Anki MCP: Setup Guide + Best Servers (2026)

Somewhere in your Anki collection is a deck you built with real effort and now barely touch, because writing new cards takes longer than reviewing the ones you have. That is the actual bottleneck in spaced repetition. Not the algorithm. Card creation.

Anki MCP is worth setting up because it moves that bottleneck onto Claude. You still decide what to study. You stop being the one who has to type out every cloze deletion by hand.

What it actually changes

Anki rewards consistency more than any other tool in the spaced-repetition space, and consistency dies the moment card creation feels like homework. Most people who quit Anki do not quit because reviewing is hard. They quit because they fell behind on writing cards and the backlog became its own source of dread.

Handing card creation to an assistant that can read your notes, summarize a topic, and format it correctly for Anki’s note types removes the exact friction that kills the habit. You still choose what matters enough to learn. The typing stops being the bottleneck.

The Model Context Protocol, released by Anthropic in late 2024, is what makes this a two-way connection rather than a copy-paste workaround. An MCP server exposes a set of tools an AI client can call directly, so Claude does not just describe cards you should make. It makes them, inside your actual collection.

No official server, and the community knows it

Search the Anki forums and you find a thread titled “AnkiWeb Official MCP?”, opened in September 2025 by a user asking for exactly this, an official, always-on MCP server that would work without a desktop client running in the background. One community member replied that the official Anki project has so far seemed uninterested. That is a forum user’s read, not a statement from Anki’s team.

That leaves the field to community servers, and Reddit’s r/Anki reflects the same gap from the other direction, with threads asking outright which MCP server is actually the best one for building cards. Two answers come up consistently.

The two servers worth knowing

ankimcp/anki-mcp-server, published under the AnkiMCP.ai project, is the broader and more actively developed option. Installed the classic way, it runs as a Node process and talks to Anki through the AnkiConnect add-on on localhost:8765. It exposes 53 tools, 42 for everyday work and 11 that drive the Anki window, spanning review and study (get due cards, rate a card, sync), deck management, note creation and search, tag management, media files, note-type and template editing, and GUI control tools like opening the card browser. It needs Node 22.12 or later. It has 498 stars and was last pushed Sep 18, 2026.

The same project also ships something newer and genuinely useful, a native Anki addon distributed on AnkiWeb under code 124672614 that runs the MCP server as a background thread directly inside Anki. No AnkiConnect, no separate Node process, no terminal window to keep open. It starts when Anki starts and stops when Anki closes, listening on http://127.0.0.1:3141, and covers the same core ground with a slightly smaller tool set. It needs Anki 25.07 or later. Its Claude Desktop setup uses an mcp-remote bridge, covered below.

nailuoGG/anki-mcp-server is a smaller, more focused project. It runs through Node and requires the AnkiConnect add-on, exposing a smaller set of tools prefixed anki_ for deck management, note create and search, tag add and remove, note-type metadata, and sync. It has 253 stars and was last pushed Sep 23, 2026, so it is still actively maintained, just narrower in scope than ankimcp’s server.

For most people, ankimcp/anki-mcp-server is the right call, mainly because of the native addon. Removing AnkiConnect from the dependency chain removes an entire category of setup failure, and the addon covers deck management, note creation, review, tags, and media, which is what almost everyone actually uses day to day. Reach for nailuoGG/anki-mcp-server if you already run AnkiConnect for other add-ons and would rather keep one consistent bridge than add a second server architecture on top.

Setup for Claude Desktop and Claude Code

This walks through the native addon path, since it is the simplest and the one with the fewest moving parts.

Step 1. Install the addon through AnkiWeb: In Anki, open Tools, then Add-ons, then Get Add-ons. Enter the code 124672614 and click OK. Restart Anki. The MCP server now starts automatically in the background whenever Anki is open, listening on http://127.0.0.1:3141.

Step 2. Add it to Claude Desktop: Open Claude Desktop, go to Settings, then Developer, then Edit Config, to open claude_desktop_config.json. Claude Desktop does not take a bare URL for a local server there, so use the mcp-remote bridge, which needs Node.js installed. The Add custom connector menu is for remote servers, not this one:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "anki": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["mcp-remote", "http://127.0.0.1:3141"]
    }
  }
}

Step 3. Or add it to Claude Code:

claude mcp add anki --transport http http://127.0.0.1:3141/

Step 4. Prefer the classic route instead? Skip the addon, install AnkiConnect (AnkiWeb code 2055492159) the same way, then add the Node server, which needs Node 22.12 or later:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "anki-mcp": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@ankimcp/anki-mcp-server", "--stdio"],
      "env": {
        "ANKI_CONNECT_URL": "http://localhost:8765"
      }
    }
  }
}

Step 5. Restart fully: Quit Claude Desktop completely and reopen it. A window reload will not pick up a newly added server.

Step 6. Test it: With Anki open, ask “how many cards are due in my main deck today?” A real number confirms the connection. If you get an error, check that Anki is actually running, since every route here depends on the desktop app being open.

What to actually ask

Setup is the boring half. Here is what makes it worth doing.

• Turn notes into cards: “Read these lecture notes and create 15 cloze cards in my Biology deck, tagged ‘week-4’.” The exact task that usually stops people from keeping a deck current.
• Check your real backlog: “How many cards are overdue across all my decks, broken down by deck?” A truer picture than opening Anki and squinting at the deck list.
• Fix messy tags: “Find every note tagged both ‘todo’ and ‘reviewed’, and remove the ‘todo’ tag.” A cleanup job that would otherwise mean scrolling the browser by hand.
• Draft a whole deck from a source: “Turn this article into 20 question-and-answer cards, one fact per card, no compound questions.” Review them before adding, since a card with two facts in one answer is a bad card.
• Audit a note type: “List the fields on my ‘Vocabulary’ note type and tell me if any cards are missing a field.” Cheap insurance before a study session, catches formatting mistakes early.

What it can’t do

It still needs Anki open. Every route here, addon or AnkiConnect, depends on the desktop app running. Neither server reaches your collection while Anki is fully closed, and the free servers have no cloud version. If you want spaced recall without Anki at all, Fluid Recall is a free remote option over MCP: it stores your decks and due dates, and your agent runs the review in chat. It doesn’t connect to an existing Anki collection.

AI-written cards need a human pass. A model can generate a plausible-looking cloze card that tests the wrong thing, or splits one idea across a bad boundary. Treat generated cards as a first draft, not a finished deck, especially for anything you are studying to pass an exam.

The native addon is newer, so it may have less mileage. ankimcp’s classic Node server has been through more real-world use than the addon version. If something breaks, the AnkiConnect route has a longer track record of people hitting and fixing the same issues.

Neither server touches AnkiWeb’s own sync or mobile review. These tools work against your local collection. Syncing to AnkiWeb or reviewing on mobile still works exactly as it did before, but the AI layer only exists on whichever machine is running the server.

Remote access needs extra setup. Reaching your Anki server from outside your own machine means a tunnel. You can run Cloudflare Tunnel or ngrok yourself, or use the managed tunnel the ankimcp project offers, which needs an ankimcp.ai account. The project also sells a hosted Anki on its Pro plan that runs in the cloud, which this guide does not cover.

Where ContextBolt fits

To be straightforward about it, ContextBolt has nothing to do with Anki, and this is not a forced tie-in.

It solves the adjacent problem in a study workflow. Anki turns things you already understand into long-term memory. ContextBolt catches the raw material before that, the threads, articles, and posts you save while researching a topic on X, Reddit, or LinkedIn, before you have decided what is worth turning into a flashcard. It tags and clusters everything automatically and exposes its own MCP endpoint, so Claude can pull from your saves the same conversation where it is building your deck.

The two pair naturally. Research and save with ContextBolt, ask Claude to pull the relevant saves and turn the key facts into cards, then review in Anki. Basic is free and is capped at 150 bookmarks. Pro is $6 a month for unlimited bookmarks, cloud sync, and the MCP endpoint.

For the wider picture of connecting your tools to Claude, see What Is MCP? The Plain English Explainer and the full MCP server directory for servers beyond Anki.

Worth doing?

If you use Anki seriously and card creation is the reason your deck falls behind, yes. The native addon route is a five-minute install with nothing extra to configure.

The thing that changes is not the review session. It’s the moment before it, when you’d normally decide the backlog is too big to face and skip today. Ask Claude to turn a set of notes into cards instead, and the backlog stops being the reason you quit.