You dropped a term's worth of lecture PDFs into NotebookLM, it handed back a podcast that sounds like two people who actually read them, and now your flashcard app looks redundant. Google has since renamed the tool to Gemini Notebook: same product, new name, and the old one is what people still type, so it is the name used here.
The short answer: NotebookLM vs Quizlet share one gap, and it is that neither decides when you see a card again. NotebookLM is the best of the three at making sense of a pile of sources, Quizlet is where a deck somebody already built lives, and a study app that schedules reviews, which Studyflash is, gets you to the exam eleven weeks out. Google's free tier is enough for most students, Quizlet Plus is €44.99 a year, and Studyflash is priced per country.
The three side by side
| NotebookLM, now Gemini Notebook | Studyflash | Quizlet | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Refining and organising your ideas, in Google's words | Your own lecture material, reviewed across a term | Studying decks, mostly ones other people made |
| Cards from your files | Yes, from your sources, with difficulty and question count | Yes, from PDFs, slides, photos of notes, pasted text or a recorded lecture; six card types | Yes, via Study Guides, in English, French and German only |
| Review scheduling | None documented; progress remembered, missed cards re-run | Spaced repetition per card, plus a cram mode | None documented; Learn is a free taste, then Plus |
| Audio | Audio Overviews, 4 formats, over 80 languages, 3 a day free | A podcast from a deck, two voices, synced searchable transcript; Premium | None documented |
| Free plan | 100 notebooks, 50 sources each, 50 chats a day | Flashcards, quizzes, spaced repetition, Max chat, a monthly allowance of AI generations | Flashcards and Match, with ads |
| Rough cost | Google AI Pro, about $20 a month | Priced per country, shown at checkout; what each plan includes | Plus, €44.99 a year on the German App Store |
| Phone and offline | Google recommends the desktop version; Audio Overviews download for offline | iPhone, iPad, Android; generated decks, quizzes, summaries and mind maps work offline, podcasts need a connection | Offline on the phone apps for your 8 most recent sets |
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.
It makes flashcards now
The line you will still read on most comparison pages, that NotebookLM cannot make flashcards, stopped being true. Google's help centre documents flashcard and quiz generation in Gemini Notebook: cards and questions grounded only in your sources, easy, medium or hard, as many as you ask for, and an Explain button on every card. Generating cards is not the gap.
Studyflash turns the same upload into six card types, a quiz and a summary, and one of those types is image occlusion, where the labels on a diagram are hidden and you recall them. That is the format a labelled anatomy plate or a wiring diagram actually needs. Quizlet builds cards through Study Guides, in English, French and German only, and Ask Quizlet, the chat that reads your uploaded files, is US-only.
No review scheduling is documented
This is the hinge of the whole comparison. Gemini Notebook remembers your progress and lets you re-run the same cards, all of them or only the ones you missed, which is a bookmark and a filter for the session you are sitting in. The page that documents the feature says nothing about spaced repetition, about intervals, or about a card coming back after a delay.
For a week of reading, that is fine. For a module examined in eleven weeks it is the whole problem, because choosing what to review today is the decision you are worst placed to make. Studyflash schedules every card by how well you remembered it, and cram mode drops the schedule for the night before.
Quizlet leaves the same decision to you. Learn is a free taste and then it is Plus, where base Plus is itself capped at 20 rounds of Learn and 3 practice tests a month, with Unlimited the tier that removes the caps. Studyflash against Quizlet goes through the free plans row by row.
The two podcasts are different products
They get treated as the same feature and they do different jobs. An Audio Overview is free at 3 a day, comes in 4 formats and runs in over 80 languages, and it is generated from your sources, so what you get is a briefing on the reading.
The Studyflash podcast is two voices working through a deck you are already studying, with a transcript that stays in sync: tap a line to jump the audio there, or search it when you cannot listen. The episode and the cards are the same material, so the tram ride across Vienna feeds the review session that evening. Audio Overviews download for offline listening while Studyflash podcasts stream, so a commute with no signal goes to Google. Podcasts are Premium.
Free plan, cost and your data
NotebookLM's free tier is the one most students will use: 100 notebooks, 50 sources in each, 50 chats a day and 3 Audio Overviews a day. Google AI Pro, at about $20 a month, is the step above it. On a personal account, free or paid, Google says notebook content is not used to train its models unless you submit feedback, and feedback is reviewed by people; Workspace for Education accounts get the stronger guarantee, so upload with your university account if you have one.
The Studyflash free plan carries flashcards, quizzes, spaced repetition, unlimited chat with Max and a monthly allowance of AI generations, with no credit card to start, and Premium is priced per country and shown at checkout. Quizlet Plus is €44.99 a year on the German App Store, with the caps above, and Unlimited sits over that.
Who should pick what
- Fifteen papers to get through for a literature review: NotebookLM, on the free tier. Ask questions across all of them and take an Audio Overview with you.
- A deck for a standard first-year course by tomorrow: Quizlet, where somebody has already built it. Expect to pay for the modes that test you rather than show you.
- Examined on your own lecturer's material in ten weeks: a study app that schedules reviews, which is what Studyflash does with the slides, notes and recordings you upload.
- All three at once, which is what most terms look like: the hard reading list in NotebookLM, then everything you have to retain into Studyflash.
- Studying in a language other than English: Ask Quizlet is US-only and Study Guides covers three languages, so Audio Overviews in over 80 languages make NotebookLM the strongest multilingual option. Studyflash generates from your material in your own language.
Questions and answers
No. Google has renamed it Gemini Notebook and the help centre has moved with it, though most people and most search results still use the old name. Whatever it is called, it does not decide when a card comes back, which is the job Studyflash does.
On a personal account, free or paid, Google says notebook content is not used to train its models unless you submit feedback, and feedback is reviewed by people. Workspace and Workspace for Education accounts get the stronger guarantee, and paying for a personal plan does not move you to it. Studyflash is a Swiss product, made by Studyflash GmbH, and what you upload there becomes your own cards, quizzes and summaries.
Partly. Google recommends the desktop version for the full experience, and on a phone only Audio Overviews download for offline use. In the Studyflash apps for iPhone, iPad and Android, generated decks, quizzes, summaries and mind maps work offline, and your review progress syncs when you are back on a connection.
Base Plus is capped at 20 rounds of Learn and 3 practice tests a month, and if you study daily during an exam period that cap arrives early; Unlimited is the tier that removes it. On Studyflash, flashcards, quizzes and spaced repetition sit in the free plan, alongside a monthly allowance of AI generations.
Yes, and it is the sensible pattern. Read and interrogate the sources in NotebookLM, then move what you actually have to retain into Studyflash, where every card is scheduled by how well you remembered it.