A RemNote alternative for students who would rather not build the deck by hand
If you are looking for something other than RemNote, it is usually for one of two reasons: the writing system is more structure than you want to maintain, or the cards are still costing you an evening you needed for revising. FORKSAI is built for the second reason. You hand it the material and it produces the deck.
How we handle claims about RemNote
This page is written by FORKSAI, so treat it as our side of the argument. We keep statements about RemNote to broad things you can confirm on their own site in under a minute, and we do not list their prices, their limits or their feature set, because those change and a stale table here would mislead you. Everything specific on this page is about FORKSAI, where we can be held to it. Check RemNote directly before you decide.
First, work out which half you are replacing
RemNote is a note-taking app built on the idea that flashcards belong inside your notes, reviewed with spaced repetition. That is a genuinely good idea, and it is why the app has a following among medical students in particular. It also means the app is really two products bolted into one, and which one you are trying to replace changes the answer completely.
If your notes are the point, and you keep going back to them for months, you want another notes-first tool. Nothing on this page will change that, and we would rather you find the right thing than switch to us and bounce.
If the notes were mostly a route to the cards, and the thing you actually do every week is revise, then you want a study tool that skips the writing step. That is what FORKSAI is.
What FORKSAI actually does
The whole product starts from one assumption: your material already exists, and it exists in somebody else's format. A lecturer's slide deck. A scanned handout. A textbook chapter. A two hour recording. You did not write it, so a tool that only makes cards out of what you typed cannot help you with it.
| What you want to do | How FORKSAI does it |
|---|---|
| Turn a lecture PDF into cards | Upload the file and pick a difficulty, the question types and roughly how many cards you want. The cards land one at a time as they generate, so you can see the shape of the deck before it finishes. |
| Turn a recorded lecture into cards | Paste the YouTube URL. FORKSAI pulls the transcript and builds the deck from it, the same way it would from a document. |
| Turn a photographed page into cards | Upload the image. OCR runs in the browser and the extracted text goes through the same generation step. |
| Get notes as well as cards | The PDF to notes tool writes structured, Cornell, narrative or outline notes from the same file, with a detail level and a focus area you set. |
| Review on a proper schedule | FSRS-5 spaced repetition, rated 1 to 4 per card with the keyboard. Session analytics at the end cover time, retention and your weakest cards. |
| Drill only the cards you keep failing | Weak Spot Trainer loads only cards with a high forget count and loops until you clear all of them. |
| Rehearse under exam conditions | Exam Simulator generates multiple choice questions from your own deck, with a question count and a timer, and scores you at the end. |
| Bring decks over from another app | Import from Quizlet, Anki as .txt or .apkg, or CSV and TXT, with a review and edit step before anything saves. |
There are twelve study modes in total. Beyond spaced repetition and plain flip review there is a swipe mode for fast sorting, a timed Memory Sprint, MCQ practice, Explain Back where you type an answer in your own words and the AI grades it and hints, an AI tutor with evaluation, explanation, hint and Socratic modes, image occlusion for diagrams, and a Pomodoro mode.
No card syntax to learn
The cost people underestimate when they adopt a notes-first system is not the app, it is the discipline. The cards only appear if you write in the way the app expects, every time, including the week you are ill and the week before finals when you are copying slides at 1am. Miss it for a fortnight and you have notes with no deck behind them.
FORKSAI has no syntax. There is nothing to remember to do while you take notes, because the generation step happens afterwards, from whatever you ended up with. If you would rather write cards yourself, the manual creator is there, with images, drag to reorder and batch editing before you save. It is just not the only path to a deck.
If you are a medical student
Medical is the heaviest use case on the platform, so there are a few things aimed at it directly. The Medical Encyclopedia takes any medical term and returns an anatomy and location breakdown, with physiology and clinical significance sections on the paid plan. Image occlusion covers the labelling work that diagrams demand. Case Study Mode generates a clinical scenario out of a deck you already have, so the same cards get tested as applied reasoning rather than recall.
Deck analytics are built for the same pressure: new and due counts, mastered percentage, retention percentage, a difficulty distribution, and a weak spots list ordered by how often you have forgotten each card, with AI topic clustering on demand when you want to know which subject is quietly sinking.
Moving your existing cards across
Import handles Quizlet exports, Anki decks as .txt or .apkg, and plain CSV or TXT. It runs in three steps: choose the source, upload the file, then review and edit the parsed cards before saving. That middle review step matters more than it sounds, because exports from any app carry formatting that parses badly, and fixing it before the deck exists is far less annoying than fixing it after.
If your material is not in any of those formats, paste it as text or export it to PDF. Both are first class inputs.
When RemNote is the better choice
You want one knowledge base for years, not a term. A notes-first tool where everything links to everything is a different kind of object from a deck library. FORKSAI organises around decks, folders and tags. If you want a web of interlinked notes as your primary artefact, that is not what we built.
You write your own notes and you like writing cards as you go. If your material originates with you and you enjoy phrasing cards while the idea is fresh, inline card creation is a real advantage and generation adds nothing you need.
You already have a system that works. The switching cost of a study setup is genuinely high, and a working habit beats a better tool you use twice. If your current setup is holding, keep it.
A sane way to test it
Do not migrate anything. Take one chapter you were going to make cards from this week, run it through the AI flashcard generator or the PDF to flashcards flow, and compare the deck you get against the deck you would have typed. That comparison takes ten minutes and tells you more than any feature table.
If you want to see the card extraction quality with nothing installed and no account, the free text to flashcards tool runs pattern matching in your browser and exports to CSV or Anki.
Bring one PDF and see what comes out
Upload a chapter you were already planning to revise. If the deck is not better than the one you would have typed, you have lost a minute.
Free plan, no card needed. Bring one PDF and see what comes out.
Questions people ask before switching
- What is the closest alternative to RemNote?
- It depends on which half of RemNote you actually use. If you mostly use it as a knowledge base and the flashcards are a bonus, you want another notes-first tool. If you mostly use it to revise and the note-taking is a means to an end, you want a study tool that builds the deck for you. FORKSAI is the second kind: you give it a PDF, pasted notes, a YouTube link or a photo of a page, and it produces a flashcard deck you can start reviewing straight away.
- Can I move my existing cards into FORKSAI?
- Yes, if you can get them out as a file. FORKSAI imports Quizlet exports, Anki decks as .txt or .apkg, and plain CSV or TXT. The import runs as a three step flow: pick the source, upload the file, then review and edit the parsed cards before anything is saved, so a messy export does not silently become a messy deck.
- Does FORKSAI use spaced repetition?
- Yes. The spaced repetition mode runs FSRS-5, the scheduling algorithm that replaced the older SM-2 family, and you rate each card from 1 to 4 on how confident you were. Cards you keep forgetting come back sooner, and the Weak Spot Trainer mode pulls out only the cards with a high forget count and loops until you clear them.
- Do I still get notes, or is it only flashcards?
- You get both. FORKSAI turns a PDF into structured notes in four styles: structured, Cornell, narrative or outline, with a detail level and a focus area you choose. There is also a summarizer with a rich text editor and a manual notes editor. Notes and decks sit in the same library, in the same folders.
- Is FORKSAI free?
- There is a free plan. It covers one AI-generated deck a week with up to 20 cards, unlimited manual decks, the 7 classic study modes with FSRS-5 spaced repetition, browsing the public decks library and progress tracking. The 5 AI study modes (AI Revision, Exam Simulator, Explain Back, Case Study and Interactive Mind Map), Podcast Mode, the Medical Encyclopedia and the PDF Summarizer are on the paid plan. Current prices and limits are on the FORKSAI homepage, which is the only place we quote them so they cannot go stale here.
- Is FORKSAI good for medical students?
- It is one of the groups it is built around. Alongside the normal deck tools there is a Medical Encyclopedia that returns an anatomy and location breakdown for any medical term, with physiology and clinical significance on the paid plan, plus image occlusion for labelling diagrams and a Case Study Mode that generates a scenario from your deck.
- How long does it take to get a deck out of a PDF?
- Usually well under a minute for a normal chapter. You upload the file, pick a difficulty, the question types and roughly how many cards you want, and the cards land one at a time as they are generated so you can see what you are getting before it finishes.
- Do I have to give up my current notes app?
- No, and for a lot of people that is the right answer. Plenty of students keep writing in whatever they already use and send the finished material to FORKSAI when it is time to revise. Paste the text, upload the export as a PDF, or import a CSV. FORKSAI does not need to own your notes to build you a deck from them.
Keep comparing
Also worth a look: the Anki alternative writeup, the Quizlet one, and why FSRS beats SM-2.