Free Flashcard Maker with Spaced Repetition

A simple, free, no-login flip-card study tool with local deck persistence.

Flashcards stores decks of front and back cards in IndexedDB and schedules them with a small SM-2-family spaced-repetition algorithm — not a black box, and not FSRS or Anki's actual engine, but a documented set of interval and difficulty formulas deciding which cards are due today. Grading a card again, hard, good, or easy reshapes when it returns, and study position survives a reload instead of resetting to card one.

How to make flashcards online

Type a title into New deck name and press Enter or Create deck; the free tier holds up to 50 decks.
Open the Cards tab and add cards one at a time with the Front and Back fields, or go to Import & export and load a JSON file or a two-column front,back CSV.
To draft a deck with AI, open Generate cards with AI, copy the prompt into your own chatbot, paste its JSON reply back, and import it as a new deck.
In the Study tab, use Browse all cards to flip through everything, or Due today to see only the cards whose review date has arrived.
In Due today, flip each card and grade yourself Again, Hard, Good or Easy; the grade sets when that card comes back.

Why spaced repetition helps flashcards stick

Two ideas do the work. Trying to recall an answer before you see it is better practice than rereading it, and reviewing just as you are about to forget is cheaper than reviewing on a fixed daily loop. A scheduler that stretches the gap each time you succeed and shrinks it when you fail lets you spend study time on the cards you actually struggle with.

The four grades map onto that directly. Again brings a missed card back in ten minutes; Hard, Good and Easy push it further out, with Easy growing the interval fastest, so a card you know cold drifts to weeks away while a shaky one keeps returning.

Grading a card and what changes underneath

Every card with a schedule row tracks a stability figure, the current interval measured in days, a difficulty estimate from 1 for easiest to 10 for hardest starting at 5, a rep count, and a lapse count. Marking a card again does not push it to tomorrow — it comes back in ten minutes within the same session, the way relearning steps work in apps like Anki rather than the original SM-2's whole-day-only scheduling, and it bumps the difficulty estimate up by one and a half.

Marking hard, good, or easy instead grows the interval by a multiplier that gets larger as difficulty drops, so a card graded easy repeatedly grows its interval faster than one you keep grading merely good, and each of those three grades nudges difficulty down slightly. A card with no schedule row yet, brand new or freshly imported, counts as due immediately.

What a CSV export keeps, and what it deliberately drops

Exporting a deck to CSV writes a header row and one comma-separated row per card, quoting any field containing a comma, quote, or newline. That is the entire portable format — a card's internal identifier and its scheduling state, meaning stability, difficulty, due date, and lapse count, are never written into the file.

Re-importing that CSV, or any file shaped like it, mints a brand-new random identifier for every row. That is deliberate: card identity and study history live in this browser's schedule table keyed to a specific identifier, so a round trip through CSV always restarts a card's spaced-repetition history rather than guessing which imported row matches an old schedule entry.

Flashcard study modes and keyboard shortcuts

Browse all cards steps through the deck in its stored order, shows your position as a counter, and resumes on the same card after a reload.
Due today lists only cards that are due, counting brand-new or freshly imported cards as due straight away; its button shows how many are waiting.
Shuffle reorders the Browse sequence and jumps back to the first card.
In Browse, the left and right arrow keys move between cards, and Space or Enter flips the current one.
The Import & export tab downloads the open deck as JSON or CSV whenever you want a copy outside the browser.

Study position that actually survives a reload

Opening a deck to study shuffles its cards into an order and records that order plus the current position as a small progress row keyed to the deck. Close the tab mid-session and reopen it later, and you land back on the same card in the same shuffled order rather than starting over, closing a gap the original workflow had when position lived only in memory and reset on every page load.

Decks, their cards, and every card's schedule live in a database called bt-flashcards; like every Workspace tool, that storage is local to the browser profile that created it, with GitHub backup available as an explicit opt-in for anyone who wants a copy tracked outside the browser.

Fifty decks can be saved for free, and Pro lifts the deck count entirely.

Where the scheduling model runs out of nuance

The algorithm is a documented approximation in the SM-2 family, not the FSRS model or Anki's actual production scheduler — expect broadly similar behavior, not identical due dates, if you are used to another app.
CSV is a front-and-back interchange format only; it cannot carry review history, so exporting and reimporting a deck resets every card's spaced-repetition state.
There is no per-card editing of the schedule directly; difficulty and interval only change in response to a grade, never a manual override.
Study progress is per deck and per browser profile; studying the same deck in two browsers produces two independent shuffle orders and two independent schedules unless GitHub backup keeps one canonical copy.

Questions people ask about Flashcards

Is this flashcard maker free, and do I need an account?: It is free and needs no account or email. The free tier stores up to 50 decks in this browser, with no cap on how many cards a deck holds, and Pro removes the deck limit. Spaced-repetition study, CSV and JSON import and export all work without paying.
Can I make flashcards from my notes or a PDF with AI?: Yes, through your own AI chat. Choose From source material, paste your notes, copy the prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, and paste the JSON reply back to create a deck. BrakeTools never calls an AI itself, so the text goes only to the chatbot you pick. For a PDF, copy its text out first, and run a scanned PDF through OCR PDF so there is text to copy.
How is this different from Quizlet?: Quizlet is a hosted service built around accounts and shared sets. This tool has no account, no public library and no class features: decks stay in your browser, each side of a card is plain text, and review timing comes from the local spaced-repetition scheduler described on this page.
Are my flashcards saved if I close the browser?: Yes. Decks, cards, schedules and your place in each deck are written to IndexedDB as you work, so closing the tab or restarting the computer loses nothing. They do disappear if you clear this site's data or study in a private window, which discards its storage when closed.
Why did a card I marked Again come back so soon?: Again schedules the card for ten minutes later in the same session rather than the next day, matching how relearning steps work in apps like Anki. That is intentional — a card you just missed should come back for a quick second attempt before the session ends, not wait until tomorrow.
If I export a deck to CSV and import it back, do I keep my progress?: No. CSV only carries the front and back text of each card; scheduling state such as due date, difficulty, and lapse count is tied to a card's internal identifier, and every imported row gets a fresh one. Treat CSV as a way to move card content between decks, not as a backup of study history.
Is this the same spaced-repetition algorithm as Anki?: No — it is a self-contained SM-2-family algorithm with its own interval-growth and difficulty formulas, chosen so the scheduling logic has no external dependency and is fully documented and testable. It behaves similarly in spirit but will not produce identical due dates to Anki or an FSRS-based app.
Can I study the same deck from my phone and my computer with shared progress?: Only if you have turned on GitHub backup, since decks and study progress are stored locally per browser profile. Without it, each browser or device keeps its own independent shuffle order, schedule, and progress for the same deck content.

Related tools on BrakeTools

Quiz — Build and take multiple-choice, true/false, and short-answer quizzes, with AI-assisted question generation.
Notepad — Rich-text notes saved in your browser, with search, Markdown export, and optional GitHub backup.
PDF OCR Reader — Extract selectable, searchable text from scanned documents, fully client-side.

Content reviewed 2026-09-27.