DecksMD vs Anki

The honest summary: Anki is a dedicated flashcard application, and DecksMD is a way of reviewing the notes you already keep. If your study material lives in an Obsidian vault, that difference is the whole story. If it does not, Anki is very likely the better tool.

The core difference is authoring, not the algorithm

Both tools schedule with FSRS. Anki has supported it for years, and DecksMD uses FSRS-6 by default. Anyone telling you to switch flashcard apps for the algorithm is selling you something.

The real difference is where a card comes from.

In Anki, a card is a record inside a collection. You open the editor, fill in fields, pick a note type, and save. If you also keep notes, you now maintain two versions of the same material — and when your understanding changes, you have to remember to update both.

In DecksMD, the note is the deck. You tag a file with #decks, and every heading at your chosen level becomes the front of a card with the text beneath it as the back. There is no second copy, because there is no second place for it to live. Fix a sentence in your notes and the card is fixed.

That is the trade. You give up a purpose-built card editor and gain the guarantee that your cards can never drift out of step with your notes.

Side by side

	DecksMD	Anki
Where cards live	Inside your markdown notes	In a separate collection
Authoring	Headings, tables, ==cloze==, image occlusion	Dedicated editor with note types
Scheduler	FSRS-6	FSRS or SM-2
Sync	Your vault’s provider — iCloud, Obsidian Sync, Dropbox, Syncthing	AnkiWeb
Shared decks	None	A very large ecosystem
Mobile	The Obsidian plugin, plus a companion app	Mature first-party apps
Add-ons	No	Hundreds
Cost	Free and open source	Free, except iOS

Read that table honestly. Anki wins on ecosystem, maturity and shared decks. DecksMD wins if — and only if — you are already writing the material down somewhere.

What the Anki import actually brings across

This is the part most migrations get wrong, so it is worth being specific. DecksMD imports a standard .apkg export and carries over:

• Decks, cards and media, including MathJax and tags.
• Your scheduling and review history, mapped onto FSRS-6, so cards resume where Anki left them instead of being reintroduced as new.
• Note types, mapped automatically. Basic notes become header-and-paragraph or table cards. Anki cloze becomes ==cloze== highlights, including cloze inside $…$ maths. Rich multi-field notes get a template generated for them. Anki’s image occlusion becomes native image occlusion.

The import is additive and non-destructive. It writes into a target folder you choose, nested under the #decks/anki tag, and never touches the source file. Re-running it simply overwrites what it generated before. Large media-heavy collections are split across capped files automatically so no single note becomes unmanageable.

In Anki: File → Export, format Anki Deck Package (.apkg), with Include media and Include scheduling information both checked. In Obsidian: run Import from Anki (.apkg), choose the file, a target folder and a profile. Scan first if you want a preview of the deck, card and media counts.

Full detail is in Import & export.

And back out again

DecksMD exports to Anki as well. This matters more than it sounds: a study tool that can only take your data in is asking you to bet years of review history on it never disappointing you. You should be able to leave. You can.

Where each one fits

Anki is the better choice if you study mainly from shared decks, you rely on specific add-ons, you need the polish of a mature dedicated app, or your material simply is not written down anywhere else.

DecksMD is the better choice if you already take notes in Obsidian and resent writing everything twice, you want your cards to update when your notes do, you would rather keep your data in plain markdown and a local SQLite file than in an app-managed collection, or you want your review history in the same vault as everything else you own.

Both is a perfectly reasonable answer. Keep the big shared decks where they are, and let the material you are actively learning stay in your notes.

Trying it without commitment

Nothing about this has to be a decision. Export one deck from Anki, import it into a folder in your vault, and review it for a week. Your Anki collection is untouched the entire time — the importer never writes back — so if it does not suit you, you have lost an afternoon and nothing else.