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Notion vs Anki
It's not really a versus — they don't do the same job. Notion holds your notes and plans; Anki drills your flashcards. That's why so many students end up running both, copy-pasting between them all semester. Mento exists for exactly that gap: notes, PDFs and a notebook that generate their own cards and schedule the reviews — one app, one loop.
Updated September 2026
The short answer
Which one is right for you?
Choose Mento if…
- ✓You're a student and the whole point of your notes is remembering them
- ✓You're tired of maintaining a Notion workspace and an Anki deck for the same class
- ✓You want cards made from your notes and PDFs, scheduled without setup
- ✓You want tasks and a calendar next to your study material — no dashboard to build
Choose Notion if…
- ✓You need a team workspace — shared wikis, project docs, collaboration
- ✓Databases, templates and dashboards are the appeal, not a chore
- ✓Your notes are for reference and planning, not for exam recall
Choose Anki if…
- ✓You want maximum control — FSRS parameters, deck options, add-ons
- ✓You live off shared decks like AnKing rather than your own notes
- ✓You already have a system for notes and only need the drilling engine
Side by side
What each app actually does
Notion and Anki at their best, against Mento today. The pattern to notice: the left column is the only one that covers the whole row set.
Notion
AnkiBuilt-in features as of September 2026. Notion Plus is per member, billed annually.
The two-app tax
What running Notion + Anki actually costs you
The copy-paste pipeline
The standard setup: beautiful notes in Notion, then an evening turning them into Anki cards by hand — retyping, reformatting, splitting cloze deletions. Every lecture pays the tax twice. In Mento the pipeline is the app: write or upload once, generate the cards from it, done.
How card generation works →Cards that lose their context
Once a card lands in Anki, its connection to the source is gone — blank on a review and your only option is flipping through Notion hunting for the right page. Mento cards stay linked to the note, PDF page or lecture they came from; the context is one tap away.
Source-linked cards →Two systems, one deadline
A workspace you maintain and a deck you feed — both competing for the hours the exam actually needs. Mento keeps the planning too: tasks, calendar, dated exam topics and daily practice in the same place as the material, so the system runs itself while you study.
Scheduling in Mento →Cost
The stack vs the loop
NotionAnkiUS prices as of September 2026. The two-app stack is cheap in dollars — the cost is the nightly copy-paste, not the subscription.
Fair is fair
When the two-app stack is the right call
Both of these tools are excellent at their actual job, and for some people the split is worth it.
- →Your Notion workspace does real non-study work — team projects, clients, a business — keep it; Mento replaces the study half, not your whole life
- →You're in a field that runs on a shared Anki deck (med school's AnKing being the famous case) — inheriting 30,000 curated cards is a real advantage
- →You genuinely enjoy building systems — some people's Notion setup is a hobby, and that's a fine hobby
- →Plenty of people land on Notion for life admin, Mento for studying — that split works
Making the move
Collapsing the stack
You don't have to migrate anything wholesale — start with one course and let the loop prove itself.
01
Bring one class
Paste the notes for one course, or upload its PDFs and slides. Leave the rest of your setup alone for now.
02
Generate the cards
Turn the material into cards in minutes — the evening you used to spend making Anki cards goes back to actually studying.
03
Let the schedule run
Daily practice queues what's due, and a dated exam topic works backward from the day. No deck options, no dashboard.
Honestly: there's no one-click importer from Notion or Anki yet, and Anki review history stays in Anki. Everything you make in Mento exports on every plan — the loop shouldn't be a lock-in either.
FAQ
Notion vs Anki, asked directly
Can Notion do flashcards?
You can build flashcard-shaped templates with toggles and databases, but nothing schedules them — there's no spaced repetition engine deciding what you see today. That's the reason the Notion + Anki stack exists at all.
Can Notion do spaced repetition?
Not natively. There are template hacks with recurring dates, but they schedule pages, not individual cards, and they don't adapt to how well you knew the answer. Anki and Mento both do true per-card scheduling.
Is Anki still worth it in 2026?
For power users, yes — the algorithm control and shared-deck ecosystem are unmatched. Its weakness was never the engine; it's that your notes live somewhere else and every card is manual labor.
Do I need both Notion and Anki for university?
That's the standard stack, and it works if you're disciplined about feeding it. The honest alternative is one app where notes and reviews share a home — which is the gap Mento was built for.
Can Mento replace Notion completely?
For studying, yes. For team wikis, client projects and heavy databases, no — Notion is genuinely better at workspace jobs, and plenty of people keep it for that while studying in Mento.
Can I import from Notion or Anki?
Not with one click yet. Most people paste notes or upload the source PDFs and let Mento generate cards from them. Full export is included on every Mento plan.
What does Mento cost compared to the stack?
Mento is free to start; Pro is $14.99 a month or $95.99 a year with AI actions included, and students pay $8.99 a month or $59.99 a year. Notion and Anki are also cheap or free — though Notion's AI needs the $20/month Business plan — and the real cost of the stack is the hours spent moving material between them.
Keep comparing
More comparisons
One app. The whole loop.
Notes, cards, spaced repetition and practice tests — free to start, no credit card.