Replace Anki, Notion, Quizlet and your calendar with a single app

Nobody chooses to have five apps. They pile up over the years. In first year, you keep your handouts in a folder on your desktop. You annotate them in Preview or Adobe Reader. A classmate mentions Anki, so you start using it. Then comes Notion to track your progress through chapters, a calendar for exams, and MCQs printed out or on a university website.

Each tool does its job well. The problem lies between them:

• A concept highlighted in the handout has no link to the card that makes you review it.
• The Notion table tracking your chapters doesn't know which cards are overdue.
• The calendar knows the exam date, but neither Anki nor Notion uses it to spread out the work.
• Missed multiple-choice questions stay on paper: nothing brings them back to you.
• You have to maintain five different filing systems, on different accounts.

This busywork is invisible, but you pay for it every week, especially during exam season.

Here, need by need, is what students use most often and what Mnemesia offers instead. The last row matters most: it says what it does not replace.

The point of a single tool isn't having fewer icons. It's that the steps follow one another without copy and paste.

• You open the biochemistry handout and highlight the key enzymes.
• You crop the glycolysis diagram and it becomes an image occlusion card: the labels are hidden, and you have to recall them.
• The card joins the subject's deck, along with a "notes and mistakes" deck specific to that handout.
• The planner knows the exam date and spreads your reviews over the remaining days.
• The day before, a multi-deck review covers every subject on the exam, then a timed MCQ set checks that it has stuck.

Each step rests on a proven method: spaced repetition against forgetting, self-testing rather than rereading, and a study planner built backward from the exam.

Mnemesia was born in medicine, where the course load is heaviest, but nothing in it is specific to health studies. The subjects, decks and MCQs are yours.

• Health: PASS, LAS (French first-year health programs), allied health, with lots of diagrams to learn through image occlusion. See studying in PASS and LAS.
• Law: definitions, statutes and case law, perfect for front and back cards. See studying law.
• Prépa (French preparatory classes) and competitive exams: formulas in KaTeX, a tight schedule. See studying in prépa.
• Bac (French high school diploma): study sheets turned into cards, regular practice right up to the exam.
• Languages: vocabulary lists imported as CSV from Quizlet or a spreadsheet.

Let's be precise, so you aren't disappointed after installing it.

• Mnemesia is not a free-form page editor or a database. For writing long notes or building a wiki, Notion or a word processor are still useful.
• It lets you write freehand on your handouts, but offers no blank notebooks for taking handwritten notes from scratch. GoodNotes or Notability do that very well.
• It doesn't let several people work on a document at the same time. You can, however, share a deck or an MCQ exam as a single file.
• It connects your Mac and iPad through iCloud (App Store version, if you turn it on), but syncs nothing with Windows, Linux or Android.
• It doesn't create cards or MCQs by itself with artificial intelligence. It gives you the prompt to paste into Claude or ChatGPT along with your handout, then imports the file you get back.
• There is no iPhone app for now.

So many students keep a note-taking tool on the side. The bulk of the studying work, though, fits in a single app.

No need to migrate everything at once. A simple approach:

• Install Mnemesia: from the App Store on Mac and iPad, or download it from mnemesia.com for Windows, Linux and Android tablets. No account to create.
• Import the folder of handouts for the current semester in one go.
• Import your Anki decks as .apkg (see Anki alternative) and your Quizlet sets as CSV (see Quizlet alternative).
• Import your timetable as .ics and add your exam dates.
• Keep Notion for your written notes if you like: the two work side by side.

Mnemesia is free, with no ads and no trackers. Everything stays on your device and works offline.