Spaced Recall
A simpler alternative to Anki
Anki is genuinely good software, and most people who try it stop using it. Here is what the difference actually is, and which one suits what you are doing.
Anki is very good, and this page is not an attempt to tell you otherwise. It is free, it has been maintained for close to two decades, its scheduling is the most studied in the field, and if you are a medical student working through twenty thousand shared cards there is no real substitute for it.
It is also the thing most people bounce off, and usually for reasons that have nothing to do with how well it schedules.
Where people actually get stuck
- The setup. Decks, subdecks, note types, card templates, add-ons. Every one of those is a decision before you have learned anything.
- The settings. New cards per day, maximum reviews, learning steps, ease factors, leech thresholds. These are real controls with real consequences, and most people have no basis for setting them.
- The backlog. Miss two weeks and come back to hundreds of due cards. This is the single most common reason people stop, and it is a scheduling decision rather than a law of nature.
- The interface. It was built for people who want every knob exposed. That is a real preference and it is not everyone's.
What Spaced Recall does differently
| Anki | Spaced Recall | |
|---|---|---|
| Setting up | Decks, note types, card templates | Type a fact, that is the whole step |
| Scheduling settings | Many, and they matter | One: how many reviews a day you want |
| Missing a fortnight | The backlog is waiting for you | Your daily number stays your daily number |
| Shared decks | Enormous library of them | None, you write your own |
| Card types | Cloze, image occlusion, custom templates | Text, and a category if you want one |
| Add-ons | Hundreds | None |
| Price | Free, except the iPhone app | Free |
The row that matters most is the daily cap. You say how many reviews a day you are willing to do, and the app never exceeds it. When more material is due than that, it decides what earns the slots rather than handing you the whole pile. Come back after a holiday and you get your usual number, not a punishment.
The cost of that is real and worth stating: on a very large library, holding to a small daily number means some items wait longer than the ideal moment. That is a deliberate trade, on the grounds that a schedule someone keeps beats an optimal one they abandon.
Which one you should use
Use Anki if you are working from shared decks, need cloze deletions or image occlusion, are studying for something with a fixed high-stakes date, or you like the controls and want them all.
Use Spaced Recall if you want to keep what you read rather than cram a syllabus, if you have tried a repetition app before and stopped because of the backlog, or if you would rather have no settings to get wrong.
They are not really competing for the same hour. One is a precision instrument for heavy study. The other is for remembering things you cared enough to write down, without it becoming a second job.
Spaced Recall does this for you. You type something you want to remember, and it decides when to show it to you again. There is nothing to organise and nothing to tune.
Also worth reading: what spaced repetition is and why it works and how to remember what you read.