Active recall and spaced repetition, minus the manual card-making
Four tools, and they are not really competing - they solve the same problem in different ways. Active recall beats rereading your notes; that part is settled science. The reason most students abandon flashcards is the setup cost, and that is exactly the job AI has taken over.
Where I landed after testing all four across a biology and a law module: Knowt if you want something that feels like the familiar flashcard sites without hitting a paywall every ten cards; Anki if you are willing to learn it once and keep it forever, especially for anything you need to remember for years rather than a fortnight; RemNote if you want your notes and your cards to live in the same place.
The honest caveat is that AI-generated cards are mediocre by default. It will happily make a card for every single line, trivia included, and a deck of 300 cards is worse than no deck at all because you will never finish a review session. My routine is to let the tool generate, delete about half, and rewrite the survivors into questions I actually care about. If you want to see how I get the raw material in the first place, that is the notes and lectures workflow here.
Built by students who got tired of Quizlet raising prices. Paste in your notes or lecture transcript and it makes flashcards and practice quizzes automatically - and the free tier is actually usable, not a teaser. The week before exams, this is my starting point.
The ugly-but-magical flashcard app that med students swear by. Its spaced repetition schedules reviews right before you'd forget something, so you actually remember for finals month, not just finals night. First 20 minutes feel clunky, then it's a permanent part of your routine. Free on desktop and Android; iOS is a one-time $25.
The fastest way to get flashcards without making them: search your textbook chapter and someone has almost certainly made the set already. Free tier covers the basics - the paid tier adds better testing modes. I default to it the week before an exam, though the shrinking free tier is why I also keep Knowt around.
The notes-to-flashcards pipeline is unreal - I take notes in class and it quietly turns them into spaced-repetition cards I review later. It replaces two apps with one, but the learning curve is real; give it a weekend. For heavy notetakers who also cram with flashcards, it's the smoothest thing I've used.