Switching from Anki to Lemnly: an honest migration guide

I used Anki for nine years. The cards I built in 2017 still pop up on my phone today. There is genuinely no other tool with that kind of durability. So when people ask whether to switch to Lemnly, my honest answer is: maybe. Let me give you the actual decision tree.

Stay on Anki if…

• You enjoy building your own card templates and tweaking CSS.
• You rely on add-ons that have no equivalent elsewhere.
• You have a deck older than two years that you care about deeply.
• You want desktop-first, fully offline, fully scriptable.
• You learn things other than language vocabulary — anatomy, law, chemistry. Anki is genuinely a better general-purpose flashcard tool.

That’s a real demographic and Anki is the right tool for it.

Switch to Lemnly if…

• Your bottleneck is making cards, not reviewing them. The URL import takes ten seconds. The EPUB import takes a minute. That’s the entire flow.
• You read articles or books in your target language and want the vocabulary to follow you out.
• You want a modern, fast UI on every device without writing a single template.
• You want a scheduler that adapts to your data, not a theoretical average.
• You don’t want to think about cloze, image occlusion, or any of the twelve other card types you never end up using.

The honest tradeoffs

It’s not all gain. Here’s what you’re actually giving up:

• Card customisation. Lemnly cards have one shape: word, translation, example sentence, part of speech. If you live and die by cloze deletion across multi-paragraph passages, Lemnly is not your tool yet.
• Plugins. No add-ons. The bet is that we ship the features you actually want, faster than you’d need to install plugins for them.
• Twenty years of community decks. If you were relying on a popular shared deck — say "Refold Mandarin 1k" — you can import it as a starting point, but our flow is built around your own reading, not someone else’s curation.
• Fine-grained scheduling controls. Anki gives you sliders for everything. Lemnly gives you three: target retention, daily new-card limit, daily review cap. We think those are the three that matter — but if you love tuning, you’ll miss the rest.

What you can bring with you

Lemnly imports APKG files directly. You keep your front/back text and your review history (we map SM-2 state to FSRS as best as can be done). Custom templates with images and audio import as plain cards with attachments — the formatting flattens, but the content survives.

Anki tags map to Lemnly tags one-to-one. If you organised your deck with #italian::verbs::reflexive, that becomes a Lemnly tag and lets you filter the same way.

The 30-minute migration

1. Export from Anki. File → Export → "All decks." Pick APKG, leave "include scheduling information" checked. Save the file somewhere you’ll remember.
2. Create a Lemnly account. Free plan handles up to 200 cards. If you have more, the import preview lets you pick which decks to bring over first.
3. Import the APKG. Settings → Import → APKG. Pick your file. Lemnly will show you the deck list and let you rename/merge before committing.
4. Pick the deck language. This is the step most migrants skip and regret. Without a language tag, Lemnly can’t dedupe against future imports — you’ll end up with three cards for "ridere" because each import will look fresh. Set the language on every deck.
5. Run one URL import to test the flow. Pick an article in your target language. Paste the URL. Watch the preview: Lemnly should skip most of the words you already have cards for in your imported Anki deck. If it doesn’t, you missed step 4.
6. Keep Anki installed for a week. Review in both. If you don’t miss Anki, retire it. If you do, you’ll know exactly why — and you can email us about the feature gap.

Building the habit from day one

The Anki-to-Lemnly switch is also a chance to reset some habits that weren’t serving you. A few suggestions from migrants we’ve interviewed:

• Cap your daily new cards. Set it to 15. You’ll want to set it higher. Don’t. The reviews you create today are the reviews you’ll do for the next two years.
• Use the URL import for at least one article a week. The biggest behavior change post-migration is the speed of "I saw a word I didn’t know" → "it’s in my deck." Aim for under 30 seconds. The URL import is the closest tool we’ve seen.
• Don’t reimport your Anki deck. Once it’s in, leave it. Your future imports will reference it for dedupe. If you keep reimporting, you’ll multiply scheduling state and confuse the algorithm.

What changes after a month

The thing most ex-Anki users say after a month on Lemnly is the same: "I review less and remember more." That’s mostly FSRS doing its job, but it’s also that the cards Lemnly proposes — coming directly from things you actually read — are stickier than the cards you forced yourself to make in Anki.

The other thing they say: "I import more, because importing is easier than I thought it would be." A long article, a chapter, a photo of a museum plaque. All of it ends up in the deck. None of it takes effort.

The honest bit

Lemnly does not replace Anki for every workflow. It replaces it for the very specific job of turning text you read into vocabulary you actually own. If that’s your job, the switch is worth a weekend. If it’s not, stay where you are — and please tell us what we’re missing.