The 10 Best Free Revision Apps for IB and IGCSE Students

Your child has fourteen apps on their phone and still hasn’t learned the Krebs cycle. That’s not a discipline problem. It’s usually an app problem.

Most study apps are built to feel productive. Colour-coded timetables. Streaks. Neat digital notes. Very little of that moves a grade. The apps that do move grades are the boring ones that make you answer questions from memory, again and again, on a schedule.

This guide picks the ten revision apps that are worth your time, and says plainly what each one costs.

Quick answer

The best free revision app for most IB and IGCSE students is Anki, because it forces you to recall facts from memory and spaces the repeats automatically. Seneca Learning is the best fully free option for IGCSE, with courses mapped to Cambridge and Edexcel syllabuses. RevisionDojo is the strongest IB-specific question bank with a free tier. If you only download three apps, download one flashcard app, one question bank for your exam board, and one focus timer. That combination covers memory, exam practice, and actually sitting down.

Prices and free allowances in this guide were checked in August 2026. App companies change their free tiers often, so check the app’s own pricing page before you pay for anything.

The 10 best revision apps at a glance

What makes a revision app actually work

A revision app works when it makes you pull answers out of your own head, and when it spreads that practice over weeks instead of one long night.

That isn’t an opinion. In a major review of ten common study techniques published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2013, Dunlosky and colleagues rated only two techniques as high utility: practice testing and distributed practice (spreading study over time). Two of the most popular student habits — highlighting and rereading — were rated low utility. Students do them constantly. They barely help.

So there are only two questions worth asking about any revision app:

1. Does it make me answer questions without looking at the notes?

2. Does it bring topics back after a gap of days or weeks?

If an app does neither, it is a stationery shop with a login screen. Pretty, but it won’t lift a 5 to a 7.

Here is the honest split:

1. Anki — the best free revision app for memorising anything

Anki is a free flashcard app that decides when to show you each card, based on how well you knew it last time.

You get a card wrong, it comes back tomorrow. You get it right three times, it comes back in three weeks. That scheduling is the whole point. It is doing the “distributed practice” part for you, so you never have to guess what to revise today.

Cost: free on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android (AnkiDroid) and the web. The official iPhone and iPad app, AnkiMobile, is a one-time purchase of about $24.99. There is no subscription. The desktop app is open source, and the iOS purchase funds development.

Best for: IB Biology vocabulary, IGCSE Chemistry definitions, Math AA formulas, IB command terms, language vocabulary, History dates.

Honest downside: Anki is ugly and the setup takes an hour. Most students quit in week one. If your child gets past that first week, it is the single most powerful free tool on this list.

How to use it well: make cards with one fact each. “What is the formula for kinetic energy?” not “Explain energy.” Twenty minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday. Learning the exam wording matters too — our guide to IB command terms shows which words examiners use and what each one demands.

2. Quizlet — the fastest way to start

Quizlet is the easiest flashcard app to begin with, because millions of sets already exist for IB and IGCSE topics.

You search “IGCSE Biology transport in plants”, you get a ready-made set, and you’re revising in two minutes. That low friction is real value, especially for a student who has never used flashcards.

Cost: the free plan lets you make and store unlimited sets and search other people’s. Flashcards, Learn, Test, Write and Match modes are included, with ads. Learn and Test have daily limits on the free plan. Offline study and the AI features sit behind Quizlet Plus.

Best for: vocabulary, definitions, quick topic drills, group revision with classmates.

Honest downside: other people’s sets contain other people’s mistakes. Always check a shared set against your syllabus before you trust it. And Quizlet’s free plan is thinner than it was a few years ago — several features that used to be free now have caps.

3. Seneca Learning — the best fully free app for IGCSE

Seneca is a free revision app with complete courses built against Cambridge International and Edexcel International GCSE syllabuses. Sitting the UK system instead? See IGCSE vs GCSE.

It works in short adaptive sessions. You answer, it marks you, and it brings back the things you got wrong more often. Seneca says it covers 14+ subjects for the two international boards, and that its content is mapped to the latest syllabuses with both Core and Extended pathways. It also runs some IB Diploma courses, including Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Business and Economics.

Cost: free, with unlimited use. There are optional Premium add-ons, but the courses themselves cost nothing.

Best for: IGCSE students who want structured revision without paying, and anyone who prefers short 10-minute sessions to long study blocks.

Evidence: Seneca points to a randomised controlled trial reporting a 65–105% improvement in test scores from its blend of spacing, interleaving and retrieval practice. That’s the company’s own citation, so treat it as a strong claim rather than a settled fact — but the underlying methods are exactly the ones the research supports.

Honest downside: IB Diploma coverage is much thinner than IGCSE coverage. IB students will need something else alongside it. And short adaptive questions don’t prepare you for a 6-mark extended answer, which is where IGCSE marks are actually won or lost. Pair it with real past papers and check the IGCSE grade boundaries so you know what score you’re aiming at. Pair an app with real IGCSE English past papers for exam-day timing.

4. RevisionDojo — the best IB-specific question bank with a free tier

RevisionDojo is a revision platform built only for IB and MYP students, with exam-style questions grouped by topic.

Because it is IB-only, the questions look like IB questions. That matters more than most students realise. Practising generic science questions doesn’t teach you how an IB Paper 2 data question is worded. RevisionDojo advertises 35,000+ IB-style questions and 8,000+ topical notes, plus AI feedback that breaks an answer down against the mark scheme, and coursework grading tools for the IA, EE and TOK essay.

Cost: there is a free plan with core practice tools and every IB subject. Full access to the question bank, exemplars, videos and full coursework grading sits behind the paid Plus and Pro tiers.

Best for: IB Diploma students in their final year who have run out of official past papers.

Honest downside: the free plan is a taster, not a full toolkit. And AI mark-scheme feedback is a guide, not an examiner. It can tell you a criterion is missing. It cannot tell you whether your idea is any good. For that, a subject specialist reading your actual draft is still the only real answer.

5. Save My Exams — board-specific notes with a small free allowance

Save My Exams gives you revision notes and topic questions written for your exact exam board, with a limited free monthly allowance.

As of their own published guidance in June 2026, the free tier gives you one topic question per month and five revision notes per month, plus unlimited access to their Learning Hub articles. Importantly, their past papers and mark schemes are free to everyone. Everything else — model answers, flashcards, mock exams, full question sets — needs a subscription, and there is a 7-day free trial.

Best for: Cambridge and Edexcel IGCSE students who want notes matched to their syllabus code, and IB students wanting a second source alongside class notes.

Honest downside: five notes a month is not a revision plan. This is a paid product with a sample attached. Use the free past papers heavily, and treat the notes as a trial before deciding whether to subscribe. If you want free past papers from other sources too, our guide on where to find IB past papers lists what is legally available and where.

6. Khan Academy — the best free app for a topic you never understood

Khan Academy is a free, ad-free non-profit with video lessons and practice questions across maths and science.

It is not an IB or IGCSE app. Nothing is mapped to your syllabus. That’s fine, because you use it for a different job: when a student doesn’t understand why something works, no amount of flashcarding will fix it. Khan Academy is where you go to re-learn logarithms, or moles, or differentiation, from scratch.

Cost: free, permanently. It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, with no ads and no paid tier for learners.

Best for: filling a real understanding gap in Maths, Physics, Chemistry or Biology, especially a gap that goes back a year or two.

Honest downside: the content is aligned to US curricula, so topic names and depth won’t match your syllabus exactly. Use it to understand, then go back to your own syllabus for the exam-specific detail.

7. GeoGebra — a free graphing calculator that lives on the phone

GeoGebra is a free set of maths apps that plot functions, solve equations and show geometry visually.

For IB Maths in particular, seeing the shape of a function is half the battle. A student who can picture where a cubic turns will make far fewer sign errors than one who only manipulates symbols. GeoGebra makes that free and instant.

Cost: free on iOS, Android and the web.

Best for: IB Math AA and AI students checking answers, exploring transformations, and building the graphs that go in an Internal Assessment. It’s a genuinely useful tool while you shape an IA — and if you’re still choosing a question, our free IB IA topic generator will give you subject-specific starting points.

Important warning: a phone app is not a permitted calculator in an exam. IB and Cambridge exams require an approved handheld graphic display calculator, set to exam mode where required. Use GeoGebra for homework, revision and IA work — never assume it replaces the calculator your school tells you to buy.

8. Microsoft OneNote — free notes on every device

OneNote is a free note-taking app that syncs across phone, tablet and laptop with a free Microsoft account.

Its advantage over prettier apps is simple: it costs nothing, on every platform, with no notebook limit. A student can photograph a whiteboard on their phone at 3pm and have it on their laptop at 7pm. Free storage runs on OneDrive.

Cost: free on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and the web with a Microsoft account. Some extras come with a Microsoft 365 subscription, but the core app is free.

Best for: consolidating class notes, storing photographed diagrams, and keeping one notebook per subject.

Honest downside — and read this one: making notes is not revising. It feels like work because it takes hours, but copying information is exactly the low-utility activity the research warns about. Notes are the raw material. The revision happens when you close the notebook and try to write the page from memory.

A note on the popular alternatives: Goodnotes is excellent on an iPad but its free tier caps you at three notebooks, and exports carry a watermark. Notion is powerful, and it does offer a free Plus plan for students — but that education plan applies to accredited colleges and universities, so most IB and IGCSE students at school won’t qualify. Notion’s ordinary free personal plan is still generous.

9. Todoist or Google Calendar — turning intentions into a plan

A task or calendar app is the tool that converts “I should revise chemistry” into a specific 45-minute block on Tuesday.

Vague plans fail. “Revise Biology this weekend” produces two hours of highlighting. “Saturday 10:00–10:45: Topic 3 questions, no notes open” produces actual retrieval practice.

Cost: Google Calendar is free. Todoist’s free plan gives you 5 active personal projects and 300 tasks per project, which is more than enough for one exam season.

Best for: students sitting 6 to 9 subjects who genuinely cannot hold the workload in their head. That’s most IB Diploma and IGCSE students.

How to use it well: put the task, not the subject, in the calendar. And work backwards from your targets. Our free IB score calculator lets you see which subject is actually costing you points, so the hours go where they matter instead of where revision feels comfortable.

Honest downside: planning is the most seductive form of procrastination there is. If your child spends Sunday building a colour-coded timetable and no time answering questions, the app has made things worse.

10. Forest or Pomofocus — the focus timer

A focus timer app runs a countdown, usually 25 minutes, during which you don’t touch your phone.

This sounds trivial. It isn’t. For a lot of students the bottleneck isn’t technique at all — it’s that no 25-minute block of the evening is ever phone-free. A timer makes the block visible and finite. “Twenty-five minutes” is a promise a teenager can keep. “Study all evening” isn’t.

Cost: Pomofocus is free on the web with no download. Forest is free on Android with ads, with a small one-off payment for the ad-free Pro version; on iPhone it’s a paid app at around $4. Any timer works, including the one already on the phone.

Best for: students who sit down to revise and lose 40 minutes to a group chat.

Honest downside: the gamified versions can become the activity. If your child is more invested in their virtual forest than their Chemistry, use the plain clock.

Free tools built specifically for IB students

Three free tools we built at Educifly sit alongside the apps above, and they answer questions general study apps can’t.

• IB score calculator — enter your subject grades and core points and see your total out of 45, including the TOK and Extended Essay bonus points. Useful for working out exactly how many marks stand between a student and their offer.

• IB IA topic generator — subject-specific Internal Assessment ideas, for the stage where a student is stuck staring at a blank document.

Both are free and need no account. They exist because Educifly’s IB specialists were answering the same two questions in nearly every trial lesson.

Apps that look helpful but usually aren’t

Some categories of app cost students more time than they save. Be honest about these.

The pattern is the same in every row. Apps that remove the difficulty also remove the learning. The struggle to recall an answer is the mechanism.

How to choose a revision app in five minutes

Pick one app per job, not five apps per subject. Three is usually the right total.

1. Choose one memory app. Anki if the student will stick with it. Quizlet if they need to start today.

2. Choose one question source for your board. Seneca for IGCSE. RevisionDojo or official past papers for IB. Save My Exams if their syllabus code is covered and you’re willing to pay after the trial.

3. Choose one focus tool. Any timer. It doesn’t matter which.

4. Add a calendar only if the workload is genuinely unmanageable in your head.

5. Delete the rest. Five half-used apps beat nothing, but they lose badly to two used properly.

A sample revision week using three apps

Here’s what a realistic week looks like for an IGCSE or IB student with about 90 minutes a day.

Notice what’s missing: no session is “read the notes”. Every block either tests recall or fixes a specific gap. That’s the whole design.

Do revision apps actually improve grades?

Apps improve grades when they deliver retrieval practice and spacing — and they change nothing when they only organise information.

The evidence backs the method, not the brand. Practice testing and spaced study are the two techniques with the strongest support in the research literature; highlighting and rereading are the two most popular and among the least effective. An app is just a delivery mechanism. Anki, Quizlet and Seneca all work because they force recall on a schedule. A beautiful notes app doesn’t, no matter how good the reviews are.

The second limit is diagnosis. An app can tell a student they got question 4 wrong. It usually can’t tell them why — whether it was a knowledge gap, a misread command term, or an exam technique problem. Those three failures look identical on a score screen and need completely different fixes. That’s the point at which a person has to look at the work.

What parents should watch for

Three signals tell you whether an app is helping.

Good signal: your child can close the app and explain the topic out loud. Retrieval is happening.

Warning signal: hours logged in a study app but no rise in past-paper scores. Time is going into organising, not recalling.

Warning signal: every homework answer is right, but test scores don’t move. Check whether an answer-solver app is doing the work.

You don’t need to police screen time to check this. Ask one question a week: “Show me a question you got wrong and what you’d write now.” A student who can answer that is revising. A student who can’t is decorating.

If the honest answer is that the gap needs a person rather than another download, that’s what our specialist IB and IGCSE tutors do — one subject, one tutor, every week. You can book a free trial class and get an honest read on where the marks are being lost.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free revision app?

Anki is the best free revision app for pure memorisation, because it uses spaced repetition and costs nothing on desktop, Android and the web. For IGCSE students who want structured courses matched to Cambridge or Edexcel, Seneca Learning is the best fully free option. For IB-specific exam questions, RevisionDojo has the strongest free tier.

Is Anki really free?

Anki is free on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and the web. The official iPhone and iPad app, AnkiMobile, is a one-time purchase of about $24.99, with no subscription. The paid iOS app funds development of the free versions. If cost is the issue, use AnkiWeb in the phone’s browser instead — it’s free and syncs with the desktop app.

Which revision app is best for IGCSE?

Seneca Learning is the best all-round free app for IGCSE, because its courses are built against Cambridge International and Edexcel International GCSE syllabuses and cost nothing. Save My Exams is stronger for syllabus-specific notes and exam-style questions, but only a small monthly allowance is free. Use Seneca daily and past papers weekly.

Which revision app is best for the IB Diploma?

RevisionDojo is the most IB-specific option, with topic-organised exam-style questions and a free plan covering all subjects. Pair it with Anki for definitions and command terms, and with official past papers from your school. Seneca has some IB Diploma courses too, though its IB range is narrower than its IGCSE range.

Are revision apps better than past papers?

No. Past papers are the highest-value revision there is, because they test the exact format, wording and timing of your exam. Apps are best used to build the recall that past papers then test. The strongest revision week uses both: daily flashcards, weekly timed past-paper sections, and careful marking against the mark scheme.

How much time should my child spend on revision apps each day?

Twenty to thirty minutes of flashcards a day is plenty, plus one or two 25-minute blocks of question practice. Short daily sessions beat long weekend marathons, because spacing is what moves information into long-term memory. More than about 90 focused minutes on a school night usually produces diminishing returns.

Do free revision apps have hidden costs?

Sometimes. Many apps advertise a free tier that is really a trial: Save My Exams gives five revision notes a month, Quizlet caps daily use of Learn and Test, and RevisionDojo reserves most of its question bank for paid plans. Fully free options with no meaningful cap include Seneca Learning, Khan Academy, GeoGebra and OneNote. Always check the app’s own pricing page, because free tiers shrink over time.

Can my child use a calculator app in the exam?

No. IB and Cambridge exams require an approved handheld calculator, and phones are not permitted in the exam room at all. Apps like GeoGebra and Desmos are excellent for revision, homework and Internal Assessment work, but students must practise on the physical calculator model their school approves, and know how to put it into exam mode.

Is it cheating to use AI apps for revision?

Using an AI tool to explain a concept you don’t understand is fine. Using one to write your Internal Assessment, Extended Essay or TOK essay is academic misconduct and can cost you the whole Diploma. The safe test is simple: if the app produces work you then submit as your own, stop. If it helps you understand something you then write yourself, carry on.

Which apps should we delete?

Delete instant answer-solvers if homework is suddenly always correct but test scores aren’t moving. Delete aesthetic planners if more time goes into formatting than answering. And delete duplicates — two flashcard apps means neither deck gets finished. Three well-used apps beat ten downloaded ones every time.

My child uses the apps but grades aren’t improving. What now?

Look at how they’re used rather than how long. Ask them to answer a past-paper question with everything closed. If they can’t, the app time is going into recognition instead of recall. If they can answer at home but lose marks in tests, the problem is exam technique or command-term reading, not knowledge. Those two problems need different fixes, which is exactly the diagnosis a subject specialist does in the first lesson.

Written by Educifly’s IB and IGCSE specialists. Educifly has been matching students with subject-specialist tutors since 2018. Prices and free tiers were checked in August 2026 and can change without notice — always confirm on the provider’s own site. And when an app isn’t enough, our IGCSE tutors can step in.