Comparison to Ankiweb shared decks

November 26, 2020

The About page explains the rationale of AnkiLab. This post features a more comprehensive comparison to Ankiweb shared decks.

What both platforms have in common

Both Ankiweb and AnkiLab are platforms where any logged-in user can submit some of their Anki cards, and where any user can download decks.

Ankiweb is the official and mature platform for sharing Anki decks; AnkiLab is an unofficial and experimental platform.
AnkiLab displays all cards directly in the browser (see here for instance), whereas Ankiweb only shows previews for 3 cards out of every deck. This makes it easy to show cards to people who haven’t downloaded Anki, or who just want to see the cards (for instance to find inspiration while making their own cards, or who want to see how someone they know formulates their cards). This removes a few barriers on the path from wanting to see a card to seeing it. It also allows to share cards that aren’t designed to be directly incorporated into the collections of others, but which have more of a demonstration purpose.
in AnkiLab, individual cards can be filtered by any combination of tags: click on Filter by tags on the main cards page. More powerful filtering and searching capabilities will be added in the future.
in AnkiLab, tags can be added and removed from the web interface (click Edit on a card when you’re signed in), for individual cards (as well as for entire decks when uploading decks).
AnkiLab allows a user to upload some cards without grouping them into a deck. It actually sees decks as mere lists of pointers to cards. This means that a card may be in any number of decks, from different users. This avoids duplication of work and may help some more creative decks be built out of existing cards.