Lectra Notes vs Lotus Flashcards
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Lectra Notes
This app provides a private workspace for reading, annotating, and organizing PDF documents. It helps users understand dense texts faster with on-device intelligence for summaries and suggested tags. Designed for a calmer document workflow, it ensures your files remain private.
- Read and mark up PDFs
- Highlight key passages and add notes
- Organize documents with folders and tags
- Generate summaries and suggested tags
- Private by design with on-device intelligence
- Backup and sync library
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Lectra is a professional workspace for the documents you think on. RECORD THE LECTURE, NOT JUST THE NOTES Start recording from a control that floats above the whole app, then keep writing. Tap a handwritten stroke to hear what was being said as the pen moved. Drag the playhead and watch the page fill back in, stroke by stroke. Transcription runs on device, and an hour of lecture compacts to about 15 MB. BUILT FOR STUDENTS AND ANYONE WHO READS CLOSELY Lecture slides, problem sets, papers, and textbooks. Annotate your readings, write notes beside them by hand, scan whatever you got on paper, and keep the whole semester in one library that works without a signal. READ AND MARK UP Open any PDF and work it over with Apple Pencil, pressure-responsive pen, highlighter, and eraser in a dark, distraction-free editor that keeps your ink sharp at any zoom. Select the document's own text with a finger. Apple Pencil Pro squeeze switches tools. ASK YOUR DOCUMENTS Ask a question about what you're reading and get an answer that cites the page it came from, computed by Apple's on-device model. Summarize documents and get to the point faster. Your documents are processed privately, on your iPad. NOTEBOOKS AND WHITEBOARDS Start from blank paper when the thinking hasn't found a document yet. Notebooks, paper styles, and room to sketch, then export your pages as PDFs. SCAN ANYTHING Bring paper into the record. Scan documents with the camera and mark them up like any other PDF. WHEN READING TURNS INTO WORK Run Python where you're already working, notebooks with charts, a real shell, Git, and a code editor, all on the iPad and all offline. The document and the work on it stay in the same place. A LIBRARY THAT KEEPS UP Everything in one place, available offline, and backed up when you sign in. Your documents are yours: export them anytime, in formats that open anywhere. YOUR MAC, TOO Lectra for Mac is a free download at canvascope.org/mac, the whole app on your desktop, plus your Mac on your iPad as a remote desktop, documents sent straight from iPad to Mac, and a shared clipboard. Now in Spanish and French. Lectra is free to use.
Lotus Flashcards
This app uses spaced repetition to help you study smarter by scheduling flashcards just before you forget them. It offers unlimited decks, image support, and iCloud sync across devices. It also integrates with Mimosa for seamless flashcard creation from PDF highlights.
- Spaced repetition learning
- Unlimited decks and cards
- Image support
- iCloud sync
- Deck sharing
- Mimosa integration
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Lotus is a free, focused flashcard app built around spaced repetition — the proven technique that schedules each card right before you're about to forget it, so you spend less time reviewing and remember more of what you study. STUDY SMARTER, NOT LONGER Lotus uses FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler), the same modern algorithm Anki adopted as its default. Rate each card Again, Hard, Good, or Easy, and Lotus works out exactly when it should come back — no settings to tune, no guesswork. EVERYTHING YOU NEED, FREE • Unlimited decks and cards • Front/back or single-sided cards, with images • iCloud sync across all your devices • Share any deck with a friend as a .lotusdeck file — over AirDrop, Messages, or Files • Light and dark mode • Review reminders, right when a deck actually has cards due WORKS WITH MIMOSA If you use Mimosa to read and annotate PDFs, Lotus can turn any highlight you make there straight into a flashcard — no retyping. This bridge is included at no extra cost with Mimosa Pro; everything else in Lotus is free regardless. Lotus doesn't have accounts, ads, or analytics. Your decks and cards stay on your device and, if you turn on sync, in your own iCloud account — never on our servers.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Lectra Notes at weekly against Lotus Flashcards's every 2 weeks. Lectra Notes also leads on ratings volume (7 vs 1). On price, rating, ads and in-app purchases 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. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Lectra Notes against 5.0 for Lotus Flashcards. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Lectra Notes has 7 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two.
Lectra Notes ships an update weekly, Lotus Flashcards every 2 weeks. The most recent releases landed on October 10, 2026 and October 2, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Lectra Notes | Lotus Flashcards |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (7 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) |
| Number of ratings | 7 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Weekly — better | Every 2 weeks |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 | 17.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 52 MB | 2 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Noel Sason | Yusuf Melih Bozgeyik |
Customer experience
Lectra Notes
Lotus Flashcards
In-app purchases
Lectra Notes
No in-app purchases
Lotus Flashcards
No in-app purchases









