aitutors.me vs Anki for KS3: who each one is really for

Anki is the most capable spaced-repetition system ever made available for free, and it is a poor first tool for a twelve-year-old. Both of those things are true, and neither is a criticism of Anki.

At a glance

What Anki does better than us, plainly

It is worth being straight about this, because a comparison that finds no merit in the alternative is marketing rather than information.

It is free, and it is yours. Anki is open source, your collection is a local file, and nobody can take it away or change the terms. For a long-term learner that matters enormously.

It works offline. On a bus, on a plane, in a house with bad wifi. We are a web product and we do not.

It scales to tens of thousands of cards. Anki is built for collections that outlive a degree. Ours is built for a child's school years.

FSRS is available. Anki's optional modern scheduler is a genuine improvement on SM-2 — roughly the same retention for meaningfully fewer reviews, because it models each card rather than applying a fixed multiplier. We are still on SM-2, honestly because we do not yet have enough review history to train anything better.

Customisation is bottomless. Add-ons, card templates, deck options per subject. If you can describe a study behaviour, someone has built it.

Where it breaks down for a child

You write every card. This is the whole thing. Anki is a superb scheduler with no opinion about where cards come from. Writing good cards is a real skill — one fact per card, exactly one possible answer, no hint that gives the game away — and adults get it wrong constantly. A Year 8 student, unsupervised, at the end of a school day, mostly does not do it at all.

The settings are a trap. Learning steps, ease factors, interval modifiers, new-card limits, leech thresholds. Every one is a decision, and a child has no basis for making it. Defaults exist, but the culture around Anki is one of tuning, and a child who follows a tuning guide meant for medical students will end up somewhere unhelpful.

The backlog wall. Anki's daily limit defaults to 200 reviews. Miss a fortnight and you return to a screen with a large accusatory number. Adults find this demoralising; children treat it as evidence about themselves and stop opening the app. Our queue never shows more than twenty cards, and the backlog drains oldest-first without ever being displayed as a debt.

A card never finishes. With a default maximum interval of one hundred years, a card you know cold does not end — it recedes. That is right for a career and wrong for a childhood: the collection can only grow, and growth is the thing that eventually feels like an obligation.

The two things we took from Anki

We are not shy about it.

Undo. Anki has always let you take back the last answer, because mis-grades happen. We shipped swipe-to-grade before we shipped undo, which was our mistake, and a mis-swipe committed an irreversible interval jump. It now has an undo.

Sibling burying. Anki avoids showing you two cards about the same fact in one session, because the first primes the second. Our cards arrive in decks minted from a single lesson, which makes the problem worse than Anki's — so the queue now interleaves across decks and shuffles within them.

Both are cases where Anki's twenty years of accumulated experience had already found the right answer.

The honest recommendation

Use Anki if your child is sixteen or older, self-directed, and willing to learn card-writing as a skill. It will serve them for decades and cost nothing.

Use us if your child is in KS3, has a tutor, and needs the cards to appear without a negotiation. The scheduling is the same family of algorithm; the difference is that the cards get made, the queue stays finishable, and the cards can end.

They are not really competitors. Anki is a tool. We are a tutoring service that happens to include a scheduler.

FAQ

Is Anki good for a KS3 student?

Anki's scheduling is excellent and free. The obstacle is everything around it: your child must write every card, design it well, and manage settings and backlogs alone. Most children stop at the card-writing.

What algorithm does Anki use?

SM-2 by default. FSRS, a modern machine-learned scheduler, is available and widely recommended but is opt-in — Anki's own manual still describes it as an alternative to the legacy SM-2 algorithm.

Why does Anki let intervals reach 100 years?

Because its typical user wants material retained for a career. Its default maximum interval is 100 years, which means a well-known card effectively never returns. Ours stops at 90 days so nothing vanishes before a termly assessment.