DentPass vs Anki: Which Is Better for Dental School Revision?

For most of its life Anki scheduled with SM-2, an algorithm from 1987 that kept one number per card and multiplied the interval by it. Since version 23.10 it has shipped FSRS, and from 24.11 that is the default.

DentPass schedules with FSRS too. That makes this a narrower comparison than it used to be, and a more useful one: the question is no longer which app has the better algorithm, it is where the cards come from and what else the tool knows about your year.

What FSRS actually is

Worth understanding, because it is the thing both tools run and it explains why the intervals look the way they do.

FSRS models three things about every card, for you specifically:

You pick a target, called desired retention, and the scheduler puts each card in front of you at the moment its retrievability falls to that number. Twenty-one weights govern how the three interact, and an optimiser refits those weights against your own review history rather than leaving you on the average of everyone else's.

That last part matters more than it sounds. The shipped weights describe an average person remembering average material. You are one person learning dental biomaterials.

Side by side

	DentPass	Anki
Scheduler	FSRS-6	FSRS (default since 24.11)
Fits weights to your own history	Yes	Yes
Where the cards come from	Over 14,000 written for the UK BDS curriculum, across 217 topics	You write them, or you download a stranger's deck
Knows when your exam is	Yes: no card is scheduled past the date	No equivalent
Learning steps, fuzz, leeches, daily limits, undo, suspend	Yes	Yes
Questions and mocks in the same place	Yes	No
Write your own cards	Yes: basic and cloze, images, tags	Yes, and the better editor: custom note types and add-ons
Choose which topics are in play	Yes: modules, set per term	Subdecks and filtered decks, managed by hand
Import an existing Anki deck	Yes, .apkg	Native
Works offline	No	Yes
Covers subjects outside dentistry	No	Anything
Price	Every Year 2 card free, no account needed beyond signup; Premium from £129 a year for the question bank and the other years	Free, except a paid iOS app

The thing Anki cannot do

Anki has no idea you have an exam on the fourteenth of June.

It will happily give a card you have just answered correctly a four-month interval, which is the right answer for someone learning a language and the wrong one for someone sitting finals in eleven weeks. You can lower desired retention across the board, or reschedule cards by hand, but neither is the same as the scheduler knowing the date.

DentPass takes an exam date and refuses to schedule anything past it, so every card in the deck comes back at least once before you sit down. That is a small feature that changes the shape of your last month.

The deck problem, which is really the whole thing

Anki's weakness was never Anki. It is where the cards come from.

Writing your own is the version that works, because writing them is itself revision. It is also slow: one lecture turned into good cards is an evening, and a BDS degree has hundreds of lectures. Most students who commit to building their own decks quietly stop somewhere in second year.

Downloading a shared deck is the version that scales, and it is the one that quietly hurts people. A deck built for another curriculum in another country contains material you will not be examined on, omits material you will be, and carries every misunderstanding its author had. You cannot tell which cards are which until an examiner shows you.

DentPass ships the cards already written against the GDC core curriculum, reviewed before they go live, and reportable when one is wrong. If you already have decks you trust, the .apkg importer brings them across, though not their review history: Anki's older SM-2 ease and interval numbers cannot be mapped faithfully onto FSRS memory state, and a wrong mapping would corrupt the scheduler rather than seed it.

Two things follow that are worth saying plainly. You choose what is in play: a module is the set of topics you are being taught this term, and new cards come only from it, so a second year is not quietly fed first year anatomy. And you can still write your own, basic or cloze, with images and tags, scheduled in the same rotation as ours. The part of Anki that genuinely works, writing a card because writing it is itself revision, is here too. What is missing is the evening spent building the other nine hundred.

Where Anki still wins

• It works with no internet. On a train, in a basement clinic, on a plane. We need a connection.
• You own your collection. It is a file on your machine. No subscription can lapse and take it away.
• It covers anything. Postgraduate exams, a language, the formulary. We cover what we have written.
• It is free, genuinely, on desktop, web and Android.
• It has been doing this for twenty years, with an add-on ecosystem and a community we cannot match.

Where DentPass wins

• The cards exist and they are yours to use today. Over 14,000 across 217 topics of the live curriculum, with no evening spent writing them.
• The exam date is part of the schedule, not something you compensate for by hand.
• Cards, questions and mocks are one product. The topics you keep failing in practice are the topics your cards come from, and both feed the same analytics.
• You choose what is in play. A module is the topics you are being taught this term, so the queue follows your timetable instead of the whole curriculum.
• You can still write your own. Basic or cloze, images and tags, in the same rotation as the written cards. One place to revise from rather than two apps to remember.
• A whole year of cards costs nothing. Every Year 2 flashcard is free, scheduler included. What Premium buys is the question bank and the other years, not the spaced repetition.
• Nobody has to trust a stranger's deck. Every card is written for the curriculum you are on and can be reported when it is wrong.

So which should you use?

If you already run a healthy Anki deck you built yourself, keep it. It works, you made it, and the scheduler underneath is the same one we run.

If you have tried three times and the deck died in November, the problem was never your discipline. It was that building a curriculum out of flashcards is a second degree on top of the one you are doing. That is the part we have done for you.

Questions we get asked

Does DentPass use the same algorithm as Anki?

Yes. Both schedule with FSRS, which models difficulty, stability and retrievability per card and shows you a card when your chance of recalling it falls to your chosen target. The implementations differ, Anki's is in Rust and ours runs the reference TypeScript port, but it is the same algorithm and the same 21 weights.

Can DentPass tune the scheduler to me, the way Anki's optimiser does?

Yes. It refits the 21 FSRS weights against your own review history, so intervals follow how you actually forget rather than an average across strangers. It needs a few hundred reviews before the fit means anything, and it tells you what changed rather than silently adjusting your schedule.

Can I import my Anki deck?

Yes, as an .apkg file, including the images. The review history is deliberately not imported: Anki's older SM-2 numbers cannot be mapped faithfully onto FSRS memory state, and a bad mapping would corrupt scheduling rather than preserve it, so imported cards start fresh and enter through your daily new-card limit.

Does DentPass work offline?

Not for reviews. This is the clearest thing Anki does better, and if you revise somewhere without signal it is a real reason to keep using it.

Can I write my own cards, or only use yours?

Both, and they share one queue. Write your own as basic or cloze cards, with images and tags, or bring them in from a CSV or an Anki .apkg. They schedule alongside the written cards rather than in a separate pile. Anki still has the better editor, with custom note types and twenty years of add-ons, but the cards you write here do not live in a second app you have to remember to open.

Do I have to pay to use the flashcards?

Not for Year 2. Every Year 2 card is free, with the same FSRS scheduling, exam-date handling and optimiser a subscriber gets. Premium covers the question bank and the cards for the other years. If you are in second year and only want flashcards, the free plan is the whole feature rather than a sample of it.

Should I use both?

Plenty of people will, and there is nothing wrong with that. The sensible split is dental content here, where the cards are already written against your curriculum and the exam date is part of the schedule, and Anki for anything outside dentistry.

See also: our full ranking of dental revision platforms, DentPass vs Quizlet and DentPass vs Dentalnotebook.