A note-taking outliner with flashcards built in, vs. a tutor built around your books.
RemNote is a hierarchical note-taking app — outliner blocks, references, and portals in the style of Roam or Logseq — with spaced repetition built directly into the writing process: highlight a phrase in your notes and it becomes a cloze flashcard automatically. It's popular with students who take detailed course notes and want review baked into that workflow. Recall skips the note-taking step entirely and works from the highlights you already made while reading.
Students building structured course notes who want flashcards to fall out of the outline for free.
Readers who want review to start from what they already highlighted, with no notes to write first.
Honest list of things RemNote does better.
We update this when reality changes.
- Note structure.RemNote's outliner — nested blocks, portals, backlinks — is a genuinely good system for building structured course notes over a semester. Recall doesn't attempt this; it's a review layer on top of highlights, not a notes app.
- PDF workflow.RemNote lets you annotate a PDF and turn selections into flashcards in the same pass. Recall imports PDF highlights for review, but the annotation itself happens in your PDF reader of choice first.
- One tool for the whole course.If you already live in RemNote for lecture notes, adding flashcards costs nothing extra. Recall asks you to bring highlights from wherever you read, which is one more habit to build if you don't have one already.
Still curious?
Try Recall with one book for two weeks. If it doesn't stick, you keep what you've planted, and walk away.