Buvard vs Ankify

Two flashcard generators for Anki, the same promise, two opposite ways of selling. Ankify sells cards by the unit, paid once, valid forever. Buvard sells a window of time, during which you generate what you like within a monthly quota. Depending on how you revise, one of the two costs several times what the other does.

Ankify prices and limits taken from their public page and privacy policy on 11 September 2026. Their prices are in dollars: conversion and any exchange fees are on you.

The table

The free plans do not belong in the same table: Ankify gives you 100 cards, once. Buvard gives you 600 a month, indefinitely — 7,200 a year, no card details.

Credits against a window

This is the only difference that really matters, and it does not crown a winner in the abstract: it depends on your rhythm.

With Ankify you buy a stock. It runs down only when you use it, no clock is ticking, and nothing stops you burning ten thousand cards in a weekend.

With Buvard you buy a period. Six thousand cards per thirty-day window, and whatever you leave unused does not roll over.

Turn the question round: what do six thousand cards cost?

With Ankify, two Standard packs, so $38. Or the Premium pack at $49, which leaves four thousand aside for later.

With Buvard, a one-month pass, so €9 — provided you generate those six thousand cards inside the same thirty-day window. That is exactly what an exam period does to your workload: it concentrates it.

Spread them over a year, though, and you need a twelve-month pass at €69 — six thousand a month adds up to seventy-two thousand possible cards, of which you would have used a twelfth. That is the case where Ankify is cheaper, and it deserves saying.

The free plan never stops

A hundred cards is two chapters. Past that, Ankify asks for a purchase.

Six hundred cards a month is two dense chapters every month, endlessly and without card details. A student who revises seriously but not obsessively will never leave Buvard's free plan — and that is deliberate: a free plan should be usable, not a ten-minute demo.

The free plan includes up to four decks a month, question-and-answer cards, support for maths and LaTeX formulas, fifteen images read by character recognition, .apkg export and revision inside the app.

Exhaustive mode

A flashcard generator samples. You hand it forty pages, it keeps what it judges important, and three weeks later you discover half of the letter P has vanished from your glossary. Ankify lets you pick a card count or let the AI decide — either way, it is a sample.

Buvard has a setting that makes one card per idea, across the whole document. Measured on a real 1,206-entry glossary: 1,199 cards out, or 99.3% coverage.

None of Ankify's limits are expressed as coverage. They are all expressed as cards purchased — which is another way of saying the question does not arise on their side.

What the legal documents say

Ankify is published by Hearttec AS, a Norwegian company. Norway is part of the European Economic Area: the GDPR applies there in full, and there is no transfer outside the protected zone to fear on the strength of their nationality alone. That point gets misread often enough to be worth stating plainly.

Two reservations, though, and both are checkable.

Their privacy policy names no AI provider. It lists Vercel for analytics, Clerk for authentication, Supabase for storing decks, Stripe for payment. But the company that receives the contents of your course — the one your document is actually sent to so the cards can be written — does not appear. That is precisely the processor a user would want named.

It is dated 27 February 2025, and it is served as a PDF generated by an online tool.

Buvard names OpenAI, spells out which content leaves and which stays, states that hosting is with OVH in France, that analytics set no cookie, and serves all of it as dated web pages. Prices in euros, French publisher, French law: no conversion, no claim to pursue abroad.

A pass, not a subscription — on both sides

There is nothing to separate the two here, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise: neither one renews itself. Ankify sells credits, Buvard sells one-, three-, six- or twelve-month passes paid once. Nothing to cancel on either side, no month billed in July because you forgot.

With Buvard, when the pass ends the account returns to the free plan and decks already generated stay exportable.

Where Ankify is better

• No monthly cap: ten thousand cards in a weekend if your exam demands it. Buvard stops at six thousand per thirty-day window, whichever pass you hold;
• credits that never expire: for rare use above six hundred cards a month, paying once works out cheaper than a window of time;
• Excel and PowerPoint as inputs, which we do not accept;
• a one-off purchase, with no duration to keep an eye on.

Which to pick

You revise regularly, across a term or a year, from long documents, and you want all of the course to become cards: Buvard. The cost per thousand cards is not comparable once the pace picks up, and the free plan is enough for many people.

You need a large one-off volume with no ceiling, or you revise from PowerPoint slides and spreadsheets: Ankify.

Either way the export is .apkg and your cards end up in Anki, on your own scheduling.

Create your first deck free — six hundred cards a month, no card details.