You are in the first years of medicine in Leuven, Zurich or Montpellier, the module handouts keep stacking up, and everyone in your year swears by flashcards. Choosing the best flashcard app feels like comparing feature lists, but for medicine it comes down to three things: image occlusion, what a ready-made deck is worth to you, and how the cards get made.
Start here: if you are sitting the USMLE, the United States Medical Licensing Examination, use Anki with the AnKing deck and stop reading. On a European curriculum nobody has built your faculty's cardiology module, so the choice turns on image occlusion and on how the cards get made. That second one is where Studyflash comes in: it builds the deck from the lecture PDF, the slides or the recording. Price will not decide it: Studyflash has a free plan, and Premium is priced per country.
The best flashcard app for medical students, compared on four things
| Image occlusion | Ready-made medical decks | Cards from your own material | Rough cost | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Studyflash | Yes, one of six card types | None; decks shared by link | PDFs, slides, photos of notes, pasted text, recorded lectures | Free with a monthly allowance of AI generations; Premium per country, what the plans include |
| Anki with AnKing | Yes, built in | AnKing Step deck, over 30,000 cards for the USMLE | No, add-ons only | Apps free; iPhone about $25 once; AnkiHub from about $55 a year |
| RemNote | Yes, 5 free, unlimited on Pro | None documented | Yes, against AI credits | $8 a month |
| Brainscape | No, "coming soon" | Certified USMLE Step 1 set, around 9,700 cards | From pasted text, not a PDF | About $96 a year |
| Mochi | Yes, Diagram cards | None documented | No, AI writes example sentences only | Free; Pro $5 a month |
| Quizlet | Not documented | 900+ million sets, public by default | Ask Quizlet, US only | €44.99 a year on the German App Store |
Prices and features checked on 10 August 2026. Prices vary by country and store, and where a vendor publishes no euro price the figure is the US one.
Image occlusion decides most of this
Cover the labels on a diagram and recall them one at a time: that is the technique anatomy, histology and pathology are built for, so read that column first. Anki has had image occlusion built in since version 23.10, and the old add-on is no longer needed. RemNote gives you 5 cards free and unlimited on Pro.
Mochi calls them Diagram cards and schedules each region separately. Studyflash has it as one of six card types, made from a figure you upload yourself. Brainscape does not have it and says so on its own site, and nothing Quizlet publishes documents it either way. If your subject is taught through labelled figures, that one column removes two of the six before you compare anything else.
Studyflash
Studyflash is built for the material your faculty actually hands you. Upload the lecture PDF, the slides or a photo of handwritten notes and the deck comes back built, image occlusion among the six card types. Record the lecture and the transcript becomes cards, a summary and a quiz, the remark your lecturer drops about the exam included. Course-level mock exams are timed and graded, with last year's paper as the template. The free plan carries a monthly allowance of AI generations.
There is no AnKing equivalent here, no public library, just decks shared by link. The Anki importer brings basic and cloze cards across but not image occlusion notes, so keep Anki for AnKing and use Studyflash for your own course. Pharmacokinetics calculations are where flashcards give least in any app, so put that practice into quizzes or work it through with the AI tutor, and check generated pathway cards before you trust them.
Anki with the AnKing deck
AnKing is a maintained deck aimed at one exam: over 30,000 cards for Step 1, 2 and 3. Nothing else here is in that category. The apps are free apart from the iPhone one, and AnkiHub, which hosts the deck, has a free tier and paid tiers from about $55 a year without saying what the free tier covers.
Where it stops is everything that is not a pre-made deck. There is no native AI generation, so turning your own lecture PDF into cards means a third-party add-on that the next Anki update can break, and AnkiWeb caps a synced collection at 100 MB compressed. More in the piece on moving away from Anki.
RemNote
RemNote keeps the cards inside the notes they came from. You annotate a PDF, the card grows out of the annotation, reviews run on FSRS, the Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler, and a deck imported from Anki arrives with its scheduling intact. Its AI writes cards from your own material, drawn against AI credits.
The free plan is where it pinches: 5 image occlusion cards is one diagram, and 3 annotated PDFs is one week of lectures, so unlimited occlusion means paying for Pro. No ready-made medical deck library is documented, which leaves the content yours to build.
Brainscape
Brainscape schedules by confidence instead of a pass or fail button. You say how sure you were, and the card comes back anywhere from minutes to months later. Its certified USMLE Step 1 collection runs to around 9,700 cards, and about $96 a year buys that ready-made content.
There is no image occlusion, and the site says it is coming. Images and sounds on cards belong to the paid plan, so the free tier is a text product in a subject taught through pictures, and its AI takes pasted text but not a PDF.
Mochi
Mochi is the cheap way to get occlusion. Diagram cards sit on the free plan with each region scheduled separately, and an import from Anki keeps your review history. Sync across devices is the paid tier.
Nothing in it is medical-specific, and the AI will not write your cards: it writes example sentences, which is a vocabulary feature. Mochi suits the student who writes their own cards and wants them scheduled properly.
Quizlet
Quizlet's feature is that the set already exists. It publishes 900+ million study sets, public by default, and if your cohort passes links around, that network is worth more to you than any card type.
Then the metering starts. Learn is capped at 20 rounds a month even on base Plus, Ask Quizlet, the chat that reads your files, is US only, and Study Guides covers English, French and German. Exports are text only, so a set built on diagrams does not leave Quizlet.
Who should pick what
- Sitting the USMLE: Anki with the AnKing deck. 30,000 cards written and corrected against that exact exam, and the app underneath is free.
- On a European curriculum, working from your faculty's slides: the question is how the cards get made. Studyflash if you want the deck built from the PDF and the recorded lecture, plus a mock exam modelled on last year's paper. RemNote if you want the cards inside annotated notes and will pay for Pro.
- Short of money and studying from text: Brainscape's free plan or Mochi. Both fall over the moment your material is diagrams.
- Your cohort already lives in Quizlet: stay for the shared sets, knowing Learn is metered even on paid base Plus and your diagrams will not export.
- Already on Anki and drowning in reviews: the app is not the problem. Check that FSRS is switched on and prune before you switch tools. If the time goes on making cards rather than reviewing them, that is the case for generating them from your own material.
Questions and answers
No. Image occlusion has been built into Anki since version 23.10, so a guide telling you to install an add-on is describing an older version. Studyflash has it as one of six card types, made from a figure in your own slides.
AnkiHub, which hosts it, lists a free tier and paid tiers from about $55 a year, and its page does not say what the free tier includes, so budget for it until you have checked. What you pay for there is the deck; cards from your own lectures are a different job, and that one is Studyflash's.
Partly. Studyflash imports an Anki package and brings basic and cloze cards across with their text and images, cloze becoming fill in the blank, while audio is dropped and Anki's image occlusion notes, which AnKing leans on, are not documented. Keep Anki for the deck and use Studyflash for your own lecture material.
For drug names, vocabulary and anything list-shaped, yes, especially if your cohort already shares sets. It is weak where medicine is visual: no documented image occlusion, and images do not survive an export. Studyflash makes occlusion cards from your own diagrams, so the anatomy stays where you study.
Anki does, through AMBOSS's official add-on, which shows its explanations inside your cards and needs an active membership, about €99 a year for German students; ask your faculty whether there is a campus licence before you pay. No equivalent is documented for the others, Studyflash included, which works from your own lecture material instead.