Anki is the better reviewer and always will be: local files you own, a mature spaced-repetition scheduler, no cost per card. Lookfornotes exists for the step before that — turning a PDF chapter, a slide deck or a past paper into a usable first set of cards and questions. If the blank page is what stops your deck from ever being made, that is the problem this tool solves.
Ask anyone who has used Anki for a year and they will tell you the same thing: the algorithm is not the hard part. The hard part is the forty minutes a night that card creation eats, and the fact that the night you skip it, the whole system quietly dies. Lookfornotes attacks that specific step. It is worth being honest about which tool you actually need, because they fail in different ways.
The two different jobs
Anki does one job extremely well: it decides what you see today, and how often you see it again. That scheduling is genuinely the best in the field, it runs offline, it is free on desktop, and the deck you build in it will still open in ten years. What Anki does not do is read your lecture PDF and decide which forty facts are worth a card.
Lookfornotes does that other job. You give it a source — a PDF, a past paper, a chapter of notes, a URL — and it produces a summary, a set of cards, and practice questions in one pass. What it does not do is run your daily review queue with a mature spaced-repetition schedule over years. That is a deliberate split of responsibility, not a missing feature.
Where Anki wins
- Longevity and control. Your collection is a local file you own. No account, no subscription, no service that can shut down. If you are building decks you intend to keep for a degree, that matters.
- Scheduling. The spaced-repetition algorithm, the add-on ecosystem, and the sheer depth of options (leeches, load balancing, custom study) are unmatched. Nothing here competes with that.
- Cost after the fact. The desktop app is free, and it stays free. There is no per-token or per-page charge when you make your five hundredth card.
- Offline and on a plane. Anki reviews work anywhere; a cloud generator needs a connection when you are creating, though nothing stops you reviewing the output offline afterwards.
Where Lookfornotes wins
- Getting to card one. The step that kills most Anki decks is the blank page. Paste a chapter and you have a starting deck in about a minute instead of an evening of typing.
- Source-shaped material. Past papers, slides with diagrams described in text, handouts that mix English and Chinese — the generator reads what you actually have rather than what fits a neat template.
- Questions, not only cards. You also get written practice questions with answers, which is closer to how exams actually test you. Anki has no equivalent built in — the usual workaround is cloze deletion, which is a different skill.
- Nothing to install. It runs in a browser tab on the shared laptop in the library. For a student who studies across three devices, that removes a whole class of friction.
Where Lookfornotes is weaker — say it plainly
- No review scheduler worth the name. There is no mature long-horizon spaced repetition. It is not trying to be your review system for three years.
- No mobile app. Browser only. If your revision happens on a phone on the way to school, this is a real limitation.
- No set importer. You cannot pull an existing deck in. It generates from sources you provide.
- Points, not unlimited. New accounts get free points and the generator consumes them. Heavy daily use costs money; Anki's creation step is free forever, at the price of your own time.
- Generated cards are a first draft. Cards you did not write are cards you have not verified. Every workflow on this site says the same thing: fix the cards before you study them. A wrong card studied thirty times is worse than no card.
The workflow most people actually end up with
Generate to get past the blank page, then choose your reviewer honestly. Two shapes work well:
- Lookfornotes → export and review elsewhere. Generate from your source, correct the cards, keep them in whatever tool you already trust for daily review. The generator's output is plain text, so this is a five-minute job, not a locked-in format.
- Lookfornotes → in-browser practice. For a subject where you revise in bursts — a test in ten days and then never again — the practice questions and cards generated per topic are often enough on their own, and you skip installing anything.
What does not work is making a deck generator your scheduler, or making a scheduler your deck builder. Those are the two failure modes; pick the tool per step, not per person.
A quick way to decide
- You already have decks you like, and your problem is keeping up with reviews → you need a scheduler. Stay where you are.
- You have sources nobody has made cards from, and your problem is the blank page → generate first, then decide where the cards live. The free check runs on one page without an account.
- Your material is past papers, slide decks or bilingual notes that no existing deck covers → that is exactly the case this tool exists for.
Neither answer is a loyalty question. Run your own material through once and judge the output yourself; that takes less time than reading another comparison.