The best study apps for Mac (including the ones you already have)

If you're looking for the best study apps for Mac, the first surprise is that you already have several of them. Preview, Notes, Calendar and Focus modes cover a big chunk of what you need for a course, with nothing to download and no accounts to create. Before installing anything, learn what's already there.

The gaps get filled by a handful of free apps: one to help you remember, one for your notes and, if you study from lecture slides, one that helps you actually understand them. Anything beyond that tends to be noise.

I've spent my whole computer engineering degree studying on a Mac, and this is the list I ended up with after trying a lot of things. It isn't a roundup of the forty most popular apps. It's what I genuinely open during finals week, sorted by what each one is for.

What already comes with your Mac

This is the part most people skip, and it's the easiest one: it's free and there's nothing to install.

• Preview for PDFs. Beyond opening them, it lets you highlight, underline, add margin notes and merge several PDFs into one by dragging thumbnails in the sidebar. I combine all the lecture slides for a unit into a single file before I start studying, which makes reviewing in one pass much easier.
• Live Text. On recent versions of macOS you can select and copy text inside an image, like a photo of the whiteboard or a screenshot of a slide. Handy for pasting a formula or a definition into your notes without retyping it.
• Notes. For quick notes it works really well: a folder per course, checklists and, if you have an iPhone, you can scan a notebook page straight into a note. It syncs on its own through iCloud.
• Spotlight. It also searches the text inside your PDFs. If you can't remember which deck covered "third normal form", type it into Spotlight and it'll find it.
• Dictation and read aloud. macOS dictation lets you talk instead of type, and in Accessibility there's an option to have your Mac read selected text out loud. For long readings, listening while you follow along with your eyes helps you keep the thread.

Staying focused: Focus, Calendar and Reminders

The most underrated study tool on a Mac is Focus modes. Create one called "Study", choose which notifications get through (none, in my case) and turn it on from Control Center. If your iPhone uses the same Apple account, it turns on there too.

Alongside that:

• Screen Time lets you set a daily limit on the apps or sites that eat most of your time. It's not foolproof, but it forces you to make a choice when you want to skip it.
• Calendar for exam dates and deadlines. I add every midterm the moment it's announced, with an alert a week before.
• Reminders for the small to-dos of each course: "ask for the worked solutions", "check whether unit 4 is on the exam".

And a trick I use every single day: click and hold a window's green button to put it in Split View. The PDF on one side, your notes on the other, nothing else on screen.

For remembering: Anki

If you only download one app, make it this one. Anki uses spaced repetition: it shows you each card right before you're about to forget it, and the spacing effect is one of the most solid findings we have about memory. On Mac it's free.

What's worth knowing first:

• You write the cards yourself, and that takes time. It pays off for things you need to know by heart (definitions, formulas, dates), not for turning a whole deck of slides into flashcards.
• Questions work better than definitions. Instead of "Normalization: the process of...", write "Why can a table in second normal form still have redundancy?". It makes you recall instead of recognize, which is what I wrote about in active recall.

If you'd rather have something simpler with ready-made decks, Quizlet works fine in your Mac's browser.

For your notes: Notion or Obsidian

There are two good paths here:

• Notion if you like having everything in a database: courses, lectures, exam dates, notes shared with classmates. It has a Mac app and a free plan for personal use. The downside is that setting up the system takes real work at the start.
• Obsidian if you prefer plain files on your own Mac. You write in plain text, link notes to each other and everything lives in a folder you can open with any other app. It's free for personal use.

The best notes app is the one you're still opening in week eight. If you stopped using it by week three, the tool wasn't the problem, but it wasn't helping either.

For lecture PDFs: beyond Preview

If you mostly study from PDFs and lecture slides, Preview can fall short for big courses. Two alternatives:

• Skim is a free, open source PDF reader built for the Mac. Its strength is that it gathers all your annotations in one list you can scroll through and export, so at the end of a unit you have an index of everything you marked.
• Goodnotes and Notability both have Mac versions and are the best pick if you handwrite on an iPad and want the same notes on your laptop.

The real problem with any PDF reader is that it only shows what's written, and on a slide that's usually three bullet points. What the professor said between those bullets isn't anywhere. That's why I built Filmina: an app that explains your lecture PDFs and slides out loud, slide by slide, with a frame that points at the part of the page it's talking about. There's a full walkthrough of how it explains each slide. Today you use it in the browser, on a Mac or any other computer, and a Mac app is on the way. There's a free plan with a monthly cap on explanation minutes.

And what this list spreads across five apps, Filmina puts in one place, on top of the same lecture. Ask is a chat about the slide you're looking at plus another one about the whole lecture, which tells you which slides each answer comes from: the AI chat, but with your material right there. Practice and Review make you recall the concepts without writing a single flashcard, which is the Anki part. Your class notes live inside the document (typed, dictated, read from a photo of your notebook or transcribed live while your professor talks), like in Notes or Notion. And when you finish, it builds a summary by topic. For me, that's the whole difference: not jumping from app to app to study the same lecture.

For questions: an AI chat, carefully

ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all have Mac apps or run in the browser, and for a question at 11 p.m. they're genuinely useful. Paste in a paragraph you don't get and they'll explain it a different way.

Two lessons I learned the hard way:

• Don't ask it to summarize the whole lecture. It picks what to tell you and leaves things out without saying so.
• Check it against your material. If what it says doesn't match what your professor taught, go with the professor. They're the one grading the exam.

How I combine them during finals week

I put it all into one routine that doesn't have me jumping between ten windows:

1. Calendar and Reminders at the start of the semester, with every date.
2. Preview to merge each unit's slides into one PDF.
3. An app to understand each slide before doing anything else.
4. Notion or Obsidian for what I write in my own words.
5. Anki only for what has to be memorized.
6. Focus on whenever I'm studying, always.

If you'd rather have almost everything in one place, Filmina covers steps 3 to 5 on top of the same slide deck, and the rest stays with your Mac.

If you want to see what each of the big-name apps does well and where it falls short, I covered that in I tried every study app.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free study app for Mac?

Anki, for remembering with spaced repetition, is free on Mac and hard to beat. Together with Preview and Notes, which come preinstalled, it covers almost everything you need without paying anything.

What app should I use to take notes on a Mac?

Apple Notes is enough for quick notes. If you want to organize your whole degree, Notion is better for databases and Obsidian for linked notes stored as your own files; both are free for personal use.

How do I annotate a PDF on a Mac?

Open it in Preview and use the Markup toolbar to highlight, underline or add notes. If you need to export all your annotations together, Skim is a free reader that does exactly that.

How do I avoid distractions while studying on a Mac?

Set up a Focus mode for studying that silences notifications, and use Screen Time to limit the apps that distract you most. Putting your PDF and notes side by side in Split View also helps you resist opening other windows.