Bunpro vs Anki for Japanese grammar (2026): SRS you rent or SRS you build

Short answer: Bunpro is a grammar course with spaced repetition wrapped around it; Anki is an empty spaced-repetition engine that will do anything you teach it, including nothing. If you want JLPT grammar explained, ordered and reviewed without setup, Bunpro. If you want one system for grammar, vocabulary, kanji and sentences that you own outright and never pay a subscription for, Anki.

I build BetterLingo from Japan and use both of these tools, so this page names what each one is better at rather than pretending one wins. It also says plainly what BetterLingo is not, near the bottom.

What they actually are

Bunpro is a subscription study site organised around JLPT grammar points. Each point comes with a short explanation, links out to other explanations, and a set of cloze sentences you fill in. The scheduler decides when a grammar point comes back. The content already exists — you pick N5 or N3 and start.

Anki is a general flashcard program with a well-studied scheduling algorithm. It ships with no Japanese content at all. You either build cards yourself or download a shared deck someone else built. It is free on desktop, Android and the web; the iOS app, AnkiMobile, is a one-time paid purchase (US$24.99 on the App Store as of August 2026) and that purchase is what funds the project.

What Bunpro is better at

  • Grammar is already written for you. Grammar is the part of Japanese that shared Anki decks handle worst — a grammar point is a pattern with conditions, not a word with a meaning, and it does not fit on a two-sided card easily. Bunpro's whole design assumes that.
  • Order. The points are sequenced by JLPT level, so "what should I learn next" is answered by default. In Anki that question is yours to answer forever.
  • Cloze sentences instead of recognition. You type the missing form, so you practise producing the grammar rather than nodding at a translation. That is the single biggest difference from a typical downloaded grammar deck.
  • Zero setup. No note types, no card templates, no deck options, no sync accounts. This matters more than people admit — the most common Anki failure is not the algorithm, it is a beginner who spends a week configuring and never reviews.

What Anki is better at

  • You own it. The collection is a file on your disk. If you stop paying anyone, nothing disappears. Bunpro is a subscription; when it lapses, so does your access.
  • One system for everything. Grammar, vocabulary, kanji, sentences mined from what you actually read — all in one review queue, one streak, one daily session. Running Bunpro plus something else means two queues.
  • Sentence mining. The strongest thing you can do with Anki is make cards from sentences you met in the wild — a line from a show, a sign in a station, a page of a novel. No pre-made course can give you that, because it does not know what you read.
  • Tunable scheduling. Intervals, daily limits, leech handling and the FSRS scheduler (opt-in since v23.10) are all yours to change. Bunpro's scheduler is Bunpro's.
  • Price. Free everywhere except iOS.

The honest failure modes

Bunpro's failure mode is that reading a grammar explanation and filling a cloze can feel like progress while you still cannot produce the form in a sentence of your own. Its sentences are its sentences.

Anki's failure mode is upstream of the reviews: the cards never get made, or a 3,000-card shared deck gets downloaded on day one and abandoned by day nine because none of it is connected to anything you have read. Anki is only as good as the person feeding it, and that is a real cost, not a slogan.

Which to pick

  • Grammar is your weak point and you want structure: Bunpro. It is built for exactly that gap.
  • You already read or watch Japanese and want to keep what you meet: Anki, with sentence cards you make yourself.
  • You are early (N5-N4) and have never kept an SRS habit: start with the one that needs no setup, and move to Anki when you have things worth mining.
  • Both: common and defensible — Bunpro for grammar, Anki for vocabulary and mined sentences. The cost is two queues and two habits.

Where BetterLingo fits, and what it is not

BetterLingo is a JLPT practice site: you answer questions, including written ones, and get them marked with an explanation of why the wrong option is wrong. It overlaps with the testing half of both tools, not the scheduling half.

What BetterLingo is not: it is not an SRS. There is no deck library, no dictionary import, no card editor, and no long-interval scheduler you can tune. It is small and new, and neither Bunpro's grammar catalogue nor Anki's ecosystem of shared decks and add-ons has an equivalent here. If spaced repetition is the thing you are shopping for, one of the two tools above is the right purchase, and this page is not trying to talk you out of it.

Related reading: Bunpro alternatives, Renshuu vs Anki, and Bunpro vs Renshuu.

Next steps

Pick one and run it for two weeks before judging it — an SRS tells you nothing on day three. If you want to check whether your grammar actually survives being tested, try a few JLPT practice questions and read the explanations on the ones you miss.