The Anki alternative that shows up when you're about to scroll
By the Braintoll team · · 3 min read
The short answer
Braintoll is an Anki alternative for people whose decks die because they forget to open the app. It uses the same spaced repetition with Again, Hard, Good and Easy ratings, but shows your cards when you open a distracting app such as Instagram, and it imports Anki .apkg decks with their review progress. Stay with Anki if you rely on cloze cards, image occlusion, audio or add-ons.
On this page
Anki is one of the best study tools ever made. Its scheduling works, its decks are endless, and millions of students swear by it. So why do so many Anki decks quietly die after a few weeks?
Usually it isn’t the algorithm. It’s opening the app.
The hard part is starting the review
Reviews pile up the moment life gets busy. Skip two days and you’re looking at a few hundred due cards — the last thing you want to face at 11 pm. Opening Instagram, on the other hand, takes no effort at all. You do it dozens of times a day without deciding to.
Braintoll is built around that observation: you don’t need more willpower to study. You need your studying to happen at the moments you already reach for your phone.
How Braintoll works differently
Braintoll uses the same idea as Anki — spaced repetition with an Again, Hard, Good and Easy rating — but changes when you review. Instead of waiting for you to open a study app, it steps in when you open an app you’ve chosen to block:
- A card from your library appears instead of the app.
- You reveal the answer and rate how well you remembered it.
- Once you’ve marked enough cards Easy, the app opens for as long as you’ve set.
Your reviews end up spread across the day in small pieces — three cards here, two there — at moments you’d otherwise lose to scrolling. No backlog, no dedicated session, no streak to protect.
Braintoll vs Anki at a glance
| Anki | Braintoll | |
|---|---|---|
| When you review | When you open Anki | When you open an app you’ve chosen to block |
| Scheduling | Spaced repetition, highly configurable | Spaced repetition based on SM-2 |
| Rating scale | Again, Hard, Good, Easy | Again, Hard, Good, Easy |
| Card types | Text, images, audio, cloze and more | Text prompt and answer |
| Creating cards | Manual, shared decks, add-ons | Manual, presets, Anki import, AI from a topic, text or file |
| Blocks distracting apps | No | Yes |
Bring your Anki deck with you
You don’t have to start over. Export a deck from Anki as an .apkg file, choose Import in Braintoll, and pick the file. Each card keeps its existing review progress, so a deck you’ve worked on for months carries on where it left off.
The import runs entirely on your phone — the deck is never uploaded. Text prompts and answers come across; image and cloze cards don’t, and the import screen tells you exactly how many were left out before you save.
When Anki is still the better choice
Braintoll isn’t trying to replace Anki for everyone. Stick with Anki if you depend on image occlusion, cloze deletions, audio cards, add-ons, or syncing between desktop and phone — or if you do long, focused review sessions, as many medical students do.
The two work well side by side, though. Keep your heavy decks in Anki and put the one you keep neglecting — vocabulary, say — into Braintoll, where it gets reviewed whether you remember to or not. Still deciding between the classic flashcard apps? See Anki vs Quizlet.
Who Braintoll is for
- Language learners who want vocabulary to stick without scheduling a daily session.
- Students who keep falling behind on reviews before exams, and who’d rather turn their lecture PDFs into cards than type every card by hand.
- Anyone who opens social apps out of habit and would rather that habit taught them something.
Braintoll is not affiliated with or endorsed by Ankitects Pty Ltd, the makers of Anki.