Flashcards for medical school, without starting over.

THE SHORT ANSWER

Why Klappa works for medical school.

Klappa is a free spaced-repetition flashcard app that keeps the Anki decks medical students already rely on, schedules included, and adds ways to study them that flashcard review alone does not give you.

Import an .apkg through the Anki Portal and each card keeps its interval, due date, ease and lapses, so in the normal case a card due tomorrow in Anki is due tomorrow in Klappa. Or import the same file into a Klappa deck and study it four ways: Flashcards, Learn, Write and Test.

Klappa was built by a dental student, Fahim Mohi, for his own exam decks. It is free, including Klappa Cortex and Klappa Live, and there is no paid tier. The full side-by-side is on Klappa vs Anki.

BIG DECKS

Large medical decks, with their progress intact.

Klappa reads the kind of decks medical school produces: deep Parent::Child deck trees, cloze cards, custom note types and image-heavy cards, including Image Occlusion from both Anki's built-in type and the older add-on. Card templates are imported, but template scripts do not run.

On the website, a single .apkg can be up to 1.9 GB, and files of 250 MB or more are streamed rather than loaded whole. Klappa for Mac does not use the website's upload cap and reads the collection with a native reader, so a collection too big for a browser tab still opens.

Suspended and buried cards stay suspended or buried, FSRS stability and difficulty come across when Anki stored them, and the Anki Portal keeps custom study and filtered decks. The per-answer review log is not imported: Klappa starts its own log from your first review. The full walkthrough is on import an Anki deck.

MOVE YOUR DECKS

Move a medical school deck into Klappa in four steps.

1. Export from Anki In Anki desktop, open File, then Export, choose Anki Deck Package (.apkg) and pick the deck. Its subdecks come with it.
2. Keep scheduling and media on Leave Include scheduling information and Include media ticked. Without scheduling, every card arrives as new.
3. Import into the Anki Portal Sign in to Klappa, open the Anki Portal and press Import .apkg. When it finishes, Klappa lists how many note types, decks, notes, cards and media files it imported.
4. Choose how to study it Keep it in the Anki Portal to continue your schedule, or use Add to Klappa Library for a separate Klappa copy that studies four ways and starts its own schedule. The Anki deck is never changed.

SCHEDULING

FSRS-6 timing, with FMSR-1 on your Klappa decks.

Klappa schedules with FSRS-6, which sets each card's next due day from your own recall history. Anki Portal decks use each deck's own desired retention, 90% unless you change it.

Klappa decks are set for exam material: they aim at 95% retention and never wait more than 60 days between reviews. On FSRS-6 alone, a card you keep answering Good comes back after about 1, 3, 8, 19 and 43 days, then every 60.

In Study and Learn, Klappa's own FMSR-1 model can change how many days a review card waits, using that card's own review history. It needs at least three reviews of that card first; until then, and for new or relearning cards, the FSRS-6 schedule stands unchanged. FMSR-1 also stays inside the 60-day cap. More on how Klappa schedules reviews and FSRS explained.

FOUR MODES

One deck, four ways to study it.

Klappa decks study in four modes, so the same cards can drill recall, check recognition and make you produce the answer from memory. Anki Portal decks study as flashcard review.

KLAPPA CORTEX

An AI that shows its sources, and what it does not do.

Klappa Cortex is an opt-in study AI: it answers questions from a curated medical library and marks the passages it used, and in Learn it explains your cards choice by choice. To use it, you turn on AI features and confirm you are 16 or older.

Know its limits before you lean on it. The library covers four subjects, biochemistry, pathophysiology, immunology and pathomorphology, and most of it is biochemistry. Cortex never reads your decks, and study guides are generated from text you paste in or a topic name, not from uploaded lecture PDFs.

Past exam papers are where it does the most work. Upload a Word or PDF paper with the correct answers highlighted, and Cortex checks each answer and writes an explanation; study the result in Klappa or export it as .apkg. See past papers to flashcards and Klappa Cortex.

WHERE IT RUNS

Study on the web, or offline on a Mac.

Klappa runs in any modern browser, and Klappa for Mac runs on macOS 11 or later, with separate Apple Silicon and Intel builds.

The Mac app studies with no connection. Open a deck once while online and it stays on your Mac; your grades save on the device and sync with their original scheduling when you reconnect. The website needs a connection. Get Klappa for Mac.

The iPhone and iPad app is submitted to Apple and not yet on the App Store. The web app runs in Safari on iPhone today.

FAQ

Medical students ask.