Brainscape vs Mandarin Flashcards
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Brainscape
This app uses AI and spaced repetition to help you learn faster and remember longer. Create your own multimedia flashcards or access a vast marketplace of expert-curated content for various subjects and exams. It's designed for serious learners who want to optimize their study time.
- AI-powered flashcard maker
- Spaced repetition algorithm
- Expert-curated flashcard marketplace
- Create multimedia flashcards
- Collaborative content creation
- Active recall and self-assessment
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Learn faster and remember longer with Brainscape, the AI flashcard app that combines scientifically proven spaced repetition and active recall. Create flashcards instantly from notes, PDFs, images, and text, or study millions of expert-created flashcards for exams, languages, certifications, and more. Whether you're switching from Anki or another flashcard app, Brainscape helps you study more efficiently. Brainscape’s intelligent study system is designed around proven cognitive science principles that help you learn faster and remember longer. By combining active recall, metacognition, and spaced repetition, Brainscape helps serious learners spend less time studying and retain more of what they learn. How Brainscape works. Study any subject using smart flashcards designed to maximize retention: - Actively recall answers instead of passively rereading notes - Rate your confidence from 1–5 after each card - Let Brainscape automatically optimize review timing using spaced repetition - Focus more time on difficult concepts and less on material you've already mastered This unique combination of active recall, self-assessment (metacognition), and spaced repetition is designed to help you learn more efficiently. Where do all of Brainscape’s awesome flashcards come from? Three places: 1. Exper-created flashcards: Study professionally designed collections covering: - Foreign languages - MBE (Bar Exam) - NCLEX - MCAT - AP courses - Series 7 - GRE - And many more 2. Community-created flashcards: Search millions of flashcards created by students, teachers, professionals, and organizations around the world. 3. Create your own flashcards: Instantly create multimedia flashcards from: - Notes - PDFs - Images - Documents - Text input Add images, audio, and collaborate with classmates or colleagues. Why learners all over the world use Brainscape - AI-powered flashcard creation - Scientifically designed spaced repetition - Active recall learning techniques - Progress tracking and study insights - Millions of existing flashcards ready to study - Available across web and mobile devices How much does it cost? Creating and sharing great text flashcards is FREE. (Woohoo! And sorry, we do have to charge for image creation for security reasons.) And for unlimited access to ALL of Brainscape's user-generated and premium, expert-curated content, as well as optional features, like bookmarks and card reversibility--or to me your content private, you can upgrade to Pro for $19.99 (monthly), $59.99 (every 6 months), or $95.99 (annually). Alternatively, you can unlock a LIFETIME of learning with Brainscape for a one-time cost of only $199.99 American dolla billz. The fine print: The 3 recurring subscriptions (monthly, semiannual, and annual) will renew automatically within 24 hours before the end of the current period, unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24 hours before the end of the period. You can cancel auto-renewal any time by going to Account Settings, and the cancellation will apply after the active subscription period is complete. Go ahead and learn more about our Terms and Privacy Policy at brainscape.com/terms. What’s on the horizon? It’s our vision to empower everyone, everywhere to rise to the challenge of personalized forever-learning. And for this reason, we love hearing from our user community: it’s through your feedback that we can continue to innovate our platform to be more convenient, efficient, and even fun and social to use!
Mandarin Flashcards
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A flashcard app specifically designed for the complexities of Mandarin! Switch between Hanzi (characters), Pinyin (the sounds) and English meaning to learn all three aspects of Mandarin. Enhanced difficulty algorithms can be adjusted based on your appetite for challenge and personal progression. My goal in creating this app was to make flashcards fun, and make it more difficult to just "guess" the word like so many other apps allow. Four directions, tracked separately. See a character and pick the sound, see the sound and pick the character, or start from the English and go either way. Each direction keeps its own score and its own difficulty, so a word you can read isn't assumed to be a word you can say. Wrong answers are picked to be genuinely hard. Distractors are scored on the initial and final pairs learners actually confuse (zh/z, ang/an) and on characters that share a radical, a component or a shape, including 740 hand-checked lookalike pairs. Four difficulty levels decide how many of the close ones you face. Cards start at two choices and climb one at a time to fourteen as you get them right; miss one and it steps back down and comes round again sooner. Start with the words that matter most. The Frequency deck orders the language by how common each word is: 250 units of 20 words, with unit 1 the 20 most frequent words in Mandarin. Practice the vocabulary that carries the most conversations first, and work your way down to the rarer stuff. Prefer a syllabus? The full HSK 3.0 word lists (levels 1 to 9) are built in as decks too, and you can import your own units. New: practice whole phrases. 2,430 conversational phrases across 18 topics, from ordering food to asking for help. One word is blanked and you fill the gap, in either direction. Once a phrase is familiar it comes back as shuffled tiles for you to put back in order. Watch the characters get written. Every Hanzi prompt is painted stroke by stroke, in proper stroke order, so the shape sinks in while you answer. Pick your brush speed, or switch the animation off. Tones are colored as you practice. Pinyin is tinted syllable by syllable, and every character takes the color of its own tone, so you start recognizing tones by sight instead of hunting for the little mark. There is a legend in Settings and a separate switch for each. On Hanzi and Pinyin rounds the tint fades once you have leveled a card past ten choices, so the colors can never hand you the answer. Hunt bounty cards for gold. Decks mark one card in every 25 as a bounty. Level it up to 14 choices and it deals a special 15 choice gold round, and getting that one right turns the card gold. All four practice directions are hunted separately, so every card has four golds to win, each with its own trophy ladder in the Trophy Room. Short term or long term, your choice. Short term keeps your active deck moving so nothing waits much more than two weeks. Long term follows a real forgetting curve across your whole card pool: every correct answer multiplies a card's rest by 2.5, out to a year. Both are tracked at the same time, so you can switch whenever you like without losing anything. Add a daily goal and a day streak, and separate profiles that keep separate progress. Everything runs offline. All 14,443 cards are built into the app, so there is nothing to download and no account to create. If you create custom cards with new characters, the strokes data will be auto downloaded, which does require a connection. This app pairs perfectly with whatever Mandarin course or app you're learning with. Reinforce what you're learning with flashcards in parallel! Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is ads: Brainscape at none against Mandarin Flashcards's shown. Mandarin Flashcards's advantage is update cadence (every 2 days vs every 3 weeks). On price, in-app purchases, device support and iOS requirement there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Brainscape sells 4 in-app purchases, starting at $19.99 per month and Mandarin Flashcards sells 1 in-app purchase, starting at $0.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
Brainscape ships an update every 3 weeks, Mandarin Flashcards every 2 days. The most recent releases landed on October 19, 2026 and October 9, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Brainscape | Mandarin Flashcards |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.8 (21K ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 82.2% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 21K — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 3 weeks | Every 2 days — better |
| Ads | No — better | Yes |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 16.6 — better | 17.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 42 MB | 24 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Brainscape | JAMES ROBERT THIESSEN |
Bugs and requests
Brainscape
Reported bugs
4 issues- App crashes when switching between cards
- Syncing issues causing data loss
- Difficulty importing and organizing custom cards
- Inconsistent performance on different devices
Requested features
5 requests- Allow more customization of cards (e.g., adding images, audio)
- Improve search and browsing functionality
- Provide more detailed progress tracking and statistics
- Offer family/group subscription plans
- Add support for more languages
Mandarin Flashcards
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Brainscape
- Brainscape Pro$19.991 Month
- Brainscape Pro$59.996 Months
- Brainscape Pro$95.991 Year
- Brainscape Pro Lifetime$199.99
Mandarin Flashcards
- Remove Ads$0.991 Month
Questions
Is Brainscape free?
Is Mandarin Flashcards free?
Do Brainscape or Mandarin Flashcards have ads?
Which is updated more often, Brainscape or Mandarin Flashcards?
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