I tried every study app. Here's the best one

Over five years of engineering I've tried almost every study app people recommend: Quizlet, Anki, NotebookLM, ChatGPT, Notion, Speechify, Goodnotes, Otter and a couple of focus timers that grow little trees. Most of them are good at what they do. The problem isn't any one app. It's that each one solves a piece, and studying a whole course ends up being a juggling act between six windows, six accounts and, quite often, six subscriptions.

Here's what each one does well, where it falls short, and why I ended up building my own. Full disclosure up front: mine is Filmina, so keep that in mind. I'm trying to be fair to the others, because I still use several of them.

Quizlet: fast flashcards, but loose ones

Quizlet is probably the first study app you ever heard of. You build a set of flashcards (term on one side, definition on the other) or find one somebody else already made, and you drill it with a handful of game modes. For vocabulary, dates or anatomy it works really well, and borrowing other people's sets saves time.

What didn't work for me:

• The card is cut off from the lecture. A card tells you what a concept is, but not which slide it came from or how it connects to what came before. You learn isolated definitions, and the exam asks about relationships.
• Someone else's set isn't your course. A set from another university follows another syllabus, another notation and another professor. Study from it and you're studying something close to your course, not your course.
• The best parts kept moving behind the paywall. Over the years, several modes that used to be free became part of the paid plan.

Anki: the best spaced repetition, and the most work

Anki is the med school favourite for a reason: its spaced repetition algorithm is about as good as it gets, and the spacing effect is one of the most solid findings we have about memory. Give it time and Anki will have you remembering things months later.

The cost is exactly that: time.

• You write every card yourself. Turning an eighty-slide deck into good cards takes hours, and those hours go into typing, not into understanding the material.
• The learning curve is steep. Decks, note types, add-ons, algorithm settings. It's incredibly powerful, and it clearly was built by very technical people for very technical people.
• It's for remembering, not understanding. Anki assumes you already understood what you put on the card. If the slide didn't make sense, the card won't either.

NotebookLM: great for questions, far from the lecture

Google's NotebookLM surprised me the most. You upload your PDFs, ask questions, and it answers with citations pointing to where each part came from. It also makes those Audio Overviews everyone shares: two AI hosts chatting about your material like a podcast.

Where it falls short for studying from lecture slides:

• The podcast picks what to talk about. Two hosts having a good time lean into the interesting parts and skim the dull ones, which tend to be exactly what ends up on the midterm. There's no way to tell which slide got skipped.
• You don't listen while looking at the slide. The audio is in one place and the PDF in another, so you never know which part of the page they're on.
• Everything happens in Google's cloud, under your account and within the usage limits of whatever plan you're on.

If you want the details, I compared them point by point in Filmina vs NotebookLM.

ChatGPT and friends: they answer everything, and summarise too little

Paste your PDF into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and it will explain it, write practice questions and answer your doubts at 3 a.m. For asking questions they're the best thing around, and I still use them.

For studying an entire deck they have one deep problem: they leave things out. Ask for a summary of sixty slides and you get five beautifully written ideas. From where you're sitting there's no way to know what was dropped, and what was dropped is what shows up on the final. On top of that, every new chat starts from zero: it doesn't know what you studied yesterday or what you struggled with. I went into this in more depth in Filmina vs ChatGPT.

The rest: Notion, Speechify, Goodnotes, Otter

These aren't study apps in the strict sense, but they all end up in the stack:

• Notion is where my notes live. Brilliant for organising, but it doesn't explain anything: it stores what you already understood.
• Goodnotes and Notability are the iPad version of a notebook. Perfect for writing on top of a PDF, and just as silent as paper.
• Speechify and other text-to-speech readers read out what's written. On a slide, that's three six-word bullets: hearing them doesn't add what's missing, because what's missing was never written down.
• Otter and other transcription tools give you the text of the lecture, but separate from the slides. Afterwards you have to match what was said to each slide by hand.
• Forest and pomodoro timers help you sit down. Useful, but they don't do the studying.

The real problem: everything is fragmented

Put all of that together and a normal study session looks like this: the PDF in Preview, the question in ChatGPT, the notes in Notion, the cards in Anki, the audio in NotebookLM and the timer on your phone (which is exactly where you shouldn't be looking). Every switch breaks your focus. Every app has its own account, its own limits and, for several of them, its own monthly bill.

Worse, none of them knows what the others know. The Anki card doesn't know which slide it came from. The chat doesn't know what you wrote down in the lecture. The podcast doesn't know what you got wrong yesterday. The one stitching it all together is you, by hand, at one in the morning.

Why the best one, for me, is Filmina

That's why I made Filmina: I wanted all of that in one place, built around what I'm actually given to study, which is the professor's slide deck. It's a Mac app that explains your PDFs and presentations out loud, slide by slide, with a frame that shows which part of the page it's talking about. It explains everything, not just what it found interesting: the code checks that no block on the slide is left unexplained.

And what's spread across the other apps sits together here, on the same lecture:

• Ask: one chat about the slide you're looking at and another with the whole lecture, which tells you which slides each answer comes from. That's the NotebookLM and ChatGPT part, with your material right in front of you.
• Practice: questions that adapt to how you're doing and come back the next day, three days later or a week later depending on whether you got them right. And Review, which makes you recall a concept before showing it to you. That's the Anki and Quizlet part, without writing a single card; it's all in Practice and review.
• Your lecture notes inside the document: typed, dictated, read from a photo of your notebook or transcribed live while the professor talks. Mina takes them into account when explaining. That's the Notion and Otter part, tied to each slide.
• A summary by topic when you finish, to read or listen to.

It all runs on your Mac: your PDF isn't uploaded anywhere, there's no account to create, no credits that run out halfway through the night, and you pay once.

To be fair, it has limits too. It's Mac only, Apple Silicon only, it doesn't interpret images or diagrams (it flags them so you look at them yourself) and, like any language model, it can get things wrong: if the voice and the slide disagree, trust the slide. If you're on Windows, the combo that worked best for me before Filmina was a chatbot for questions plus Anki for recall, following the method in how to study from lecture slides.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best study app?

It depends on what you're studying. For standalone vocabulary, Quizlet or Anki; for asking questions, an AI chatbot. If you study from your professor's slides and PDFs and you have a Mac, Filmina puts the explanation, the questions, the practice and your notes in one place.

Is Anki better than Quizlet?

Anki, if you'll be studying for a long time and don't mind writing your own cards: its spaced repetition is stronger. Quizlet, if you want to start fast or use sets that already exist. Both assume you already understand the material.

Is NotebookLM good for studying?

It's very good for asking questions about your documents, with citations for every answer. For studying a whole slide deck it falls short, because the Audio Overview chooses what to cover and you don't hear it while looking at each slide.

Are there free study apps?

Yes. Anki is free on desktop and Android, and NotebookLM and Quizlet have free plans with fewer features. Filmina has a free version that explains the first hundred slides of every document.