Anki users tend to get stuck at the same few spots Anki itself was never built to handle — where cards come from, what to review first across many books, how to keep your daily queue from piling up. MarginNote fills in those spots. FSRS-native · apkg both ways · your AnKing deck keeps working.
"I am a doctor and using it in collaboration with Anki app. My most favourite feature is ability to reach concerning part of the book directly from an Anki card."
FOUR THINGS ANKI WASN'T BUILT FOR
Anki nails "when to review." But heavy users typically run into the same few spots Anki was never built to handle — where cards come from, what to review first across many sources, how to keep some material out of the SRS queue without losing it. SuperMemo's creator Piotr Wozniak also pointed at these in his work on long-term retention.
MarginNote's design hypothesis: these parts deserve product surface, not external workarounds. The four sections below explain each one and what MN does about it.
Self-made cards tend to stick better than downloaded ones — Anki's own manual recommends building your own deck. But most users grab AnKing in practice because typing each card is too slow. The gap is not "shared decks are bad"; it's "self-made beats shared, and the cost difference is the only reason you wouldn't."
With ten textbooks plus a deadline, "what should I review next?" is mostly left to your working memory. Anki's per-card ease adjustment doesn't operate at this layer. SuperMemo's priority queue + Auto-Postpone do — schedule across all open material, demoting low-priority items so they don't pile up as overdue.
Not everything worth remembering belongs in SRS — tomorrow's quiz, an attending's pimping question, anatomy you'll see again next block. Folding a mind-map node, hiding a highlight, covering a diagram — these are also retrieval, and they don't compound your daily card count. Anki assumes everything memorizable goes in the queue; that's a structural source of pile-up.
Anki cards are isolated units; reviewing them out of their original chapter loses the context that helped encode them. Chapter 2 broken into 8 isolated cards is a structural loss. Block review treats a mind-map third-level branch as one review unit so the surrounding context stays in view.
EVIDENCE FROM THE ANKI COMMUNITY ITSELF
A specific failure mode of long-running Anki decks is widely discussed in the Anki community under the name "ease hell": as cards lapse, intervals collapse, and overdue counts compound, daily review crowds out new learning. The literature most relevant to MarginNote's positioning is not our user research — it's what the Anki community itself has documented:
What FSRS solved is the algorithmic component of pile-up — over-aggressive interval shrinkage on lapse. What it did not solve is the structural component: some material doesn't actually need long-term spacing, and putting it in the queue at all is the original mistake. Tomorrow's quiz, an attending's pimping question, anatomy you'll re-encounter next block — these don't need to compound your daily review count to be remembered. That's the gap MarginNote's light-track recall fills (Gap 3 above).
WHAT MN DOES ABOUT EACH
We don't claim MN produces better memory outcomes than Anki — that would need a controlled study we haven't run. What's listed below is what the product actually does, mapped to the four points above.
Turn reading excerpts into cards that retain a path back to the source. You can also prepare cloze or image-occlusion material for review. Understand the passage first, then choose what you need to remember.
Choose material to remember, add it to review and practice according to the review schedule. When you get stuck, follow a card back to its source to check the context and adjust what you study.
Mind-map node folding, highlight blanking, rectangle & highlighter occlusion with recall mode, handwriting layer hide/show. Each is a retrieval attempt. None adds to your daily review count. The SRS queue gets reserved for material that genuinely warrants long-term spacing.
Every card stays linked to book → chapter → mind-map node → source paragraph. During review, the surrounding chunk is one tap away. Block review lets you treat a third-level branch as a single review unit instead of eight isolated cards. Tag-bound chunks (e.g. #renal #weak) let you review a topic as a contextualized session.
Same algorithm family Anki uses. Bidirectional apkg means your AnKing deck imports, and anything you build in MN exports back as a separate deck Anki can layer in. You don't choose between MN and Anki; you choose how to allocate work between them.
Inside the queue, priority adjustment is a filter operation. color = red AND tag = weak AND added < 7d assembles a temporary review session in two taps. No deck restructuring, no per-card ease tweaks.
REAL APP STORE REVIEWS
Verbatim from the App Store. Author handles, dates, countries, and review IDs are recorded for audit. Selected from a 1,482-review English corpus retrieved via the Appfigures API.
"Most importantly, this is hands down the most intuitive and effective reading, note-taking, research, and writing tool I have ever tried. The method I have developed works exactly like I always wanted it with Margin Note 3 and offered more that I didn't even know I needed or wanted. I love that the notes highlighted link between the mindmap and the document, unlike notability, adobe, and Evernote."
280803903327LYbJwB-9W6vGuVX4ODTzRWQ"Throughout medical school and residency I was constantly looking for a program that let me upload electronic textbooks to highlight and annotate with easy referencing. I tried everything, Goodnotes, Onenote, Evernote - you name it I tried it, and while they all worked fine/ok for annotation and highlighting, they all struggled when it came to reviewing what I'd already gone over. Once I found MarginNote I was hooked."
280893313767LEKQwcqOb0XOzuW__JyTczA"Forget Notability or Goodnotes, this is the app you want. You can make space as margins around textbooks (hence margin note) but now you can even split the book at any position to make space to write as much as you want - a feature criminally lacking in all other apps. You can make mind maps, review items using spaced repetition, and have an infinite canvas to write on (some other ENTIRE apps are JUST that, here it is dropped so casually as an add on feature)."
337383547083LsYEvtzhhHTU7x7iDqzBKSQWe have written this comparison page to be defensible, not promotional. The lines we will not cross:
Free 14-day trial. macOS and iPadOS. FSRS-native. apkg in/out. Your AnKing deck still works.