Mnemosyne Alternatives: Which Wall Did You Hit?

Mnemosyne is still maintained, so the right alternative depends entirely on which wall you hit. Want the same scheduling model with better tooling and a phone client? Anki. Want the deepest, most obsessively developed algorithm? SuperMemo. Want notes and cards in one browser tab? RemNote. Want the cards written for you? That is a different category of product altogether.

Four different frustrations arrive wearing one search phrase. The desktop-era interface. The missing iPhone client. The pace of releases. And the sheer manual labour of typing every card by hand. Those route to four different places, and picking by a generic ranked list is how people end up switching twice.

Everything below links to the page it came from, including the parts that make Mnemosyne look good. Leaving a tool you already know has a real cost, and that cost is only worth paying against a wall you actually hit.

Is Mnemosyne still maintained, or is it abandoned?

It is maintained. That is the assumption this search most often rests on, and getting it wrong is understandable, because two official sources tell different stories about how alive the project is.

The GitHub repository is not archived, and its master branch carries commits through April 2026, including a change adding HTTPS support to the sync client for Android and desktop, plus a round of OSX fixes. The mnemosyne-proj package on PyPI published version 2.11.1 on 13 March 2026.

Now the other story. The newest tagged release on that same repository is 2.11, published on 12 November 2023, and the official download page still opens with the line "The current version of Mnemosyne is 2.11". So a reasonable person checking the release page in 2026 sees a headline version approaching three years old and concludes the project died. The packaging channels say otherwise.

The honest description is a small volunteer project on a slow, deliberate cadence, which is exactly what the project has always said it is. Its own front page frames it as two things at once: "It's a free flash-card tool which optimizes your learning process" and "It's a research project into the nature of long-term memory". The licence file opens with "Code from the Mnemosyne Project follows the AFFERO v3 licence", plus one added provision that a derived work using a non-trivial part of the code keeps the Mnemosyne name visible. Research projects run on academic time. Slow is the design.

Which means: if the thing that sent you searching was a fear that your card collection sits on dead software, you can stop searching. That fear is unfounded. Read on only if one of the next four walls is your actual problem.

Which wall did you actually hit?

Answer this before you look at a single alternative, because the four walls have almost nothing to do with each other.

• The interface feels like 2009. This is a taste problem with a real cost, because an ugly tool is a tool you skip. It is also the wall with the weakest case for switching, since every scheduler underneath is doing roughly the same arithmetic. Anki will not feel dramatically more modern. RemNote and the browser-first tools genuinely will.
• You want to review on an iPhone. Hard wall, no workaround worth recommending. Covered in its own section below.
• The release pace worries you. Mostly a misread, per the section above. Where it is a genuine concern is algorithmic: Mnemosyne has deliberately stayed on its SM-2 descendant while Anki adopted a newer scheduler.
• Typing every card is the bottleneck. The one wall where no spaced-repetition program is the answer, because every one of them assumes the cards already exist.

Only the fourth is a card-making problem. The first three are all scheduler problems, and scheduler problems are solved by other schedulers.

Mnemosyne vs Anki: what actually changes when you switch

Less than the internet implies, and that is the point. Mnemosyne's principles page states its own lineage plainly: "The Mnemosyne algorithm is very similar to SM2 used in one of the early versions of SuperMemo", with modifications for early and late repetitions and, in its words, "a small, healthy dose of randomness to the intervals". Anki scheduled on the same SM-2 family for most of its history. Switching between them changes your tooling while keeping the memory model.

What you gain is platform reach and momentum. Anki states that "The free computer version is available for all major platforms", listing Windows, macOS and Linux, with the desktop version currently at 26.08.1. Sync is free: "The free AnkiWeb synchronization service lets you sync your cards across devices." On phones the split is the thing to know. "AnkiDroid for Android is free and developed by contributors", while "AnkiMobile is the official iOS app and all purchases help fund Anki's development". The App Store lists AnkiMobile Flashcards, from Anki Software LLC, at $24.99 as a one-off purchase.

The other gain is the newer scheduler. Anki now ships FSRS as a documented setting in its deck options, a model fitted to your own review history with a desired-retention dial. Mnemosyne has stayed put, and says why: it will only make modifications to its algorithms based on common sense or if the data tells it there is a statistically relevant reason to do so. That is a defensible position for a research project and a frustrating one for a learner who wants the current state of the art.

What you lose is the research component, and it deserves more than a footnote. Mnemosyne is the only mainstream flashcard program that is also a memory study. Its front page offers the arrangement directly: "If you want, anonymous statistics on your learning process can be uploaded to a central server for analysis." The privacy design is unusually careful for something you get for free. Participation is opt-in and off by default, an anonymous random identifier stands in for you, and the principles page is specific that "your question/answer pairs are identified only as numerical IDs, and contain no information about the text of the cards". The project has been collecting this data since 2006 and says it will make the results available to everyone, on the grounds that charging for volunteered data would be unethical. If contributing to a two-decade longitudinal memory study appeals to you at all, no alternative on this page offers it.

Whichever way you go, the cards themselves are the variable that dominates. A migration moves your scheduling problems and your card-quality problems across intact, which is why writing cards that a scheduler can actually work with pays off more than any switch does.

Does Mnemosyne have an iOS app?

No, and this is the one wall with no way around it. Mnemosyne has a desktop program for Windows, macOS and Linux, and an Android client that the download page describes as "a mobile client which allows you to do offline reviews, as well as syncing with the desktop client", available from Google Play. That is a real, syncing, offline-capable phone app, so Android users hitting this section can stop here.

For iPhone and iPad the official answer is a workaround. The same page says: "For mobile review on other platforms, activate the Mnemosyne webserver on your desktop using the configuration screen, and then review using your browser on your mobile client." It works. It is also unsuitable for the exact situation most people want a phone client for. Your desktop must stay powered on and reachable for the whole session, which rules out the commute, the queue, and the ten minutes before a lecture. And the features page is refreshingly blunt about the rest: after describing the webserver it adds, "Note that this does not contain any security features."

So for iOS specifically, the choice narrows to Anki with the $24.99 AnkiMobile purchase, or a web-first tool whose phone client is included. Nothing about Mnemosyne changes this, and no setting is hiding the option.

What about SuperMemo and the newer web-based tools?

SuperMemo is where the algorithm came from, and it is the right destination only for a specific kind of person. Piotr Wozniak's write-up of SM-2, adapted from his 1990 thesis, opens with the origin story: "I wrote the first SuperMemo program in December 1987 (Turbo Pascal 3.0, IBM PC)." Everything downstream, including the scheduler you are currently using in Mnemosyne, traces to that work.

Two practical notes usually missing from ranked lists. The desktop program is Windows-only and paid, and its prices are public rather than a mystery: the SuperMemo store lists SuperMemo 20 for Windows at $68.00 USD, with SuperMemo 19 at $34.00 and the older SuperMemo 18 at $19.00. Second, the name now covers two different products, which trips people up constantly: supermemo.com sells subscription language courses, while the classic desktop program lives on at super-memory.com and supermemo.store. If you are leaving Mnemosyne because you want a more sophisticated algorithm, the desktop program is the one you mean.

RemNote is the closest thing to a modern answer for the interface wall, because it is a notes app with spaced repetition built into it rather than a card program with notes bolted on. Its pricing page puts a genuinely usable free tier at $0, including unlimited notes and flashcards and unlimited synced devices, with PDF annotation, image occlusion, handwritten notes and the exam scheduler metered down to a handful of uses until you pay. Pro is $8 per month billed yearly at $96, and Pro with AI is $18 per month. Web, desktop and both phone platforms are covered, so the iOS wall disappears at no cost. Our head-to-head on RemNote and Anki goes through where each one breaks down, and the wider field of spaced repetition apps covers the tools that sit outside this particular lineage.

How do you move your cards out of Mnemosyne?

Anki reads Mnemosyne files directly, which makes this one of the gentler migrations in flashcard software. The Anki manual states it in one line: "Anki can import text files, packaged Anki decks created by the export feature and Mnemosyne 2.0 .db files." The database your desktop copy already keeps is an accepted import format, so there is no conversion step to find a tool for. Point Anki at it through the File menu and then Import.

Two expectations, set before you start rather than after. Card formatting rarely survives a migration intact, because the two programs build cards differently, so budget an evening to check how cloze cards and media land. And review history is the asset people most want to carry and most often lose, so verify what actually came across on a small sample before deleting anything. Keep the original Mnemosyne database until a full week of scheduling in the new tool looks sane.

Worth knowing that the traffic runs both ways. The Mnemosyne features page lists "full import from Anki supporting custom card types and learning data, as well as import from SuperMemo and CueCard", so a switch you regret is reversible. That is a real argument for trying the migration rather than agonising over it.

Where GeniusPal fits, and the scheduler it does not have

GeniusPal answers the fourth wall only, and the boundary needs stating before anything else, because getting this wrong would cost you months of review data.

GeniusPal is not a spaced repetition system. It has no due dates, no review queue, no scheduler, and nothing in the SM-2 or FSRS family. If what you value about Mnemosyne is the algorithm deciding when each card comes back, GeniusPal does not replace that, and no amount of feature comparison changes it. Go to Anki. That is the honest recommendation and it is the one this section exists to make.

The one spacing behaviour it does have is worth describing exactly, so nobody reads more into it. A question counts as mastered after a streak of correct answers; that streak can advance at most once per spacing window, so answering the same set twice in an evening cannot certify anything as learned; and mastery lapses after a decay period, at which point the question rejoins the weak pile. That is the entire mechanic. It is a guard against false confidence rather than a scheduler, and it schedules nothing.

What GeniusPal actually does is narrow. Upload a file the course handed you and it writes exam-style questions from those pages, which removes the typing that stops most people keeping a card collection alive. One set comes back, and it runs as a scored quiz. On the Student plan the same questions also run as flashcards and as written recall, where nothing appears on screen until you have committed an answer in your own words.

Generated questions need the same scrutiny as any card you did not write yourself, which is the argument in our piece on whether AI-generated flashcards hold up. Reading the set before studying it is not optional.

The pricing, so nothing surprises you. A new account gets two study-set generations, and that pair is the whole allowance for the life of the account, with no monthly reset behind it. Both run as a quiz. Flashcards and written recall open together on the Student plan, which is 14.99 dollars a month and carries a hundred generations, and Genius is 59.99 dollars for a year against a fair-use ceiling.

So the routing comes out clean. If the release page scared you, the fear was misplaced and you can stay. If you need an iPhone, you need Anki or a web-first tool, and the $24.99 AnkiMobile purchase is the price of the shortest path. If you want a more sophisticated algorithm than a 1990 design, that is SuperMemo on Windows or FSRS in Anki. And if the real problem is that your deck stopped growing because writing cards is tedious, a scheduler was never going to fix that, and switching to a different one will not either.