Anki vs Rayaad
Anki vs Rayaad
Both run FSRS. Only one of them asks you to configure it. Rayaad is the vocabulary tool for people who want the scheduling, not the settings screen.
Why Rayaad
- FSRS is on from your first card, already tuned. There is no scheduler to enable, no parameter set to optimise, and no monthly maintenance ritual.
- Two answers — knew it, didn't — instead of four. You stop grading yourself and start reviewing, several hundred times a week.
- Pronunciation is part of the card, not an add-on. Both sides speak in their own language, cached after the first play and free to replay forever.
- Listen mode turns the due queue into a session you can do on a walk, with lock-screen controls. It counts as review, because it is.
- Every device on one free account, iOS included. Nothing is held back for a paid app or a second purchase.
Where they differ
- Anki is a general-purpose review engine with custom note types, cloze deletions and image occlusion. Rayaad is built for vocabulary and ships one card shape, which is why there is nothing to configure.
- Anki exposes its scheduler's parameters and expects you to optimise them against your own history. Rayaad ships one tuned parameter set and publishes it, so the tuning is done before you arrive.
- Anki has a large add-on ecosystem. Rayaad has none, and the surface it protects — review, sync, audio, the extension — is the product rather than a plugin target.
- Anki imports its own collection format. Rayaad imports cards from CSV or a pasted list, and starts their scheduling fresh.
Side by side
Prose rather than ticks in both columns. "Supports spaced repetition: yes / yes" is true of nearly every tool here and tells you nothing about which one to use.
| Dimension | Rayaad | Anki |
|---|---|---|
| Who it is for | People learning vocabulary in one or more language pairs who want the scheduling to be right without becoming a project. | Anyone reviewing anything — the tool is deliberately domain-agnostic, and configured per deck. |
| What a card is | A word, its meaning and an optional example, inside a language pair. One shape, so there is nothing to set up. | Almost anything. Custom note types, multiple fields, cloze deletions, image occlusion, LaTeX, audio and video. |
| Scheduling | FSRS-6, on by default, one published parameter set. Nothing to enable and nothing to optimise. | FSRS is available and opt-in; the legacy SM-2 scheduler remains. Parameters are optimised from your own review history, which the manual suggests repeating roughly monthly. |
| Answering | Two answers, by swipe, key or button, with an undo that reverses the scheduling rather than the animation. | Four buttons with configurable intervals. Anki's documentation supports studying with only two of them. |
| Pronunciation | Built in. Both sides spoken in their own language, chosen from the pair's tags and cached after the first play. | Audio can be attached to notes, generated by add-ons, or produced by platform text-to-speech. |
| Hands-free review | Listen mode plays the due queue in the background with lock-screen and headphone controls, on every plan. | No first-party equivalent; community add-ons and third-party apps approximate it. |
| Ready-made content | A first-party catalog authored per language pair, copied into a deck you own outright and can edit. | A large library of user-contributed shared decks covering almost every subject, of variable quality. |
| Platforms and price | Web, iOS and Android on one free account. Sync is never a paid feature. | Free on desktop, Android and AnkiWeb. The official iOS app is a separate one-time purchase. |
| Setup before your first review | Pick two language tags, add a word, answer it. The scheduler is already running. | Deck options, note types and card templates are available immediately and are where new users most often stall. |
The scheduling is the same. The overhead is not.
Anki and Rayaad both run FSRS, and there is no meaningful sense in which one produces better intervals than the other. What differs is everything around it.
In Anki, FSRS is a setting you find, switch on, and then maintain — the manual recommends re-optimising your parameters about once a month, and the deck options screen that holds it also holds learning steps, ease bonuses, leech thresholds and a dozen other decisions. Every one of them is useful to somebody. Collectively they are why a new user’s first session includes choices about scheduling before they have made a single card.
Rayaad has no such screen, because it has no such choices. One scheduler, one published parameter set, on from your first card. The tuning happened before you arrived.
Two answers, and why that is the stronger design
Rayaad asks one question per card: did you know it. Anki offers four buttons and expects you to place your recall on a scale.
The middle two are where self-assessment breaks down. “Hard, but I got there” is the grade people are least consistent about, and inconsistent grades make a memory model worse rather than better. Removing the choice removes a decision from every card — several hundred a week — and FSRS is designed to work correctly from two grades, which Anki’s own documentation supports.
You lose the ability to record a shade of difficulty. You gain a session you can finish with one thumb on a bus.
Vocabulary has different requirements, and Rayaad meets them
A general review engine treats a word like any other fact. A vocabulary tool knows that each side of a card is in a different language, and that changes what the software owes you:
Sound is not an attachment. Rayaad speaks both sides in their own language, chosen from the pair’s tags rather than guessed from the characters — the guess is why so many tools mispronounce short words with confidence. A clip is generated once and cached, so hearing a word a hundred times costs the same as hearing it once.
A session should fit in a walk. Listen mode plays the due queue in the background with lock-screen and headphone controls, and the answers it records are ordinary reviews.
Reading is where vocabulary becomes yours. The browser extension puts words you have already learned back into the pages you read anyway, with the matching done entirely in your browser.
What moving costs, stated plainly
Rayaad imports cards from a CSV or a pasted list. It does not import a review history, so a migrated card starts its scheduling fresh. For a large mature collection that history is worth real money in time, and the sensible move is not to migrate it at all: export the two or three hundred words you are actively working on, bring those, and leave the rest where it is.
There is no rule against running both. Most people who switch do it one deck at a time.
Try Rayaad alongside Anki
Nothing to uninstall and nothing to migrate. Add a handful of words you keep losing and see whether they stop being lost.