Notion to Anki: How to Turn Your Notion Notes into Flashcards

Notion is a great place to write notes. Anki is a great place to review them. The problem is the gap in between: retyping every question and answer into Anki by hand is slow, and most students give up after the first chapter. The good news is that you don't have to. Notion can export your cards in a format Anki reads, and there are tools that turn Notion pages straight into Anki decks.

This guide walks through each option step by step, shows what survives the trip (and what doesn't), and covers the most common import errors.

The short answer

• Your cards are rows in a Notion database: export the database as CSV and import it into Anki. Free, built in, no extra accounts.
• Your cards are toggle lists inside your notes, with images or formulas: convert the page with 2anki, a third-party tool that turns Notion pages into Anki decks.
• You only use Anki because Notion has no reviews: you can skip the export and review inside Notion with a spaced-repetition template.

Before you start: shape your cards in Notion

Every Anki card has at least two fields, a front and a back. The cleaner your Notion cards match that shape, the easier any method gets. Two layouts work well:

Option A: a flashcards database

One row per card, with these properties:

• Front (the title column): the question or term.
• Back (text): the answer. Keep it short; one idea per card.
• Tags (multi-select): topic or chapter, written as single words like cell_biology.
• Deck (select, optional): which Anki deck the card belongs to.

This is the best layout for the CSV method. If you are building it from scratch, our guide to Notion flashcards shows the full database setup.

Option B: toggle lists in your notes

Write the question as the toggle's title and put the answer inside it. You can do this right in your lecture notes, so writing cards becomes part of taking notes. This is the layout 2anki expects.

Method 1: Export a Notion database as CSV and import it into Anki

This uses only features that are built into both apps.

Step 1: Export from Notion

1. Open your flashcards database as a full page.
2. Click ••• in the top right, then Export.
3. Choose Markdown & CSV as the format. You can export the current view or the default view, so pick a view that shows the cards you want.
4. Click Export. Notion downloads a zip file. Unzip it and find the .csv file inside.

Step 2: Check your tags (optional)

Notion writes multi-select values separated by commas, while Anki separates tags with spaces. If a card has the tags biology, exam_1, Anki will read the comma as part of the first tag. Open the CSV in a spreadsheet app, replace ", " with a single space in the Tags column, and save it again as CSV (UTF-8). If you only use one tag per card, you can skip this step.

Step 3: Import into Anki

1. In Anki on your computer, click File → Import and pick the CSV file.
2. Check that the field separator is Comma. Anki usually guesses it correctly.
3. Pick the note type (Basic is fine for question and answer) and the deck.
4. Map the columns: Front → Front, Back → Back, Tags → Tags. Set any column you don't need, such as dates or formulas, to nothing.
5. Click Import.

Adding more cards later

You don't need to export only the new cards. Anki checks the first field to decide whether a note already exists. By default it updates the existing note and keeps its review schedule, so you can keep writing cards in Notion and re-import the whole CSV each week. The catch: if you edit a card's question in Notion, Anki treats it as a new card.

What you lose

A CSV holds plain text. Bold, colours and images don't come across, and the sync is one-way: changes you make in Anki never go back to Notion. For text-only decks such as vocabulary, definitions and dates, that's rarely a problem.

Method 2: Convert toggle lists with 2anki

2anki is a third-party converter built for exactly this. It reads your Notion pages and turns them into an Anki deck file (.apkg).

1. Write your cards as toggle lists in a Notion page (question as the title, answer inside).
2. Give 2anki your page in one of two ways: connect your Notion workspace and paste the page link, or export the page from Notion (••• → Export → HTML) and upload the zip.
3. Download the .apkg file and open it with Anki, or use File → Import.

Because it works from the page itself, 2anki keeps much more than a CSV: images, code blocks, formulas and cloze deletions come through. It can also turn tables and databases into cards.

Two things to know before you connect it. First, 2anki is a separate service, so when you connect your workspace it can read the pages you share with it. Share only your study pages. Second, it has a free tier with a usage quota and paid plans above that, and the limits change, so check the current ones on its site. A single conversion is a snapshot; for ongoing updates you either convert again or use its hosted sync option.

CSV vs 2anki vs reviewing in Notion

Method 3: Skip the export and review in Notion

Many people use Anki for one reason only: Notion has no built-in review scheduler. If that's you, exporting every week means keeping two copies of the same cards. The alternative is to add the missing piece to Notion: a flashcards template that decides which cards are due today and quizzes you on them.

Staying in Notion makes sense when:

• you already write your notes in Notion and want cards right next to them;
• you want your study plan, deadlines and reviews in one place;
• your decks are in the hundreds of cards, not the tens of thousands.

Anki is still the better tool when you have very large decks, want its advanced scheduling algorithms, review offline on your phone every day, or use shared decks from other learners. We compare both in detail in Notion vs Anki for flashcards.

Common import problems (and fixes)

• Everything ended up in one field. The separator is wrong. Set it to Comma in Anki's import options.
• Strange characters instead of accents. The file was saved in a different encoding, usually after editing it in a spreadsheet. Save it again as CSV (UTF-8).
• Every card was imported twice. The first column changed between imports, or the import was set to create duplicates. Keep the question in the first column and leave existing notes set to update.
• The column names became a card. Notion puts property names in the first row. Delete that card in Anki, or remove the first row before importing.
• Tags look odd. Commas or spaces inside tag names. Use single-word tags such as exam_1.

Bottom line

For text cards in a Notion database, the CSV export is all you need: export, import, and re-import whenever you add more cards. For toggle-list notes with images, 2anki saves you the formatting work. And if the only reason you export is to get spaced repetition, you can bring the reviews to Notion instead. New to the method itself? Read our guide to spaced repetition or the complete guide to studying with Notion.

Frequently asked questions

Can Notion sync with Anki automatically?

Not natively. Notion and Anki have no built-in connection, so the CSV method is a manual export and import. Third-party tools such as 2anki offer a hosted sync that checks your Notion pages for changes; check their current plans and limits.

Will re-importing a CSV reset my Anki reviews?

No, as long as the first field (usually the question) hasn't changed. Anki uses the first field to find existing notes and, by default, updates them while keeping their review schedule.

Can I move my Anki cards into Notion?

Yes. In Anki, use File → Export and choose Notes in Plain Text. Open the file in a spreadsheet app, save it as CSV and import it into a Notion database. Your review history stays in Anki.

Does Notion have spaced repetition?

Not built in. You can add it with formulas that calculate each card's next review date, or use a template such as Flashcards Pro that includes the scheduler, a quiz mode and progress tracking.