Comparison
AnKing alternative for in-house exams: cards from your own professor.
AnKing has more than 30,000 cards built for Step 1 and Step 2 CK. Your block exam is written by one professor from one slide deck. This is when each one earns its place, and when it does not.
The mismatch nobody talks about
If you searched this looking for the AnKing deck itself, it lives on AnkiHub now and that is the place to get it. This page is about the exams AnKing was never built for.
AnKing is a community deck built around First Aid and Boards and Beyond, and it is good at what it is for: Step. Your block exam was written by one faculty member who picked which mechanisms to stress and which drug pairs to compare. AnKing rarely lines up with that. I have done 200 cards that were never tested and missed the ones that were.
Building your own starts from whatever your course posted. PDF to Anki covers slide PDFs, and PowerPoint to Anki covers courses that hand out .pptx files.
When each one wins
AnKing
Premade board deck
Wins on
- Step 1 and Step 2 CK coverage
- Standard board topics: mechanisms, classic associations
- Retention across years
- Tags by topic and yield
Loses on
- Your professor's exam emphasis
- Lecture-specific drug pairs and mechanisms
- New cards pile up fast and the review count compounds
- Topics your school teaches in depth that First Aid does not
SynapticRecall
Cards from your own lecture
Wins on
- Your professor's actual slides
- In-house block exam alignment
- School-specific emphasis, like your prof's favorite distractors
- The source slide on the back of every card, so you can check it
Loses on
- Step 1 coverage on its own
- Topics the lecture skipped that the boards test
- The polish of a community-edited deck
Use both
I run two decks. AnKing for Step, slowly. A school deck built per lecture that matures inside the block.
The lecture layer is the one that dies, because making the cards eats the evening you meant to spend reviewing. SynapticRecall does that first pass, so the block goes into checking and answering cards.
If that evening is the bottleneck, the card-making takes too long page is about exactly that trade.
Deeper read: own cards vs premade decksQuick answers
Is AnKing still worth using in 2026?
For Step 1 and Step 2 CK, yes. For in-house block exams, no. Your professor writes the exam from their slides, not from First Aid. AnKing for Step, your own cards for the block.
What is the best alternative to AnKing for in-house exams?
A deck made from the actual lecture PDF. It covers the professor-specific material a board deck skips. Check it against the course objectives before you review.
Do I need both AnKing and my own deck?
I do. AnKing runs in the background for Step. In-house cards go on top, made per lecture. They cover different material, so they do not fight.
Will my own deck cover Step 1 the way AnKing does?
No. AnKing covers First Aid material your school may skim. Keep AnKing for Step coverage and use your own deck to match your professor's exam.
Three free credits
Try it on your next lecture
Upload the lecture your professor posted and get back an .apkg scoped to it. Three credits free on signup, no card.