The best apps to turn your notes into flashcards in 2026
Eight apps that make flashcards or quiz questions from your notes, slides and lectures: what each one makes, how much of it is free, and which bring the cards back for spaced review.
We make Breef, and it’s on this list. It comes first because it’s ours, not because it ranks first: the others are in no particular order. Every app is described from its own website and help pages as of November 2026, with what it does better than Breef said plainly.
The short answer
For a deck of flashcards made from your files, Gizmo and Knowt are the quickest, and both schedule the cards for spaced review; Quizlet builds sets from notes or a recorded lecture, beside the largest library of shared sets. RemNote makes AI cards inside your notes, Goodnotes turns handwritten notes into Study Sets on Apple devices, Notability makes quizzes and flashcards from notes, PDFs and recordings, and NotebookLM makes flashcards and quizzes from your sources for free, though with no review schedule.
Pick Breef if you’d rather not keep a separate deck at all: your notes themselves come back on an FSRS schedule, and when one is due Breef writes three questions from it, each answer shown beside the line of your note it comes from. For the cards you do want, write them as “question :: answer” lines in a note, or use Breef’s free flashcard maker, with no sign-up, and export them to Anki.
Making flashcards is where much of the time goes when you study with them: reading your notes again, choosing what to ask, typing each card. Apps that do it for you take your notes, a PDF of slides or a lecture recording and give back cards or quiz questions in a minute or two.
Two things matter as much as the cards. Check them: AI can ask about the wrong detail or get one wrong, so a quick read against your notes is worth it. And come back to them: answering from memory works best repeated at spaced intervals, so we’ve noted for each app whether it schedules the cards for review, or leaves it to you to remember to.
In partStudy Sets with spaced repetition, on Apple devices only
1Breef
Quiz questions from your notes, with the notes themselves reviewed
Price
Free; Pro €6 a month or €48 a year
Platforms
In the browser on any computer or phone; installable
Breef doesn’t turn your notes into a separate deck: it reviews the notes themselves. When a note is due, on an FSRS schedule fitted to how fast you forget, Breef writes three questions from it, in the note’s language, and points to the line that answers each. Drop in a PDF of slides and it becomes linked notes first; record a lecture and it’s written up. Your own “question :: answer” lines are cards, reviewed with the note and exportable to Anki, and the free flashcard maker on Breef’s site does the same for cards you type or paste.
Strengths
Questions written from each note when it’s due, with the line that answers each
PDFs and lectures turned into notes first, then reviewed
Cards export to Anki, from your notes or the free flashcard maker
Limits
10 new quizzes a month on the free plan; Pro writes as many as you need
No deck of AI-made flashcards to drill; browser only, with a connection
2Quizlet
Study sets from notes or a recorded lecture
Price
Free, with ads; Quizlet Plus paid
Platforms
Web, iOS, Android
Quizlet’s AI builds a complete study set from notes you type, paste or upload, and turns a lecture you record or upload into study guides and flashcards. You then drill the set with Learn, Test, Match and games, beside a vast library of sets made by other students. The free plan has ads and limits; Quizlet Plus removes them.
Strengths
Sets from notes, files or a recorded lecture
Games and study modes for drilling
A huge library of sets made by others
Limits
Ads and limits on the free plan
Built for terms and definitions more than explanations
RemNote makes cards where your notes are: mark a line as a card yourself, or let its AI make cards from a passage, a PDF or slides, and they’re scheduled with FSRS like the rest. The free plan includes a few AI-made cards, with many more on Pro; turning a whole PDF into flashcards, quizzes and summaries is on Pro with AI, its top plan.
Notes, flashcards and practice tests from files and lectures
Price
Free, with ads; Ultra $95.99 a year or $24.99 a month
Platforms
Web, iOS, Android, Chrome extension
Knowt takes a PDF, slides, a video or a lecture, recorded live or uploaded, and makes notes, flashcards and practice tests from it; paste in your notes and its AI makes cards from them too. Its study modes, a Spaced Repetition mode among them, are free on your own sets, and Quizlet sets import in a couple of clicks. The free plan has ads and one AI summary of a file a month; Ultra lifts the limits.
Strengths
Notes, flashcards and practice tests from one upload
Spaced repetition and study modes free on your own sets
Quizzes and flashcards from slides, audio or photos of notes
Price
Free; Gizmo Unlimited paid, priced by region
Platforms
Web, iOS, Android
Gizmo’s Magic Import makes flashcards and quizzes from PDFs, slides, lecture audio, photos of handwritten notes or a whiteboard, pasted text, spreadsheets and web pages, and brings in Quizlet sets and Anki decks. Memorise mode schedules the cards for you, an AI tutor writes questions from your content, and leagues and live quizzes make it a game. The free plan has 15 hearts and a 20-minute wait between imports; Unlimited removes both.
Strengths
The widest range of things to import, photos of handwriting included
Spaced repetition with nothing to set up
Imports Anki decks and Quizlet sets
Limits
Hearts and a wait between imports on the free plan
No published price: it’s shown in the app, by device and region
Free flashcards and quizzes from the sources you add
Price
Free with a Google account; more with Google’s AI plans
Platforms
Web, Android, iOS
NotebookLM, which Google renamed Gemini Notebook in July 2026, answers questions from the sources you add, such as PDFs, Google Docs and Slides, websites and YouTube videos, and makes flashcards and quizzes from them at the difficulty you choose. You mark each card as got or missed and can retake only the ones you missed, and an answer can be explained with citations to your sources. Nothing brings the cards back on a schedule, so when to review is up to you.
Strengths
Free, from Google, with a generous allowance
Cards and quizzes from many kinds of sources at once
Explanations that cite your sources
Limits
No spaced review: you decide when to come back
Built for exploring sources more than keeping them for months
Quizzes and flashcards from handwritten notes and recordings
Price
5 notes free; Plus and Pro paid
Platforms
iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows, Android, web
Notability Learn turns your notes, PDFs and lecture recordings into summaries, quizzes and flashcards, and its Auto Study mixes multiple-choice questions, flashcards and fill-in-the-blanks. It’s the natural choice if you handwrite with a stylus and record lectures alongside. Quizzes and flashcards are limited each month on Plus and unlimited on Pro; the free Starter plan holds 5 notes.
3 documents free; Essential $11.99 a year, Pro $35.99 a year
Platforms
iPad, iPhone, Mac, Android, Windows, web
Goodnotes’ Study Sets turn handwritten notes into flashcards, each linked back to the page it came from, and bring the cards you get wrong back more often. Study Sets come with Essential and Pro and run on iPad, iPhone and Mac only, though Goodnotes itself also runs on Android, Windows and the web. Its AI writes quizzes from your notes as well, a few a month on the free plan.
We picked apps that make flashcards or quiz questions from material you already have: typed or handwritten notes, PDFs and slides, or lecture recordings. For each, we checked on its own website, pricing and help pages in November 2026 what it takes in, what it makes, how much of that is free, whether it schedules the result for spaced review, and which devices it runs on; Quizlet’s features come from its own App Store listing.
Prices are as each vendor states them, in its own currency, and they change often; Gizmo shows its price only in the app. We didn’t score or rank the apps, or judge the quality of their cards, which depends on your material: whichever you use, check AI-made cards against your notes. If something here is out of date, write to support@breef.app and we’ll put it right.
Questions
Can AI turn my notes into flashcards?
Yes. Quizlet, Knowt, Gizmo, RemNote, Notability and NotebookLM all make flashcards or quizzes from notes or files you give them, and Goodnotes does from handwritten notes on Apple devices. Check the cards against your notes: AI can ask about the wrong detail or state one wrongly. Breef takes another route, writing three questions from a note each time it’s due for review.
Which app makes flashcards from a PDF?
Knowt, Gizmo and RemNote make cards from a PDF, and NotebookLM does for free from the PDFs among your sources. Notability makes them from PDFs you’ve brought into it. Breef first writes a PDF up as linked notes, an overview and a note per topic, and then quizzes you on each note when it’s due.
Is there a free app to turn notes into flashcards?
NotebookLM is free with a Google account. Knowt’s free plan has unlimited sets and its study modes, with one AI summary of a file a month, and Gizmo’s is free with hearts and a wait between imports. Breef’s free plan writes 10 new quizzes a month and reviews every note, and its flashcard maker, free with no sign-up, turns cards you type or paste into a file Anki imports.
Are AI-made flashcards as good as writing your own?
They save time but skip a step that helps: putting things in your own words, which research on the generation effect finds makes them easier to remember. AI-made cards can also miss the point of a page. A good middle way is to let an app write the questions, answer them from memory, and fix your notes wherever you got one wrong.
Which of these apps use spaced repetition?
RemNote, Knowt, Gizmo and Breef schedule reviews; Goodnotes does for Study Sets on Apple devices, and Quizlet has a spaced repetition feature beside its Learn mode. Notability and NotebookLM make the quizzes and cards but don’t describe a review schedule.
How do I make Anki flashcards from my notes?
Write each card on a line as “question :: answer”, then paste the lines into Breef’s free flashcard maker: it gives you a file Anki imports, with the deck and fields set. In Breef itself, the same lines inside your notes are cards, reviewed with the note and exported to Anki as a deck per project.