What Is Anki and What Is It Used For?

Anki is a flashcard program built around spaced repetition: it schedules each card for review right around the time you're likely to forget it, so you spend more time on difficult material and less on what you already know. It's used by anyone who needs to retain large amounts of information over the long term — language learners, students in medicine or law, and professionals memorizing facts, terms, or procedures. The desktop version is free and available for Windows, macOS, and Linux; the official iOS app (AnkiMobile) is a paid purchase, while AnkiDroid for Android is free.

How Anki works

The core mechanism is simple, and the site describes it in two steps:

• Decks are groups of flashcards that let you study specific parts of your collection instead of everything at once. You create a deck and add cards to it.
• Reviews are where you rate how well you recalled each card. Based on that rating, Anki schedules the next review for when you're most likely to forget the information.

That scheduling is the whole point. Instead of reviewing everything on a fixed timetable, you see each card at expanding intervals — often, rarely, or somewhere in between — depending on how you rated your recall.

What Anki is good at

The site lists several capabilities that shape what Anki is actually useful for:

The combination of media support and customization is what makes Anki adaptable: a language learner can put audio on a card, a medical student can use images and scientific markup, and either can adjust how cards look and when they come back.

Who it's for

Anki fits you if you need to remember a large body of material over months or years and want a system to manage the review schedule for you. The site's own framing is that memory becomes "a choice" rather than a haphazard event — you decide what to learn, and Anki handles when you see it again.

It's less suited to one-off cramming before a single exam, where you don't need long-term retention and the scheduling intervals won't have time to work.

Getting started

1. Download the desktop version for your platform from the downloads section. Current version is 26.09.2, with builds for Windows 10+ (x64), Windows 11 (ARM), macOS 13+ (Apple Silicon and Intel), and Linux (x64 and ARM). An installation guide and change notes are linked there.
2. Create a deck and add some flashcards to it.
3. Start reviewing and rate your recall with the most suitable option. Anki then schedules the next review.

For mobile, AnkiMobile is the official iOS app (purchases help fund Anki's development), and AnkiDroid is the free Android app developed by contributors. Syncing through AnkiWeb keeps your decks consistent across desktop and mobile.

Beyond your own cards

Anki is a community project, and that affects what's available to you:

• Shared decks — others can share their decks, which makes it easier to start learning a subject someone has already built cards for.
• Add-ons — if you code, you can build add-ons or features; if you don't, you can install ones others have made.
• Translation — contributors help translate Anki to make it more accessible.

If you're deciding whether Anki is worth the setup effort, the honest test is this: pick one subject you need to remember for more than a few weeks, build a small deck, and review it for a week. The scheduling behavior — and whether it fits how you study — becomes clear quickly.