Anki vs merke.me for German: Which One Should You Use

Anki is the reference implementation of spaced repetition. It is open source, it has been around since 2006, and a very large number of people have learned a very large amount of German with it.

What follows is the honest comparison, including the parts where Anki wins.

The one-sentence version

Anki is an engine. merke.me is a course. Anki will schedule anything you feed it, and expects you to supply the content and the configuration. merke.me supplies a fixed A1-C2 curriculum and schedules it for you, and does not let you change much.

Which of those is better depends entirely on whether you want to build a curriculum or follow one.

What merke.me does differently

• The content already exists and is consistent. Roughly 13,000 vocabulary entries, 444 grammar points with long-form bilingual explanations and 20-50 examples each, collocations and idioms, all with native audio. You do not evaluate shared decks, and you do not spend your first fortnight building cards instead of learning.
• Grammar is a first-class item, not a flashcard. A grammar point has an explanation, a structure pattern, worked examples and cloze reviews - it is not a two-sided card that says "Dativ" on the front.
• Fixed, staged scheduling. Eight levels from 4 hours to 4 months, grouped into five ranks from Apprentice to Master; pass the last review and the item leaves your queue for good. This is deliberately less clever than FSRS. The trade is predictability and a visible finish line instead of per-card optimisation.
• Nothing to configure. There is no deck options screen, which is a feature or a dealbreaker depending on who you are.

When merke.me is the better fit

• You have tried Anki and bounced off the setup - the decks, the settings, the note types - and want to spend that time studying instead.
• You want grammar taught, not just drilled.
• You want one coherent path from A1 to C2 rather than a pile of decks of uneven quality.
• You want audio on everything without sourcing it.

The honest summary

merke.me is for people who want the curation and scheduling decisions already made, and are willing to pay for that. Those are different products for different people, and the fact that both use spaced repetition is close to the least interesting thing about either of them.

You can look at what the content actually is before signing up for anything - the grammar library, the vocabulary and the expressions are all open to read.