Anki vs Crammed: an honest comparison from the smaller side

Updated August 18, 2026

Let's set the table honestly. Anki is two decades old, open source, battle-proven by the most demanding student population on earth, and as of 2026 it has FSRS built in, image occlusion built in, and active new stewardship. It is the gold standard of spaced repetition, and we're a weeks-old app writing about it on our own blog. This is that comparison — written knowing exactly which of us is the institution.

Where Anki wins, plainly

• Maturity and trust. Twenty years, open source, your data in a format you fully control forever. No startup risk — Anki cannot un-exist.
• Depth. Custom note types, card templates, add-ons for anything, statistics for everything. If you can imagine a workflow, Anki can be bent into it.
• The deck ecosystem. Shared decks for med school, languages, law — inheriting a proven class deck is one of the best study shortcuts that exists, and it's an Anki-shaped shortcut.
• Price shape. Free on desktop, web, and Android; a one-time $24.99 on iPhone that funds the whole project. No subscription anywhere.

Where Crammed wins, specifically

• Time to studying. Anki's honest onboarding is an evening; ours is a minute — open crammed.study, drop in a lecture PDF or slides, cards stream out (cloze and image-occlusion, importance-ranked), approve them, study. No account required to start.
• The lecture pipeline. This is the actual difference in kind. Anki assumes cards exist or you'll make them; Crammed's whole loop is your document in, scheduled deck out, with the figures auto-detected for occlusion. Anki has no equivalent, and add-ons only approximate it.
• Zero-config everything. One design on web and iPhone, sync in seconds without setup, a daily plan on the home screen ("Today: 18 cards, ~6 min"), and the weakest-cards-first ordering as the default instead of a setting to discover.
• Sharing that fits how students actually share. A deck link that unfurls in the class group chat, opens in a browser, no install — versus exporting an .apkg and explaining what to do with it.

The philosophical difference, which decides it

Anki's philosophy: maximum power, and the user will learn the tool. Ours: one workflow — lecture to scheduled cards — perfected, and everything else deliberately left out. We have no custom note types, no templating language, no add-ons, and never will; that refusal is the product. Anki users often (fairly!) read that as limitation. People who bounced off Anki read it as relief. Both readings are correct — that's why both apps should exist.

The honest gaps between us

• We don't import .apkg yet, so a life's work in Anki doesn't migrate — deliberate for now, because we'd rather not half-support your 20,000 cards. (Crammed decks do export in a format Anki imports, so the door out of ours is open.)
• Generation past the free monthly allowance is what our subscription pays for; Anki's costs are one-time. If you generate nothing, Crammed's studying is free like Anki's — but Anki never meters anything.
• No Android app yet (web works there); Anki has one, and it's free.

The bottom line

Choose by your relationship to setup. If tinkering with your tools is part of the pleasure — or a classmate is handing you a proven deck — Anki, sincerely, and may your reviews be ever green. If your lectures are piling up right now and you want the proven method without the evening of assembly: crammed.study, one upload, and you'll know in sixty seconds whether it's for you. More on what to demand from any of us: the four requirements.