Quizlet alternatives for students (2026): free and paid, compared

The best Quizlet alternatives in 2026 are Knowt if you want Quizlet's study modes free, Anki if you want the strongest spaced repetition and do not mind setting it up, RemNote if you want cards built into your notes, and Gizmo or Brainscape if you want a phone-first app. Students who leave mostly cite the paywall: Quizlet's free plan now limits Learn mode and practice tests, and even the cheaper paid plan caps Learn at 20 rounds a month. This guide covers what changed at Quizlet, seven alternatives with prices checked in November 2026, which ones import your Quizlet sets, a comparison table, and a straight answer on which to pick. Bord is on the list. We make it, so weigh that entry accordingly; we have been as plain about its gaps as about everyone else's.

What changed at Quizlet

Quizlet's library of shared sets is still its strength, and for finding someone else's deck the night before a quiz it is hard to beat. What drives students away is the steady move of study modes behind the paywall. On the free plan, Learn mode gives a limited number of rounds per set and you get one practice test per set [1]. Late in 2025 Quizlet split its paid plan in two. Plus, at $7.99 a month or $35.99 a year, includes 20 Learn rounds and three practice tests a month. Plus Unlimited, at $9.99 a month or $44.99 a year, removes the caps [1]. Free users also see more ads.

Reddit threads tell the rest. "The final straw for me is that they made the 'test' feature paid," wrote one student on r/quizlet [2]. In April 2026 a paying user posted the message they got mid-study: "you've reached your limit for learn mode with Quizlet+, purchase Quizlet+ UNLIMITED to continue" [3]. Quizlet did add a free spaced repetition mode to flashcards on the web in August 2026 [4], which answers one of the oldest complaints.

The alternatives

Prices and limits below were checked on 13 November 2026 from each vendor's pricing page, help centre or app store listing. They change often; the links are in the sources.

Knowt: the closest thing to old Quizlet, free

Knowt is built to be the Quizlet replacement and says so. Its free plan advertises unlimited Learn mode and practice tests, the two things Quizlet capped. It imports Quizlet sets through a Chrome extension, has spaced repetition, and makes AI flashcards and notes from PDFs, slides, videos and lecture recordings [5]. The free tier carries ads, and the AI features have limits on Free that Knowt does not spell out. Paid Ultra is $24.99 a month or $95.99 a year. Web, iOS and Android.

Anki: the strongest spaced repetition, if you will set it up

Anki is the free, open-source flashcard app that medical students live in. Desktop and AnkiDroid on Android are free; AnkiMobile on iPhone is a one-off $24.99 [6]. Its scheduler can use FSRS, a modern algorithm that models how likely you are to forget each card, or the older SM-2 [7]. It has no AI card generation built in and no Learn-style modes, and the settings take some learning. In exchange it will handle ten thousand cards for years without asking for money. You can bring your own Quizlet sets across as a text export.

RemNote: notes and flashcards in one place

RemNote turns lines in your notes into flashcards, so you write once and review later. It imports Quizlet directly from its importer, uses SM-2 by default with FSRS in beta, and makes cards from text, PDFs and slides with AI [8]. The free plan has unlimited cards but five AI card generations a month. Pro is $10 a month; Pro with AI is $20 a month or $216 a year. It suits students who already take notes in an outliner, and feels heavy if you only want cards.

Gizmo: phone-first, with Quizlet and Anki import

Gizmo is a mobile-first app with spaced repetition and a game layer. Paste a Quizlet set link and it imports it; it takes Anki decks too, and makes cards from PDFs, notes, lectures and YouTube [9]. The free plan gives unlimited cards and quizzing with a "hearts" limit, 15 before a ten-minute wait, and two AI imports a day. US pricing for its Unlimited plan was not clear from its public pages when we checked.

Brainscape: confidence-rated cards

Brainscape asks you to rate each card from 1 to 5 for how well you knew it and schedules it from that rating [10]. Free covers unlimited cards of your own and spaced repetition. Pro is $19.99 a month or $95.88 a year, with a $199.99 lifetime option. Quizlet sets come in via a CSV export and its bulk importer. Its pages disagree about how much AI card generation the free tier includes.

StudyStack: cheap and simple

StudyStack has been around for years and still works: free with ads, $10 a year to remove them [11]. It has study games and matching but no real spaced repetition, and importing means pasting delimited text. Cram.com, the other old-school option, shut down on 9 November 2026 [12].

Bord: for courses where facts are not enough

Bord is a different kind of tool: an infinite notebook and whiteboard with an AI that works on the board. It belongs on this list for students who used Quizlet to revise for exams that ask for more than definitions. Flashcards writes a deck of 8 to 16 cards from a topic, your slides or a lecture recording. You can also write cards by hand or turn any note on the board into a card. You recall, flip and mark each one, and an SM-2 style scheduler brings misses back in about ten minutes and spaces known cards out to a day, three days, then longer. Studying a deck does not use your weekly allowance. Next to the deck, Quizbook writes quizzes with written answers graded on the reasoning and diagram questions you answer on the board. Ask lays out the topic as notes and diagrams cited to your file.

Where it falls short. It does not import Quizlet sets, and it has no library of other people's sets to search. Decks live on a board, one topic at a time, rather than in a single review queue across every course, so for thousands of cards Anki is the better tool. It runs in the browser, on desktop and on your phone, rather than as a store app.

Price. Free to try as a guest with no account; cards from your own files need a free account. Plus is $20 a month. Pricing.

Compare them

Moving your Quizlet sets

Quizlet lets you export sets you created as plain text from the set's menu. Images do not come across, and you cannot export other people's sets this way [13]. That text file imports into Anki, StudyStack and most others. Knowt, RemNote and Gizmo also import straight from a Quizlet link or extension, which is faster for a handful of sets. Export everything you made before you switch, so you have a copy whatever you decide.

Which to pick

• You want Quizlet as it used to be, free: Knowt.
• You have hundreds or thousands of facts to keep for months, such as a medical or law degree: Anki.
• You take your notes in an outliner and want cards to come out of them: RemNote.
• You study mostly on your phone in short bursts: Gizmo or Brainscape.
• Your exams ask you to explain, draw and connect ideas, and cards were only part of your revision: Bord, with the deck, the quiz and the notes on one board.

Whichever you choose, the card app matters less than how you use it. Answer before you flip, and space the sessions out; there is more on that in our guides to active recall and spaced repetition schedules.

Questions