How to Convert Quizlet to Anki (Step by Step, and When Not to Bother)
TL;DR: You can move a Quizlet set into Anki by exporting it as text on the Quizlet website, then importing that text into Anki and mapping it to a Basic card. Text and definitions survive. Images, audio, and diagrams do not. For a small or image-heavy set, rebuilding it, or regenerating it from your original notes with an app like Imprimo, is usually faster than the conversion dance.
People search for this for one of two reasons. Either Quizlet started charging for something that used to be free and they want their sets somewhere else, or they have realized that Quizlet does not actually schedule reviews the way a real spaced repetition tool does, and they want Anki's scheduling without retyping everything.
Both are fair. The conversion is doable. It is also fiddlier than it sounds, and for some sets it is not worth the trouble. Here is the honest version, including the part where I tell you not to bother.
What actually transfers, and what does not
Before you spend twenty minutes on this, know what you are getting. Quizlet's export is plain text. That single fact decides everything.
| Content on the Quizlet card | Survives the move to Anki? |
|---|---|
| Term (front text) | Yes |
| Definition (back text) | Yes |
| Basic formatting (line breaks) | Mostly |
| Images on a card | No |
| Audio | No |
| Diagrams and labelled images | No |
| Star or progress data | No |
If your set is all text, the conversion is clean. If it leans on images, like the labelled anatomy diagrams a lot of medical sets use, the text export strips out the part you cared about. Keep that in mind before you start, because no amount of careful importing puts the pictures back.
Step 1: Export the set from Quizlet
This only works on the website. The phone app does not have an export option, so open quizlet.com in a browser and sign in.
- Open the set you want to move.
- Click the three-dot menu (More) near the set title.
- Choose Export.
- For "Between term and definition," pick Tab.
- For "Between rows," pick New line.
- Click into the text box, select everything, and copy it.
Tab and New line are the safe choices because definitions often contain commas and semicolons. If you separate fields with a comma and your definitions are full of commas, the import will split them in the wrong places. Tab almost never shows up inside a definition, so it makes a clean divider.
Paste the copied text into a plain text file and save it if you want a backup. Otherwise the clipboard is enough for the next step.
Step 2: Set up Anki to receive the cards
Open Anki on desktop. Import happens on the computer version, not AnkiMobile or AnkiWeb.
- Pick or create the deck you want the cards to land in. Make a new deck if you do not want them mixed into existing reviews.
- Decide the note type. For a straight term and definition set, Basic is right. If you want to be quizzed in both directions, choose Basic (and reversed card) so each row makes two cards.
That is all the prep you need. Anki reads the structure from the text you paste in the next step.
Step 3: Import the text into Anki
- In Anki, go to File, then Import.
- If you saved a text file, select it. If you copied to the clipboard, paste into a new .txt file first, because Anki imports from a file rather than directly from the clipboard.
- Anki shows an import preview. Set the field separator to Tab to match your export.
- Check that column one maps to Front and column two maps to Back.
- Choose the deck and note type you set up in step two.
- Import.
Anki tells you how many notes it added. Open the deck and spot-check a handful of cards to make sure the front and back landed in the right place. If every card looks shifted or merged, the separator did not match. Go back, confirm you used Tab in both the export and the import, and try again.
Step 4: Clean up after the import
A raw import is rarely review-ready. Two passes save you a lot of annoyance later.
First, fix anything that imported oddly. Quizlet definitions are sometimes long and wordy because no scheduler was punishing you for it. In Anki, where you will see these cards for years, long cards are worth tightening. The guide to writing flashcards that actually work covers how short a good card should be.
Second, turn on the modern scheduler. Anki still ships with SM-2 as the default, and FSRS is an opt-in setting in the deck options. If you went to the trouble of moving to Anki, enabling FSRS is the upgrade that makes the move worthwhile, because it cuts daily reviews by 20 to 30% at the same retention. The FSRS vs SM-2 article walks through why and how.
When you should not bother converting
Here is the part most tutorials skip. Conversion is not always the right move.
If the set is small, rebuilding it by hand is faster than exporting, importing, and fixing field mappings. Forty cards take fifteen minutes to retype, and you reinforce the material while you do it.
If the set is image-heavy, the text export throws away the images, so you are not really converting the set. You are converting half of it and rebuilding the rest. At that point, starting fresh is cleaner.
If you only left Quizlet because of the paywall, ask whether Anki is actually where you want to land. Anki is free and powerful, but the interface puts a lot of people off, which is the whole reason the best Quizlet alternatives and best Anki alternatives guides exist. You might be jumping from a tool you found annoying to one you find harder.
If you still have the original source, the PDF, the lecture notes, or the textbook chapter the set came from, regenerating cards from that source is often the fastest path of all. An app with AI card generation drafts a fresh deck from your material in seconds, which skips the export entirely and gives you cleaner cards than a Quizlet set usually contains. That is how Imprimo handles it: point it at the source, get a draft, then trim. The how to make flashcards from a PDF guide shows the workflow.
A note on the "automatic" converters
Search results are full of browser extensions and websites promising one-click Quizlet to Anki conversion. Be careful with these.
They break whenever Quizlet changes its page structure, so the one you find today may not work next month. More importantly, the ones that ask you to log in are asking for your Quizlet account, and handing your login to an unofficial third party is a real risk for a few minutes saved. The manual export is slower, but it never asks you to trust a stranger's website with your account.
The honest bottom line
If you have a text-based Quizlet set and you want Anki's scheduling, the export-and-import path works. Use Tab as your separator, map the fields carefully, enable FSRS once the cards are in, and tighten the long ones.
But the conversion is a means to an end, and the end is reviewing on a scheduler that respects your time. If your set is small, image-heavy, or still sitting in an original PDF, you may get there faster by rebuilding than by converting. And if Quizlet's pricing is what pushed you out, it is worth deciding where you actually want to study before you commit to moving everything. Medical and language learners especially tend to outgrow Quizlet fast, which is why there are dedicated guides for flashcards for medical students and language learners.
