A free Anki alternative that runs in a browser tab, with no account and no install

Open Cards, make a deck, and type. The scheduler is SM-2, the algorithm Anki and SuperMemo are built on: each card comes back just before you would have forgotten it, and how you grade it decides when. Cloze deletions are written the way every other flashcard program writes them, a pair can be made both ways round in one go, and a deck has its own limit on how many new cards a day it will start. Everything is kept on this device; there is no account, nothing is uploaded, and it works with the network off. What it does not have is Anki's shared decks, its add-ons, its phone apps and its sync — and those are real reasons to use Anki, which is why they are listed rather than skipped.

The part that does the work

Spaced repetition is not a feature, it is an interval. Review something you already know and you have wasted the review; review it after you have forgotten it and you are learning it again from nothing. The useful moment is just before forgetting, and it moves further out every time you get it right.

SM-2 tracks that with two numbers per card: how many days until the next sighting, and an ease factor that stretches or shrinks the gap depending on how hard you found it. Answer Easy and the interval jumps; answer Again and the card is back in this session and its ease drops. The first correct answer brings a card back tomorrow, the second in six days, then six times whatever the ease has become. It is not magic, and there is nothing to configure before it starts working.

What is here

• Decks, made and renamed in place, with a count of what is due.
• Cloze deletions. Write The capital of {{c1::Peru}} is {{c2::Lima}}. and you get two cards from one sentence: each asks about its own piece and leaves the rest readable. A hint goes after a second pair of colons — {{c1::Ecuador::which country}} — and becomes what the blank says. A sentence with brackets of its own keeps them.
• Reverse cards. One tick makes hablar → to speak and to speak → hablar at the same time, which is what vocabulary actually needs.
• A daily limit on new cards, kept with the deck rather than with the browser. Twenty a day is the usual advice; a deck of six hundred started all at once is how people quit in week two.
• The keyboard. Space shows the answer and then marks Good; 1 to 4 are Again, Hard, Good, Easy; Escape stops. You can review a hundred cards without touching the mouse.
• Bulk add and import. Paste a list, or import a tab-separated, comma-separated or JSON file — which is what Anki's own "Notes in Plain Text" export gives you, and what every spreadsheet writes.
• Export, as tab-separated text or JSON, so the cards are yours to take somewhere else. This is the part a study app with an account rarely makes easy.
• Search across the deck, for when you know you wrote a card about something.

What Anki has that this does not

Four things, and for some people any one of them settles it.

• Shared decks. Anki's library of pre-made decks — the medical ones especially — is enormous, and it is most of why people use it. Nothing here replaces that. You can import one as tab-separated text if you can export it that way; an .apkg file will not open here.
• Sync and phone apps. Anki reviews on the bus. This runs in a browser on whatever device you open it on, but there is no account syncing your progress between them, because there is no account. Export and import is the manual route.
• Pictures and audio on cards. Cards here are text. Language decks with audio and anatomy decks with images need Anki.
• Add-ons, note types and FSRS. Anki is programmable, has card templates with several fields, and now ships a newer scheduler. This has one card shape and one scheduler.

What this has that Anki does not

• Nothing to install. Open a page and start. On a locked-down work or school machine, that is the difference between studying and not.
• No account, nothing uploaded. What you are studying can say a great deal about you — a diagnosis, a legal exam, a language you are not telling your employer about. None of it leaves the device.
• It opens instantly. No library to load, no sync on startup.

Getting cards in

The fastest way to a useful deck is not typing cards one at a time. Paste a block of front <tab> back lines, or export from a spreadsheet as CSV. If the material is a page of notes rather than a list, write it in Notes first, then turn the sentences you want to remember into cloze deletions: it is usually quicker, and it makes better cards than trying to invent them from a blank box.

Where the cards live

In this browser's storage on this device. That is what makes it private and it is also the risk: clearing site data clears the deck, and a different browser is a different deck. Export the deck when it matters — the tab-separated file is small, readable, and opens in anything, including Anki.

The short version