Using Smara with Anki

Import any .apkg deck and the cards keep working here, cloze deletions and images included. One honest caveat: your Anki review history does not come along, so imported cards start their schedule fresh. Decks you build or generate in Smara export back to .apkg, so nothing you make is locked in. If you study in Anki and only want Smara for generation, that round trip is a supported workflow, not a grudging one.

Card creation is the part of the Anki method everyone agrees is valuable and nobody enjoys at volume. Smara generates cards from lecture PDFs, slides, and notes in your course's emphasis, so the hour of typing becomes minutes of reviewing what it made. The bigger addition is the practice exam: a full sectioned paper with case studies and a worked answer key, which is not what card-based review is for. Missed exam questions become cards in one click, and those can ride back into Anki too.

Smara's default scheduler is SM-2, the algorithm Anki built its reputation on, and FSRS is a setting rather than a plugin: turning it on replays your review history to fit each card's memory state, so nothing resets. Grading is the same honest four levels with interval previews. If you have opinions about desired retention, you will feel at home; if you never want to see a scheduler option, the defaults hold.

Anki's add-on ecosystem, shared-deck community, and a decade of tooling are not things Smara replicates, and popular community decks stay best experienced in Anki. Smara's case is narrower: generation from your own materials, exams with worked keys, and a review loop that needs no setup. The demo shows unedited output, and studying here is free without limits, so trying the combination costs nothing.