Anki vs Roam Research vs RemNote for Studying: My Experience

Studying for an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam pushed Liam Gower to stress-test three popular systems—Roam Research, RemNote, and Anki—in a new, high-memorization context. The key takeaway: RemNote emerged as the best fit because it keeps notes and flashcards tightly linked, eliminating the “disconnect” that can cause both wasted effort and stale information when exam facts change.

During a two-day course in late May 2021, Gower used Roam Research for note-taking, largely because it felt fast and seamless while capturing interconnected “networked notes.” Early concepts like AWS regions and availability zones naturally linked forward to edge locations, and later to services such as CloudFront that rely on those same edge locations. The payoff came during review: backlinks made it easy to see how one concept supported another without manually writing relationships.

After the course, the exam’s format drove the next shift. The multiple-choice test leaned heavily on basic definitions and lists—exactly the kind of content flashcards are good at memorizing. Gower built an Anki deck with 439 cards for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, including list-focused cards (using the “cloze overlapper” add-on for the six advantages of cloud computing) and visual recall cards (using “image occlusion” for S3 storage classes and their differences). Study routines were simple: short review sessions before sleep and quick catch-ups during spare time.

Practice exams then highlighted two recurring failure modes. First, wrong answers often traced to weak understanding—fixable by revisiting documentation and updating notes. Second, some misses were pure memorization gaps, such as forgetting the six advantages of cloud computing because Anki review time wasn’t targeted enough.

That’s where the separation between Roam/notes and Anki/flashcards became costly. When understanding changed (for example, updating “time to live” to 24 hours), Anki required manual identification and editing of the specific cards affected. Without heavy upfront tagging, it was hard to filter the 439-card deck down to only the relevant items, creating duplication of effort and risk of memorizing outdated facts. The same limitation showed up when trying to focus on weak areas: Anki scheduling and filtering didn’t make it easy to study only the concepts tied to incorrect practice-exam questions.

RemNote solved both problems in Gower’s workflow by treating notes and flashcards as the same underlying objects. By writing a note and converting it into a flashcard using inline markup, updates to the note automatically updated the corresponding card—removing the notes/flashcards disconnect and reducing the chance of stale knowledge. RemNote also enabled targeted “cram” practice by organizing incorrect exam questions into a dedicated page, letting him review them directly rather than hunting through a large Anki deck.

Based on that experience, RemNote became the preferred system for exam studying, while Roam’s networked-note strengths remained valuable. The conclusion wasn’t that one tool is universally superior, but that RemNote’s integrated workflow made it the most reliable for learning, updating, and memorizing under exam pressure.