SuperMemo Alternatives: Which SuperMemo Did You Mean?

Two different products are called SuperMemo, and which one you had open decides everything that follows. If it was the Windows desktop program, Anki is the honest default and the switch costs you incremental reading. If it was the subscription at supermemo.com, you were using a language app, and every desktop recommendation on the internet is aimed at somebody else.

That confusion is the real reason this search is so unsatisfying. Ranked lists of SuperMemo alternatives almost never say which SuperMemo they mean, so a reader who wanted a cheaper way to drill Spanish vocabulary gets told about a Windows program with a $68 licence, and a reader who wanted incremental reading on a Mac gets told about a phone app that cannot open their collection.

Every price, platform and quotation below is sourced to the page it appears on, and the sources include the ones that argue for staying. SuperMemo 20 is a current, actively sold release, so leaving is a decision rather than an evacuation.

Which SuperMemo are you actually trying to replace?

Four addresses carry the name, and they are doing three different jobs. Work out which one is yours before reading another word of advice.

• The Windows desktop program. Sold at supermemo.store, which is also where super-memo.com sends you. SuperMemo 20 for Windows is $68.00, on what the page calls a "One-time purchase, lifetime license", and the platform line reads "Windows 10 / 11". This is the original spaced repetition software and the home of incremental reading.
• The language-learning app. A separate commercial product at supermemo.com. Its App Store listing is published by "SuperMemo World sp. z o.o.", is free to download, and carries in-app purchases headed by "SuperMemo.com Premium" at $9.99 and "Premium Subscription 12 months" at $99.99. The pitch is language courses, AI conversation practice and voice translation.
• The writing. super-memory.com is the article archive, where Piotr Wozniak’s own material lives, and supermemo.guru is the wiki that carries the algorithm and memory theory. Neither sells you anything. Both are frequently mistaken for the product.

The two products are less separate than they look, which adds a final twist. The requirements list on the SuperMemo 20 page notes that its newest optimization "may require supermemo.com API access", so the desktop program now reaches into the other domain for part of its scheduling work. They remain separate purchases with separate collections.

Is SuperMemo abandoned? SuperMemo 20 says otherwise

It is actively developed, and this is the assumption worth checking first, because a lot of the writing about SuperMemo reads like an obituary.

SuperMemo 20 for Windows is listed on the official store at $68.00, with an upgrade for existing owners at $32.00. The SuperMemo 19 page dates the handover for you, offering that "Customers who ordered SuperMemo 19 in March 2026 can receive a free upgrade to SuperMemo 20." The page leads with "42 years of memory science, now running five algorithms at once" and stakes the older claim plainly: "SuperMemo invented spaced repetition software". Its headline feature is the Algorithm Arena, where "Five spaced repetition algorithms run in parallel on your data" and the one that predicts your recall best earns more weight in the schedule. The five are SM-20, tagged as the "current champion", alongside SM-19, FSRS, SM-15, and SM-2, which the page labels "The engine behind Anki".

The rest of the release is unglamorous and practical: "Read and extract directly from PDF files in incremental reading", YouTube inside a WebView, MathJax formula rendering, AI explanations while extracting text, a 64-bit rebuild, and a dark theme.

So why does everyone think it died? Because the documentation around the product is far older than the product. The version comparison page at super-memory.com, titled Which SuperMemo?, is stamped "Updated: May 30, 2016" and tops out at SuperMemo 17. The front page of that site still points its Buy and Upgrade links at the SuperMemo 19 product pages, a release behind what the store itself sells. A visitor who lands there reasonably concludes the project stopped a decade ago. It did not.

There is a genuine bargain hiding in that stale page, though. It prices SuperMemo 15 from 2011, and every version before it, at "free ($2 registration entitles to a Freeware Upgrade)", which is the cheapest door into real incremental reading that exists. The Anki manual supplies the fair warning: very old versions have been made available for free, and "they are quite limited for modern use".

So what actually sent you looking?

Name the wall before shopping. Six different frustrations arrive through this one search phrase, and they route to six places, only some of which are schedulers.

Why Anki is the default answer, in Anki’s own words

The most useful description of SuperMemo’s weaknesses is published by its main competitor, and it is unusually fair. The Background chapter of the Anki manual opens by giving SuperMemo the credit. It traces the spacing effect back to a result that "was reported in 1885 by a German psychologist called Hermann Ebbinghaus", notes the paper method that followed when "One example was in 1972, when a German scientist called Sebastian Leitner" popularised boxes of cards, and then lands on the software: "SuperMemo pioneered the concept of a system that keeps track of the ideal time to review material and optimizes itself based on the performance of the user."

Both of those ancestors are worth understanding before you pick a replacement, because they are what every option on this page is an implementation of. Our explainers on the shape of the forgetting curve and the Leitner box system cover the two ideas the software is built on.

Then the same chapter turns, under a heading reading Why Anki, and the criticism is specific enough to check yourself: "The program is often criticized for being buggy and difficult to navigate. It only runs on Windows computers. It is proprietary software, meaning that end-users cannot extend it or access the raw data." The verdict lands in one sentence: "And it is considerably easier to use than SuperMemo."

The practical side matches. Anki states that "The free computer version is available for all major platforms", covering Windows, macOS and Linux, with free AnkiWeb sync between them. Android is free through AnkiDroid, and "AnkiMobile is the official iOS app", a paid one-off on the App Store. Measured against a $68.00 Windows-only licence, that is a wide gap on money and a wider one on reach.

Anki is also where the other SM-2 descendant sends people. If you are weighing the open source options against each other, our piece on where Mnemosyne runs out walks this lineage from its other end. For everything sitting outside the SM family altogether, start with our survey of spaced repetition tools.

Does Anki run the same algorithm as SuperMemo?

No, and the gap is about thirty-five years wide. The Anki manual states its own lineage plainly: "Anki’s spaced repetition system is based on an older version of the SuperMemo algorithm called SM-2." That design comes from Wozniak’s 1990 thesis, where the very first sentence is a date stamp: "I wrote the first SuperMemo program in December 1987".

Since then the two have walked in different directions. Anki added FSRS, which the manual describes as an algorithm that "has been integrated as an alternative to the legacy SM-2 algorithm". SuperMemo went through SM-15 and SM-19 to SM-20, and then, in a turn nobody predicted, put FSRS into its own Algorithm Arena to compete against them.

Two things follow. Anyone telling you Anki runs SuperMemo’s algorithm is describing 1990. And anyone leaving SuperMemo purely because they want a better scheduler is probably walking the wrong way, because the newest SuperMemo runs the Anki scheduler too.

Incremental reading is the one thing nothing replaces

This is the section that should stop some people from switching. Incremental reading is the workflow where long articles are imported whole, read in small portions across many sessions, and progressively cut down into extracts and then into questions. Wozniak’s guide to incremental learning describes the point of it as being able to "read thousands of articles at the same time" without losing the thread of any of them, and claims the field outright: "Currently, SuperMemo is the only software that implements incremental learning".

Treat the date on that claim carefully. The same page describes itself as written when "Incremental learning is the fastest and the most comprehensive way of learning available to students at the moment of writing (2013)", so it is a decade-old boast by the person selling the software. The awkward part is that it has held up.

The nearest thing anywhere else is a community add-on, and the AnkiWeb add-on listing tells that story without any help from me. Search it and what comes back is a short row of volunteer projects at different stages of upkeep. One of them advertises itself in its own title as an "unofficial clone" of the original, and another spends the opening characters of its title telling you not to install it. Read the list yourself and check the modification date on whichever entry you land on, because the ordering and the upkeep both shift. That is a thin foundation for a habit you intend to keep for a decade.

If what you want is reading and cards living in one place, rather than incremental reading specifically, RemNote is the closest modern shape, and our comparison of RemNote and Anki covers where each one gives out.

Can you take your collection with you?

Check this before you decide anything, because it is the step most switching guides skip. The Anki manual on importing lists what it accepts in one sentence: "Anki can import text files, packaged Anki decks created by the export feature and Mnemosyne 2.0 .db files." SuperMemo appears nowhere on that page.

The practical route out is therefore a plain text or CSV export from SuperMemo, imported into Anki as a text file. Your items survive. Your review history, your priorities, and your incremental reading queue do not, because no field in a text file carries them. Somebody with a twenty-thousand item collection and fifteen years of scheduling data attached is looking at a genuinely expensive move, and that cost belongs in the decision rather than at the end of it.

Run the export first, import a small slice, and study it for a week before committing. Keeping the original SuperMemo database until the new tool has behaved sensibly for several review cycles costs nothing and has saved a lot of collections.

What GeniusPal does here, and the collection it will never manage

The boundary goes first, because on this particular page getting it wrong would be expensive.

GeniusPal is not a spaced repetition system, and it does not manage a collection. Nothing inside it schedules anything: no queue of items falling due, no SM-2, no SM-20, no FSRS. Incremental reading is absent. A SuperMemo database cannot be imported, and there would be nowhere to file it if it could. Twenty thousand items with fifteen years of review history attached belong in Anki, and if that describes you, this section is addressed to somebody else. Putting that in writing is the only thing that earns the section its place on the page.

One small piece of spacing behaviour does exist, and it is worth describing precisely so that nobody reads a scheduler into it. Mastery is awarded on a streak of correct answers. The streak refuses to move more than once inside a fixed window, so two passes through the same set in one evening prove nothing to it. And the award expires, dropping the question back among the weak ones. There is no more to the mechanic than that. It exists to stop the product certifying learning it has not watched happen, and it puts nothing on a calendar.

The row it does answer is the last one in the table, the only entry there that no scheduler in forty years has touched. Hand over a document, a PDF, an exported slide deck, or a link, and the questions and flashcards get written out of those pages for you, so the typing that usually strangles a collection never happens. Quiz mode scores every set. Paid plans replay the same questions as flashcards and as written recall, the second of which keeps the answer hidden until yours has been typed. A daily review sits across every set you own, costs nothing on any plan, and draws on both the questions you got wrong and the ones you have yet to face.

One thing here will feel familiar to anybody who has ever fed a document into SuperMemo. Give GeniusPal a past exam paper and it measures the shape of it: how topics are weighted, which question formats dominate, which command verbs keep coming back. Questions then come out of your own notes wearing that shape, so the facts stay yours while the styling comes from the paper. What that produces is a reading of one document, and it forecasts nothing about the exam in front of you.

Prices, with the catches named. Signing up buys two generations, and two is what the account holds forever, since no month tops the number back up. Those free sets are 10 questions apiece and may be sat twice each, and the whole account carries a single past-paper reading, spendable once across both sets rather than once per set. Student runs $14.99 monthly and covers 100 generations, sets stretching to 30 questions, ten styles a month, and the two extra modes. Genius is $59.99 for twelve months under a fair-use cap. Whatever the source, treat generated questions the way you would treat a deck downloaded from a stranger, and read one through before trusting it.

So what should you open tonight?

Give the wall a name and the answer falls out. If you were using the language app at supermemo.com, nothing above applies to you and you want another language app. If the price or the Windows requirement is the problem, install Anki, which is free on three desktop platforms and on Android. If you assumed the program was dead, it is not, and SuperMemo 20 is a real release with a real changelog. If it is the interface and the learning curve you cannot face, Anki will not rescue you, because it is plain rather than modern, and RemNote or another browser-first tool is where a current one lives. If you want a stronger scheduler, note that the newest SuperMemo now runs FSRS alongside its own algorithms, so switching for that reason moves you sideways. If incremental reading is why you are there, stay, because the alternatives are volunteer add-ons whose upkeep you would have to check yourself. And if the true problem is that your collection stopped growing because writing items is tedious, a different scheduler will disappoint you in exactly the same way the last one did.