Wordbrush vs Anki for Learning Chinese

If you have searched for an "Anki alternative for Chinese," you have probably already met the two frustrations that send people looking: building a good Chinese deck is a project in itself, and getting reliable native audio onto every card is fiddly. Wordbrush exists to remove both of those chores for the HSK 1-3 vocabulary. But Anki is a genuinely great piece of software, so let us lay out the trade-off plainly rather than pretend one tool wins everything.

Side by side

Where Anki is the better choice

We are not going to pretend otherwise: for a lot of learners Anki is the right tool, and here is where it clearly beats Wordbrush.

• Infinite customisation. Anki lets you design card types, add fields, restyle everything with HTML and CSS, and script behaviour. Wordbrush is deliberately opinionated; you cannot reshape it. If you want a cloze-deletion card with your own mnemonic field and a custom grading step, that is Anki, not us.
• Any content, not just HSK 1-3. Anki holds anything: sentence mining from a show you are watching, characters beyond HSK 3, a whole other language, your chemistry midterm. Wordbrush only teaches HSK 1-3 vocabulary. The moment you step outside that scope, Anki is the answer.
• The ecosystem. Two decades of shared decks, hundreds of add-ons, and a large community mean someone has probably already solved your exact problem in Anki.
• Data ownership and longevity. Anki is open source, stores your data locally, and syncs across your own devices. It will still be around and exportable in ten years. That matters if you are playing a very long game.

Where Wordbrush is the better choice

The flip side of Anki's flexibility is that you have to supply everything yourself. That is exactly the work Wordbrush removes.

• Setup is minutes, not hours. Every word of HSK 1-3 is already loaded, ordered, and ready. There is no deck to find, import, or vet.
• Native audio on everything. Every word and every example sentence is voiced by a native speaker. In Anki you either pay for a deck that includes audio, hope a shared deck has it, or wire up a text-to-speech add-on.
• Characters are decoded for you. Each hanzi is split into its components so you learn the building blocks, not just isolated shapes - no add-on to install.
• Mobile-first and free. Wordbrush is a native app on iPhone, iPad, and Android, free on all three. On iOS, the official AnkiMobile app is a paid purchase.

What switching actually costs (and does not)

People hesitate to try something other than Anki for two honest reasons, so let us address them directly. The first is sunk effort: if you have already built a Chinese deck, Wordbrush does not import it, and it will not reproduce your custom card layouts. That work stays in Anki, which is fine, because nothing stops you running both. The second is lock-in worry: Wordbrush is a fixed HSK 1-3 curriculum rather than an open database you export and remix. If owning a portable file of your own cards is important to you, that is a real point in Anki's favour, and we are not going to argue you out of it.

What switching does not cost is the thing that actually makes vocabulary stick. The review science is the same on both sides (see below), the words are the current HSK 1-3 set, and the audio is native either way. For a beginner who has not yet sunk weeks into a deck, there is very little to lose by starting in Wordbrush and reaching for Anki later, if and when you outgrow HSK 3 or want to study something Wordbrush does not cover. The two tools sit at different points on the same path, not on opposite sides of a fence.

The scheduling is the same modern idea

A common worry when leaving Anki is losing its spaced repetition. You do not. Both tools can use FSRS, the algorithm shown in the open FSRS benchmark (70+ collections, roughly 1.5 billion reviews) to need fewer reviews than Anki's classic SM-2 for the same retention. Anki added FSRS as a built-in option in 2023 and made it the default for new users in 2024; Wordbrush runs FSRS by default and fits its parameters to your own history. So on the part that actually determines whether the words stick, the two are on equal, modern footing. For a concrete sense of why that matters, see the worked FSRS vs SM-2 example.

New to the HSK standard?

One more reason old Anki decks can trip you up: the HSK levels themselves changed. The 2021 HSK 3.0 standard, rolling out worldwide in July 2026, reorganised the vocabulary, so many decks online describe the old six-level HSK 2.0. Wordbrush's word lists follow the current standard. If that is news to you, read the new HSK explained first.

So which should you use?

If you already love Anki, keep it - and grab our free HSK 1, 2, and 3 Anki decks (native audio included) or a plain HSK word list to build from. If you want HSK 1-3 done for you, with audio and characters decoded and a schedule that adapts to your memory, Wordbrush is free on iPhone, iPad, and Android. And if you are the kind of learner who ends up wanting both, that is a perfectly good answer too.

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