Is Flua better than Anki? It depends on what you need. For learning one of Flua's languages without building or hunting for a deck, Flua is the one built for that. For anything else, Anki wins. Anki is a free, flexible flashcard engine. Flua is a ready-made, checked language deck that runs on the same kind of memory scheduling.
Keep Anki if you study other subjects, already have a deck you trust, or want to pay nothing on desktop, web or Android. Use Flua if you want to learn French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese or Korean and skip building, fixing or hunting for a deck.
Written by Sora Kalden, who builds Flua, and who learned most of his Japanese from a shared Anki deck before building Flua. So this is a fan of Anki writing, but still our side of the story. Independent reviews are still few; the best check is the public sample cards and the free first cards.
How is Flua different from Anki?
Anki is a tool, not a course. Its scheduler (FSRS, or the older SM-2) decides when each card comes back, and it's excellent. What you actually learn depends entirely on the deck you pick or make, and that's where most language learners get stuck.
Flua takes the part of Anki that works, memory-timed reviews, and supplies the part that's hard: the deck.
The deck problem
In our experience, many shared language decks are word lists or loose collections of sentences. A word with a translation and no context is hard to use in real speech. Sentences pulled from subtitles or textbooks often contain several words you don't know yet, so a card becomes guessing.
Even the decks the community likes best are made by volunteers for one language at a time, so quality, ordering and audio vary from language to language and from card to card.
Choosing is its own project. Dozens of decks, add-ons, note types and settings, and every choice is yours. Plenty of learners spend their motivation on setup.
Making your own deck costs the most. At even a minute a card, a 1,000-card deck adds up to about 17 hours of making cards, on top of studying them. And keeping every sentence to words you already know, in the meaning you learned them and in the order they're most often heard, means checking each new sentence by hand against every word and meaning already in the deck.
What Flua does instead
One deck per language, built and checked by the same system, so every language gets the same standard.
Every card teaches exactly one new word or grammar pattern; every other word in its sentence was taught on an earlier card.
Words come in order of how often they're spoken, and each word returns later in a fresh sentence, often in a different voice.
Expressive, full-speed audio on every card, and a picture of the sentence's scene on nearly every card.
Scheduling uses FSRS, the algorithm modern Anki offers as an option, pre-tuned. Two buttons, Again and Good, and nothing to configure.
Japanese, Chinese and Korean cards show the native script with a pronunciation line underneath (romaji, pinyin or Korean romanization), so you can start before you can read the script.
No deck hunting, no setup: you're studying within a minute.
One new thing per card, checked word by word.
The same quality bar in every language.
Full-sentence audio on every card and a picture on nearly every card.
Clear progress: study time, recall, and the share of everyday speech you understand.
Phone and web, progress synced when signed in.
CONS
Languages only, and only French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
Beginner material only for now: 1,008 to 1,058 cards per language, teaching 551 to 959 distinct words, 5 of 7 at Flua's A1 target of 700 or more.
You can't edit cards or build your own decks, and there's no import of Anki decks or review history; a placement test starts you at your level instead.
Paid after the first 150 cards ($89.99 once per language), though everything is free while the beta runs.
Few independent reviews exist yet; the best check is the public sample cards and your own first hour.
You have to find or make the deck yourself: making cards takes hours on top of studying them, and shared language decks vary widely in quality.
Settings, add-ons and note types take time to learn.
An interface many users describe as dated.
Easy to bury yourself in reviews by adding too many cards at once.
Who should use which?
Anki if you study medicine, law or anything besides a language, already have a deck you trust, or need it free on desktop, web or Android.
Flua if you're serious about one of its languages and want a ready-made deck instead of making and curating your own.
Is it easy to switch from Anki?
Yes, if you're learning one of the languages Flua teaches. Flua can't import your Anki deck or review history, so instead a short placement test (Settings, “Recalibrate my level”) asks whether you know words sampled from across the deck, adapts to your answers to find where your knowledge runs out, and isn't thrown off by one forgotten word. It starts you there. Every word it places you past comes back as a quick review over the following weeks, so a wrong placement corrects itself. You can keep Anki for anything else you study.
Is Anki better for serious, long-term learners?
Serious learners are who Flua is built for. Many serious Anki learners write their own deck, and the hours that takes are the work Flua's decks already do, held to rules that by hand would mean checking every new sentence against every word and meaning already in the deck. Each language starts at the beginner level and is being extended level by level toward C2; every deck's current size is on its transparency page, and a lifetime purchase includes each new level.