RemNote's central idea is genuinely good: cards should not be orphans. You write notes, mark parts of them as flashcards, and each card keeps a link to the context it came from. It also assumes a person who takes structured notes — and that is the assumption that breaks for a KS3 child.
At a glance
| RemNote | aitutors.me | |
|---|---|---|
| Core metaphor | Notes that contain cards | Lessons that produce cards |
| Who writes the cards | You, while note-taking | The tutor, from the conversation |
| Card keeps its context | Yes — the surrounding note | Yes — the lesson and curriculum locator |
| Default algorithm | SM-2 (FSRS in beta, opt-in) | SM-2, fixed constants |
| Retirement / graduation | Not documented | Mastered and put away |
| Best for | University students, self-teachers | KS3 students with a tutor |
| Assumes | You take notes | You had a lesson |
What RemNote gets right
Cards should not be orphans. This is RemNote's real contribution and it is a good one. A flashcard extracted from nothing is a fact floating free; a flashcard that sits inside the note where the idea was explained can be understood again, not just recalled. When your child gets a card wrong, the useful next step is re-reading the explanation, and RemNote keeps that a click away.
Making cards is folded into work you were doing anyway. The friction of card creation drops a lot when it is a keystroke inside a note rather than a separate task. That is the single best answer to the card-writing problem that any self-serve tool has produced.
It is a serious tool with a serious algorithm. SM-2 by default, with FSRS available. Hierarchical documents, references, spaced-repetition queues per document.
We agree with RemNote's diagnosis and reached a different conclusion about the cure — which is really what this comparison is about.
The assumption that does not hold
RemNote requires a note-taker.
Not just someone who writes things down, but someone who writes structured notes, in an app, at the time of learning, in a form clean enough that marking pieces as cards produces good cards. That describes a motivated undergraduate quite well. It describes very few Year 8 students.
Most KS3 children either take no notes, take notes in an exercise book at school, or take notes so fragmentary that extracting cards from them would produce bad cards. Handing them a note-taking app so they can generate flashcards adds a step to a chain that had already broken at step one.
Our answer is to move the source of cards from your notes to your lesson. The tutoring conversation is the context — it is where the explanation happened, where your child hesitated, and where the phrasing they understand was established. Cards written from it inherit all of that without your child writing anything.
Context, kept differently
We agree cards need context, and we keep it in a different form.
Each card carries a serial like MATH-Y8-ALG-042 — subject, year band, topic group, number — and a locator into the KS3 curriculum map. So a card is not an orphan either: it knows where it lives in the curriculum, what came before it, and which topic it belongs to. On the review page your child can open the card's place on the map; in their Sky, cards cluster by strand.
RemNote's context is the note you wrote. Ours is the curriculum and the lesson. For a child following a national curriculum rather than self-teaching, we think curriculum context is the more useful of the two — and it does not require the child to have produced it.
Where neither of us shines
Being fair to both: neither RemNote nor we are the right tool if what you want is a shared bank of ready-made cards for a specific exam board. Quizlet's library is enormous and Anki's shared decks are deep. We offer a curated Atlas and a pool of cards published by other children, but that is a smaller, more careful collection by design rather than a marketplace.
Who should use which
RemNote, if the learner already takes notes in an app, is self-directed, and wants their cards embedded in a knowledge base they will keep for years.
Us, if the learner is a KS3 child who does not take structured notes, has a tutor, and needs the cards to arrive from the lesson rather than from a blank page.
FAQ
What makes RemNote different from Anki?
RemNote is a note-taking app first. You write notes and mark parts of them as flashcards inline, so cards keep the context they came from rather than living as isolated pairs.
Which algorithm does RemNote use?
Anki's SM-2 by default. FSRS is supported but its own documentation describes it as a beta feature you enable manually.
Can RemNote retire a finished card?
Its documentation describes no retirement or graduation concept. Cards keep being scheduled, which is the same position Anki takes.