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Comparisons

The best repetition engine, or the material to put in it.

Anki solves retention and asks you to author everything. Zelvi authors from your documents and teaches the concept. Many people should use both.

Choose Zelvi if

  • You do not have time to author cards from a term of lecture slides.
  • You want the concept explained before you drill it.
  • You want interactive diagrams and anatomy labelling rather than only cards.
  • Your institution wants the material to come from what was actually published.

Choose Anki if

  • You want the most configurable spaced-repetition scheduling available.
  • You want your collection stored locally and fully under your control.
  • You rely on community decks in a field that has excellent ones.
  • You want an extension ecosystem and to tune the algorithm yourself.

Feature by feature

Zelvi compared with Anki, feature by feature
FeatureZelviAnki
Building cards from a documentGenerated from PDFs, slides and notesManual authoring, or a community deck
Spaced-repetition schedulingBasic schedulingThe most mature and configurable engine in the category
Local storage and data controlHosted; export and erasure are implementedLocal collection files you own outright
Community decksNoneLarge, and excellent in some fields
Tutor that explains the conceptConversational tutor, typed or spokenNot what it is for
Interactive STEM and anatomy visualsManipulable diagrams generated from parametersImages on a card; image occlusion via add-ons
ExtensibilityNone for the learnerA deep add-on ecosystem
Setup effortUpload a documentReal configuration before real use

What Anki does better

Anki is better than Zelvi at the thing Anki is for. Its scheduling is more mature and far more configurable than ours, your collection is genuinely yours on your own disk, and its community decks and add-on ecosystem have no equivalent here. A disciplined Anki user with a good deck is doing something we do not currently do better.

What our side of this rests on

  • Answers cited back to your own material, with the instructor one tap away when the material does not cover itOn our go/no-go benchmark every answer retrieved the right passage, carried a valid citation and stayed inside the material, and every out-of-scope question routed the learner to the instructor rather than a guess — against 54.2% for handing the model the whole document.
  • Interactive STEM visuals — graphs, geometry, circuits, reactions — that the learner can manipulate54 STEM diagrams and 27 interactive ones ship today, and every one is re-drawn and checked before a release.
  • Interactive anatomy diagrams with tap-to-reveal labelling for active recallSix anatomy diagrams ship today, each one a labelling task the learner completes rather than a picture to look at.

Questions people actually ask

Can Zelvi export to Anki?
Not today. Your data can be exported, but there is no Anki deck format export.
Should I use both?
For heavy memorisation — medical terminology, vocabulary, anatomy — that is a reasonable pairing. Zelvi is stronger at turning a document into material and explaining it; Anki is stronger at making you retain it over months.
Is Anki free?
The desktop application is free and open source. Check its own site for the current position on mobile, which differs by platform.

Other comparisons