What Anki is genuinely better at
Any honest comparison has to start here, because for a lot of people the right answer is "keep using Anki":
- It is free on desktop and Android, and open source. The official iPhone and iPad app is the one paid piece, sold as a one-time purchase that funds development.
- The scheduler is the best available. Anki ships FSRS, a modern spaced-repetition algorithm, and lets you tune the intervals yourself.
- It will do anything. Custom card types, cloze deletions, add-ons, images, your own audio, arbitrary fields.
- Shared decks exist for everything, including large, well-made Spanish frequency decks.
- It syncs across devices and your data is yours.
If you already have a deck you like and you enjoy tuning your settings, nothing below is a reason to move.
Where Anki costs you time on Spanish specifically
The friction is not the algorithm. It is everything around it:
- You have to source the content. A shared Spanish deck may have no audio, machine translations, no example sentences, or 15,000 cards with no sensible order to learn them in. Vetting one takes real time.
- Audio is not guaranteed. Many Spanish decks are text-only, and adding audio to thousands of cards is a project of its own.
- There is no speaking practice. Anki shows and hides; it does not listen. For a language you intend to speak, that is a gap you have to fill elsewhere.
- Spanish-specific things are not built in. Noun gender, articles, and verb conjugation drills are all possible in Anki — as things you construct yourself.
- On iPhone it is a paid app. Reasonable for what it is, but it means you cannot casually try it on an iPhone.
Side by side
| Anki | Hola Cards | |
|---|---|---|
| Content | You supply it: build or download a deck | Spanish vocabulary is built in and ordered by level |
| Audio | Only if the deck includes it | On every card |
| Speaking practice | Not included | Voice modes with on-device recognition |
| Scheduling control | Full: FSRS with tunable intervals | Automatic, not user-tunable |
| Platforms | Desktop, Android, iOS, web sync | iPhone and Android |
| Cost | Free on desktop and Android; paid iOS app | Free to download; optional Premium subscription |
| Setup before you start | Choose and vet a deck | Open it and start |
| Custom cards | Anything you can design | Your own word groups, fixed card format |
A rule for choosing
Stay with Anki if you want control over the algorithm, you study more than one subject, you are on desktop a lot, or you already have a deck that works.
Try something else if you have downloaded three Spanish decks and abandoned all three, if your reviews are silent because your deck has no audio, or if you want to practise saying the words rather than only recognising them.
Hola Cards is the second case. The Spanish content is already there, ordered from A1 to C2, with audio on every card, example sentences, and voice modes that check your pronunciation. There is nothing to assemble first.
What you give up is control: you cannot tune the scheduler, there is no desktop version, and you cannot invent your own card types. That trade is the entire point of it.
You can also use both. Plenty of people keep a specialised Anki deck for grammar or exam vocabulary and use a dedicated app for daily Spanish practice.
Common questions
Is Anki free for Spanish?
Anki is free on desktop and free on Android through AnkiDroid. The official iPhone and iPad app is a paid one-time purchase, which is how development is funded. Shared Spanish decks are free to download.
What is the main downside of Anki for Spanish?
The content problem. Anki gives you an excellent review engine and no Spanish. You either build the cards or vet a shared deck, and many Spanish decks have no audio and no example sentences.
Does Hola Cards use spaced repetition?
Yes — cards you get wrong come back sooner and words count as learned only after your accuracy stays stable. The intervals are managed automatically and are not exposed for tuning the way Anki exposes them.
Can I import my Anki deck into Hola Cards?
Not directly. You can build your own word groups inside Hola Cards, and the guides on this blog include copy-ready word lists you can paste in as a group.
Disclosure: Hola Cards is published by the owner of this website. App features described here were verified on 3 August 2026. Details about other apps come from their own official documentation and can change — check the current version before you decide. No app on this page is given a star rating, because we have no independent rating data to give.