduling is the same idea Anki uses; what changes is that deck-building stops being a separate activity.

Mossglen (full disclosure: ours) is the free version of this shape. It's a Chrome extension: any page becomes a clean reading view in the original language, and tapping a word saves it with the sentence it came in. Reviews run on FSRS — on by default, no optimize button to find — and a short quiz after reading keeps the next text near your level. 8 languages, no account required.

What you give up: Anki's ecosystem. No shared decks, no add-ons, no image occlusion, no med-school megadecks.

Route 2: a tool with the SRS already inside

If you'd rather stay with one app than assemble a workflow:

Tool	Review built in	Free tier	Price
Migaku	Migaku Memory	10-day trial	~$10/mo (Standard)
LingQ	Interval review of saved LingQs	20 words, lifetime	~$14.99/mo
Clozemaster	Cloze drills on a schedule	Generous	~$8/mo Pro
Renshuu (JA)	Full SRS, JLPT-shaped	Real free tier	~$7/mo Pro
jpdb (JA)	Frequency-ordered SRS	Free	Optional

The trade is the obvious one: you're renting the schedule, and your words live in someone else's account.

Route 3: paper

Underrated, and the honest answer for a certain kind of person. A Leitner box is five sections of index cards; a card you get right moves one section back, a card you miss goes to the front, and each section is reviewed on a slower cycle than the one before it.

It's spaced repetition with a cardboard scheduler. Worse than FSRS at picking the moment, better than any app at actually getting used, because there's no phone involved. If you've quit three flashcard apps, try the box before the fourth.

Route 4: a different card app

Mochi, RemNote, Brainscape, Quizlet and a dozen newer ones. Prettier, easier to start, usually with AI card generation attached.

The honest note: this route swaps Anki's interface for a nicer one, but you're still making cards. If card-making was your problem, you'll be back here in two months. If Anki's interface was your problem, this is a fine fix.

Watch for two things: whether it uses FSRS or a simpler fixed-interval scheme, and whether you can export. Anki's file format is your escape hatch from Anki — not every alternative gives you one.

How many times do you need to see a word before it sticks?

This comes up in every thread, usually with a confident number attached — the LingQ forums have argued over "160 times" for years, and ELT research tends to land somewhere between 8 and 20 encounters for a word met in reading.

The useful answer is that there isn't a fixed number, which is the whole reason schedulers exist. It depends on the word, the language, how close it is to something you already know, and whether you met it in a sentence you cared about. A scheduler's job is to stop you guessing: it tracks your hit rate per word and spaces accordingly. A fixed number would be a worse algorithm than the one you already have.

Is "an Anki alternative" even what you need?

If you searched for one, check which of these is true:

• "I hate making cards" → Route 1. A different card app won't help.
• "I hate the interface" → Route 4.
• "I want it free on iPhone" → Route 1 or 4; several are.
• "I want better scheduling" → You want FSRS, and Anki already has it. Turn it on, optimize, and stay.

That last one matters. If the algorithm is the complaint, the fix is a settings page, not a migration.

The short version

• Spaced repetition is the idea; Anki is one build of it, with card-making attached
• FSRS ships with Anki but you have to enable and optimize it yourself
• Hate the busywork → let a reader collect the words as you read
• Want one app → Migaku, LingQ, Clozemaster, Renshuu, jpdb
• Want no app → a Leitner box, genuinely
• Want a prettier Anki → Mochi, RemNote; check for FSRS and export

More on the collect-and-review habit itself: how to remember new words while reading. If the Anki question came up through a specific tool, we've compared Migaku vs Anki and covered WaniKani alternatives. And the wider case for getting vocabulary from texts rather than decks is in learning a language by reading.