Anki MCP Server

Anki is the best-known spaced repetition system and the least conversational: a card appears, you grade yourself, the algorithm moves on. This MCP server gives an AI assistant direct access to your collection through the AnkiConnect add-on, which turns review into something closer to sitting with a tutor — the assistant can present a card, explain why your answer was wrong, give context the card never had room for, and then record your rating.

42 tools

Thirty-one cover everyday operations: sync with AnkiWeb, get_due_cards and get_cards with filtering by deck and state (due, new, learning, suspended, buried), present_card and rate_card for the review loop, plus note, deck, model and media management. Card front and back are rendered per card from its own template, exactly as Anki would show it, so reversed and cloze cards come through in the right direction rather than as raw fields.

The remaining eleven drive the Anki desktop GUI itself — reading the notes currently selected in the browser, for instance, so "add this image to the front of the note I have open" works as stated.

What it is good for

Bulk creation is the obvious win: "create 10 Arabic vocabulary cards with right-to-left styling" becomes listing note types, creating a custom model with RTL CSS, and batch-adding the notes. So is media handling — a local file is uploaded with storeMediaFile and referenced from a field.

Running it

It needs desktop Anki with the AnkiConnect add-on installed, and Node.js 22.12.0 or newer. Install with npm install -g @ankimcp/anki-mcp-server or run it on demand with npx; for Claude Desktop there is an .mcpb bundle on the releases page that bundles everything. The server runs on the same machine as your client and talks to AnkiConnect on localhost:8765, so your collection never leaves your computer.

MIT licensed, and the authors describe it as beta — APIs and features may still change.