You’ve built up a deck of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Anki cards over months or years, and switching apps feels like it would mean throwing all of that away. It doesn’t have to. The cards themselves — the actual content you’ve put time into — are almost always portable, even if the app around them isn’t.
Learning how to import Anki decks into a new app is usually a matter of exporting to a plain format and mapping the fields correctly, not rebuilding your deck from scratch. Anki has been the default flashcard tool for a lot of serious learners for years, largely because it’s free and endlessly customizable, but that flexibility comes with a steep interface and a look that hasn’t aged particularly gracefully. This post covers how to bring your existing decks over to something friendlier without losing your progress.
What Actually Transfers When You Import
Anki decks are, at their core, structured text plus media files. The front and back of each card, any tags, and any attached images or audio can all be exported and read by another app, as long as that app supports the same import format. What generally does not transfer cleanly is your review history and scheduling data — the exact “this card is due again in 9 days” state that Anki’s algorithm tracked for each card.
That’s a smaller loss than it sounds like. Most spaced-repetition algorithms, including the classic SM-2 algorithm that Anki itself descends from, converge on a similar schedule within a review or two of restarting. You’ll re-rate a card as easy or hard once after import, and the new app’s scheduler picks up from there almost as if nothing changed.
Export Formats to Know
| Format | What it contains | Best for |
|---|---|---|
.apkg (Anki package) |
Cards, media, and deck structure in one file | Full decks with images or audio |
.txt / .csv |
Plain front/back text, tab or comma separated | Text-only decks, quick manual review |
| Shared deck files | Community decks downloaded from AnkiWeb | Starting fresh with a pre-built deck |
If your deck is text-only — vocabulary, definitions, simple facts — a CSV export is usually the cleanest path, because you can open it and sanity-check the fields before importing anywhere. If your cards include images, audio, or complex card templates, the .apkg format preserves more of the original structure.
A few problems come up often enough to be worth watching for before you assume an import went wrong:
- Field order mismatches. If your Anki note type has fields in a different order than the standard front/back layout — say, a reading, a definition, and an example sentence — the new app’s automatic mapping might put content in the wrong slot. Check a handful of cards after import to catch this early.
- HTML formatting artifacts. Anki stores card text as HTML internally, so exported text sometimes carries stray formatting tags. Most modern import tools strip these automatically, but it’s worth spot-checking cards that used bold, italics, or cloze deletions in the original deck.
- Media file paths breaking. Images and audio referenced by relative paths inside an
.apkgcan occasionally fail to link correctly if the import tool doesn’t fully unpack the package. If images look missing after import, re-exporting with media included usually resolves it. - Duplicate cards from re-importing. If you import the same deck twice, or import overlapping decks, you may end up studying the same card under two different entries. Most import tools have a duplicate-detection option worth enabling before a large import.
None of these are common enough to expect on every import, but checking a sample of ten or so cards after any import — rather than assuming it worked and finding out three weeks later — saves more frustration than the check costs in time.
Step-by-Step: Anki to Memwiz
- In Anki, open the deck you want to move and choose Export from the File menu.
- Pick your format — CSV/text for simple decks,
.apkgif media or multiple note types are involved. - Review the exported file briefly to confirm the front and back fields look right, especially if your original deck used custom note types.
- In Memwiz, use the import option and select the exported file — Memwiz reads CSV, Anki, and plain text imports directly, mapping fields automatically for standard front/back decks.
- Spot-check a handful of imported cards before you start a full review session, just to catch any formatting quirks early.
What You Gain by Switching
The point of moving isn’t just aesthetics, though a cleaner interface does make daily review less of a chore. Memwiz adds an AI deck generator that can build new cards from a topic or a block of text, and an AI mnemonic builder that creates a metaphor, visualization, or short story for cards that aren’t sticking through repetition alone — something Anki doesn’t offer natively. Under the hood, both apps use the same spaced repetition logic that decides when each card comes back for review, so the actual studying experience should feel familiar within a session or two.
Memwiz is also built specifically as an Anki alternative for iPhone and iPad, with a native interface instead of Anki’s cross-platform compromise design, and cards that support text, images, and voice recordings out of the box.
Weighing the Switch
There’s no rule against running both apps side by side while you decide, and for some people that’s genuinely the right move — especially if a deck is tied to a specific Anki add-on or a community-shared deck that gets frequent updates you want to keep pulling in. Import a copy into the new app to test the experience without deleting anything from the original. For most personal decks, though, running two systems in parallel just means splitting your review time and your attention across two queues, which tends to work against the exact consistency that makes spaced repetition effective in the first place. If your goal is a friendlier daily habit rather than Anki’s specific customization features, committing fully to one app after a short trial period usually beats an indefinite split.
Being upfront about the limits saves frustration, too. Anki add-ons — custom card templates, third-party statistics plugins, specialized note types built for particular subjects like anatomy or music theory — are Anki-specific and won’t carry over to any other app, because they’re code, not data. If your study routine depends heavily on a specific add-on, that’s worth weighing before you commit to switching.
Your review history and per-card ease factors also don’t transfer, as mentioned earlier. This mostly matters for very large, very mature decks where you’d lose fine-grained scheduling data built up over years. For most learners, especially anyone still actively adding new material, the short recalibration period after import is a small price for a study experience that’s easier to open every day.
Getting Started
- Export your Anki deck in CSV or
.apkgformat, depending on whether it includes media. - Open Memwiz and choose Import, selecting your exported file.
- Check that fields mapped correctly on a sample of cards before running a full study session.
- Re-rate each card honestly on your first pass — the scheduler needs one round to rebuild an accurate sense of what you know.
If your Anki deck has been sitting in an app that feels more like a chore than a study tool, Memwiz imports it directly and adds SM-2 spaced repetition, an AI mnemonic builder, and honest stats on top — all for a one-time $7.99 with no subscription. Take a look at Memwiz before your next study session.