An Anki alternative that writes the cards for you.
Anki's scheduler is excellent and its card editor is a second job. Toly keeps the first part and deletes the second: type one line, get a finished card, review it when it is due.
iPhone · Free plan · 7-day PRO trial
Four reasons people go looking for an alternative.
None of them are that spaced repetition stopped working.
You spend longer making cards than reviewing them
Anki assumes you arrive with the content already written. Toly writes the back of the card for you in about a second, so adding a card costs one line of typing.
The setup is the hobby
Note types, card templates, scheduling parameters, add-ons that break on update. Toly has none of that, on purpose — there is one card format and one schedule.
You want it to just work on your phone
Toly is an iPhone app with Sign in with Apple and iCloud sync. No desktop client to keep in step, no sync server to configure.
Your deck stalled at forty cards
Almost every abandoned Anki deck died at the card-creation step. Removing that step is the entire point of Toly.
The scheduler was never the hard part.
Ask anyone who quit a flashcard habit why, and it is almost never the reviews. It is the evening they sat down to turn a chapter's vocabulary into forty cards and decided to do it tomorrow instead.
Toly attacks that specific step. You give it a word, a concept or a question; it works out which one you gave it and writes the back — translation and usage, an explanation, or an answer. About a second per card, and every one of them editable.
- One text field, not a note-type picker
- One card format, not a template language
- One schedule, with nothing to tune
Everything you came to Anki for.
Switching should not mean giving up the mechanism that made flashcards work in the first place. Toly's engine does the same job: each card gets its own interval, growing when you recall it easily and collapsing when you do not.
What is gone is the dashboard of levers on top of it. There are no ease factors to argue about on a forum, because there is nothing to set.
When you should stay put.
Toly is an iPhone app with one card format and no import. If you study on Android or desktop, depend on cloze deletions or custom note types, run community add-ons, or want to hand-tune scheduling parameters, Anki does things Toly has deliberately left out — and you should keep using it.
Toly is for the other case: you know what you want to remember, you are on your phone, and you want the card to exist without writing it.
Questions about moving from Anki.
Is Toly a replacement for Anki?
For most people learning vocabulary or discrete facts on a phone, yes. If you rely on custom note types, cloze deletions, add-ons or fine-grained control over scheduling parameters, Anki does things Toly deliberately does not.
Can I bring my Anki decks across?
Not today. Toly does not import Anki decks. Most people starting with Toly rebuild the cards they actually still review, which is usually a much shorter list than the deck they were carrying.
Does Toly use spaced repetition like Anki does?
Yes. Every card carries its own schedule, and each answer moves the next review out or pulls it back in. The difference is that Toly does not expose any of the parameters for you to tune.
Anki is free. Why would I pay?
Toly has a free plan too — 3 AI-generated cards a day, 3 decks, and the full scheduling engine. PRO, at $2.50/month billed yearly, buys unlimited AI card writing. What you are paying for is the hours you would otherwise spend authoring card backs.
Is Toly available on Android or desktop?
Toly is an iPhone app. If you need Android, Linux or a web client, Anki covers ground Toly does not.
Skip the card-writing evening.
Type the word you were going to look up anyway, and let the schedule handle the rest.
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