KoiSwarm vs Anki, UWorld and AMBOSS: which to buy
In short
- Your own course material: KoiSwarm. Nothing else works from your lectures.
- Boards in under three months: UWorld. It is worth the money.
- Looking things up: the AMBOSS library tier, $12.50 a month.
- One month of UWorld costs more than a year of KoiSwarm.
We make KoiSwarm — so check the prices yourself. Every figure below is from the vendor’s own page in August 2026 and linked at the bottom.
Here is the short answer, then the reasoning.
The verdict
| Your situation | Use |
|---|---|
| Block exam on your school’s lectures | KoiSwarm |
| Step 1 in under 3 months | UWorld, plus KoiSwarm for weak topics |
| You need to look things up fast | AMBOSS library tier |
| You already have flashcard decks you like | Anki, keep using it |
| Broke, first year | KoiSwarm free tier + Anki |
Why your own lectures are the whole issue
Anki decks, UWorld questions and AMBOSS articles have one thing in common: someone else wrote them for someone else’s course.
That is fine before Step 1, when everyone is studying the same national blueprint. It is much less fine in second year, when your exam covers the 340 slides your department wrote, with your lecturer’s emphasis and your school’s diagrams.
Right now most students bridge that gap by hand — reading the deck, making cards from it, hoping they picked the right things. That is the job KoiSwarm does: you upload your lecture, and you get notes, practice questions, anatomy drills and spoken viva practice from that lecture. Not from a national average of what medical students study.
That is the entire difference. Everything below is detail.
What you actually pay
| Tool | Price |
|---|---|
| KoiSwarm | Free tier · $19.99/mo billed yearly ($239.88) |
| Anki | Free (iOS app costs extra) |
| AMBOSS | $12.50/mo library · $448/yr with Qbank · $1,199 through residency |
| UWorld Step 1 | $349 for 30 days · $579 for a year |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20/mo |
Worth sitting with: thirty days of UWorld costs more than a full year of KoiSwarm.
The honest case for each
Anki — take it, it’s free. The best value in medical education, full stop. Its catch is that it only schedules cards; it never makes them. You write hundreds yourself, or download a deck built for a different syllabus. If making cards is what keeps stalling you, that is precisely the part KoiSwarm removes.
UWorld — buy it before boards. The questions are written by doctors and the explanations teach better than most lectures. Its catch is scope and price: it drills the national exam, so in a preclinical block it is teaching the wrong syllabus at $349 a month. Buy it when boards are close, not in first year.
AMBOSS — the library is the good bit. $12.50 a month for a peer-reviewed reference you can search mid-revision is genuinely useful, and it stacks fine alongside anything else. The full $1,199 bundle is a large commitment to make early.
ChatGPT — good for getting unstuck, not for studying. It will explain a concept at midnight, which is worth something. But it forgets your material between sessions, never tells you what to review today, and does not show you where an answer came from — which matters more in medicine than most subjects.
KoiSwarm — for the course you are actually enrolled in. Upload the deck; get notes that cite the slide each fact came from, questions on your topics, labelling drills built from your own anatomy diagrams, and a spoken viva you can practise at 1am. Free tier to try, $19.99/month if you stay.
Two things we are not
We are not a boards Qbank. In the last stretch before Step 1 you want thousands of questions calibrated against how real candidates performed. UWorld has years of that data; nobody’s freshly generated questions do. Use us for your coursework and weak topics, use a Qbank for the exam.
We are only as good as your deck. Notes stay faithful to your lecture, which means a thin lecture produces thin notes. That is deliberate — notes you can check against the original are worth more than notes that quietly invent the missing bits — but it is worth knowing.
What we would actually do
First and second year: KoiSwarm on your lectures, Anki for long-term recall. Total cost: $0 to $19.99 a month.
Dedicated boards period: add UWorld. Keep KoiSwarm for the topics you keep getting wrong, because it can build practice from your own weak material rather than serving the next generic question.
Throughout, if you can spare it: the AMBOSS library tier as a lookup tool.
That is it. Two free options, one cheap one, and one expensive one that is worth it at the right time.
What this cannot tell you
We have not tested UWorld’s or AMBOSS’s question quality against ours — their content is proprietary and we have no access to it, so any claim either way would be marketing rather than a finding.
Prices change. Check the links before buying anything.
Sources: Anki · UWorld Step 1 · AMBOSS pricing · ChatGPT pricing