Zorbi Alternatives: Who Actually Writes the Cards?

Zorbi is a spaced-repetition app with a Chrome extension for capturing cards as you read. It advertises no AI that writes cards from a file. So the right alternative depends on your wall: want cards drafted for you, a published price, or graded questions? Each of those has a different answer.

Clear up the AI question first, because it is the one most people arrive with. Nothing on zorbi.com or its pricing page offers generation from an uploaded document. The single mention of AI on either page is one sentence, printed on the home page and again above the pricing table, where no row names AI at all: “You’ll also be the first to get access to our AI learning assistant.” That is an early-access promise about something later.

Everything quoted below comes from the Zorbi home page and pricing page, read on 21 September 2026, with three outside tools checked on 20 September 2026. Where GeniusPal loses, that is stated plainly.

What does Zorbi actually do?

It forgets nothing on your behalf. The home page states the whole product in one sentence: “Zorbi makes studying easy by only showing you flashcards when you forget them.” The loop under it runs in three beats: “Read a question”, “Rate its difficulty” and “Come back daily”. Under the second sits “We use your rating to predict when you’ll forget each question.” and under the third “Zorbi only shows you the questions that you’ve forgotten.” The same page claims “Join 153,000+ other students”, which is the company describing itself.

The capture story is the second thing it leads with, and it is easy to misread. The heading is “Create flashcards in seconds from any website or PDF”, and the sentence attached names the mechanism: “The Zorbi Chrome extension makes it easy to create flashcards while you’re watching lectures, reading notes, or summarising a textbook.” The extension rides along beside whatever you have open and takes the friction out of writing a card the moment you spot one. The cards are still yours to write. A PDF here is a page you are reading, never a file the software drafts from.

The third pillar is other people’s tools. The Notion route is described this way: “With Zorbi, you can work with your friends to create notes in Notion. Our integration will turn them into ready-made flashcards on your Zorbi account which you can share with anyone.” The pricing table lists “Import from Anki, Quizlet, CSV” in every column, with a “50MB Limit” on Free, a “100MB Limit” on Pro and “Unlimited” for schools.

The same table shows how generous the free column is. “Spaced repetition flashcards”, “Integrate with Chrome and Notion”, “Add images, gifs, and audio to cards”, “Simple fill-in-the-blank cards” and “Study from any device anywhere” all sit in Free, alongside sharing with a “2 editor limit” against “Unlimited” on Pro. Pro adds “Annotate and hide areas of images”, an “Exam date optimizer”, “Custom spaced-repetition profiles” and “Realistic text-to-speech”, which the page explains with “Zorbi supports over 24 languages and is powered by Amazon Alexa’s technology.” A Schools / Teachers column adds “Set homework in Zorbi”. On price philosophy the home page is pointed: “Other apps make you pay for basic features like changing the colour of text, we’ll never do that.”

Which wall did you actually hit?

Four walls send people looking, and each one has its own answer.

• You want the cards written for you. You arrived with a chapter and you do not want to type a hundred prompts.
• You want to know the price before signing up. You are willing to pay. You want the figure in front of you first.
• You want questions you answer and are scored on. Flipping a card and rating yourself feels like studying while proving little.
• Notion or in-browser capture is why you are there. Then wall four is the one to read.

The first and the third are real reasons to leave. The second is a thing to go and check. The fourth is a reason to stay put.

Wall one: does Zorbi write the cards for you?

No, not on anything its pages advertise. The extension shortens the distance between reading a line and having a card made of it, which is a genuine saving of a different kind. Uploading a document to software that drafts the questions is the other model, and our walkthrough on making flashcards from a PDF the fast way makes the point that it shifts your job from writing to reviewing: skim the draft, cut the trivial, fix the wrong, keep the rest.

Cram advertises that model on the front door. Its home page on 20 September 2026 read “One Free AI Flashcard Maker. Millions of sets. Limitless learning.” and set the upload boundaries at “PDF, PPT, CSV, TXT, or DOCX, 25 MB max. One file at a time.” Our wall-by-wall guide to the alternatives to Cram makes the same recommendation in reverse: if you left Cram believing it could not read your files, go back, because that maker is on the home page.

Brainscape puts the free part in writing. Its pricing page said on 20 September 2026 that “Creating, sharing, and studying your own content is always FREE.”, listed “Use AI to make 100s of flashcards” on the free Basic tier, and priced Pro at “$7.99/mo” billed yearly. Our roundup of the best Anki alternatives for students reaches the same split by habit, and puts an AI-first generator that reads a whole file, such as GeniusPal, in front of anyone studying from PDFs and lecture notes.

Wall two: how much does Zorbi cost?

We cannot tell you, and the reason is mechanical. When we requested zorbi.com/pricing on 21 September 2026, the page rendered the word “Loading...” where the price belongs, and no dollar amount appeared anywhere in the HTML it returned. The figure is assembled in the browser after the page arrives, so nothing reading the raw page ever sees it. Open that page in an ordinary browser and read the number there.

What is published is the shape of the deal, and that is most of what you need in order to decide whether to open the page at all: three columns, a free tier already carrying spaced repetition, both integrations, media on cards, fill-in-the-blank cards and cross-device study, and a Pro tier whose additions are listed above. For scale, GeniusPal Student is $14.99 a month for 100 generations a month, and the GeniusPal free plan allows two generations for the lifetime of the account.

Wall three: questions you answer and are scored on

The losses go first, because on this comparison they are heavy. The Zorbi free column puts no ceiling on how much you may create, and the only free limits the table prints are a “2 editor limit” on sharing and a “50MB Limit” on importing, while the GeniusPal free plan allows two study-set generations for the lifetime of the account with no monthly reset behind them. Zorbi imports from three places; GeniusPal imports from none. Zorbi integrates with Notion and with Chrome; GeniusPal integrates with nothing. It ships no browser extension, no image occlusion of the kind Pro calls annotating and hiding areas of images, and no text-to-speech.

The largest loss is the scheduler, which is the whole of Zorbi. GeniusPal sets no due dates and runs no intervals, so if being told what to review today is the point, this is the wrong swap. The nearest free thing with dials is Anki, which stated on 20 September 2026 that “The free computer version is available for all major platforms.” If you would rather run the spacing yourself, our guide to building a spaced repetition schedule lays out the 2357 method, reviewing on days 2, 3, 5 and 7.

GeniusPal does the one job. Upload a PDF, Word file, PowerPoint, plain text, Markdown or CSV up to 10 MB, or paste a link, and it writes a study set of questions from that material. The free set runs ten questions, entirely multiple choice, with two full runs of each set. Student at $14.99 a month carries 100 generations a month, and Student and Genius both add flashcard mode, recall mode, written quiz answers and sets of up to 30 questions. Every attempt reshuffles the question order and the option order. The daily review is free on every plan and draws up to 20 questions from across your sets, led by the ones you got wrong or have not tried.

Wall four: Notion and in-browser capture, the reason to stay

If your notes live in Notion with other people, or if the extension is how you get through a lecture recording, nothing on this page replaces that. Cram, Brainscape, Anki and GeniusPal all wait for you to come to them. None of them advertises a browser extension or a Notion integration on the pages quoted here.

Weigh that against the thing you came here annoyed about. The capture habit is the part most people struggle to rebuild somewhere else. If the cards you write are good and the only complaint is how long they take, keep Zorbi for capture and spacing, and run one chapter through a generator to see whether a drafted set earns a second tool.

So which one, in one line each

If you want the cards written for you, Zorbi advertises nothing that does that today, and Cram leads with a free AI flashcard maker while Brainscape promises your own content is always free. If you want the price first, open the Zorbi pricing page in a real browser, because the figure is not in the page a fetch returns. If you want questions asked of your own file and a score at the end, GeniusPal does that and only that, with two free generations to test it. If you want review dates you can tune, that is Anki, free on the desktop. And if Notion or the browser extension is why you are here, stay: that is the part nothing above gives back.