Semora vs DormWay: which is right for you?

Syllabus-first vs. LMS-first: what the difference actually does

Both apps start from a document rather than a blank calendar, but what each one treats as the source of truth changes what you end up with. DormWay's own description pairs syllabus parsing with read-only Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle sync, merging both into a single timeline and week view. Semora treats the syllabus itself as the primary record: the scan pulls the course name and code, the instructor, class meeting blocks with days, start and end times, kind and room, office hours, the semester start and end dates, the letter-grade scale, and every assignment, quiz, exam, project, and reading with a due date, a due time, a percentage weight, and a confidence score.

The percentage weight is the part that matters most, and it is usually the part an LMS feed does not carry. A Canvas assignment list tells you a paper is due Thursday. The syllabus is what tells you the paper is 25 percent of your grade. Semora's workload math runs on that number: each item's load score is its extracted grade weight multiplied by a prep-effort multiplier for its type, so an exam counts three times a reading at equal weight, a project 2.5 times, a quiz 1.5, an assignment 1.2. A week is flagged as a crunch week when its total load is a statistical outlier for your semester — at or above the mean plus one standard deviation, with at least two items in it, so a single big exam does not get called a crunch week on its own. Without weights that ranking is impossible, and every deadline looks the same size.

Which model suits you depends on your professors, not on the software. If every one of your instructors posts every assignment into the LMS and keeps the dates current, an LMS-first timeline is genuinely less work. If some of your syllabi never make it into Canvas in full — the reading schedule lives in a PDF appendix, the exam dates sit in a table on page two — a syllabus-first tool captures work the sync would never see. Semora offers both paths: Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle import is free on every plan. Connecting Canvas takes one step: copy the private Calendar Feed link Canvas already gives you and paste it in. There is no access token to generate and nothing for your school to approve. The alternative is to copy assignment text out of an LMS page and paste it into the scanner on web, which accepts anywhere from 20 to 60,000 characters at a time. That floor is low enough that a pasted assignment list of a few hundred characters goes through fine, and the ceiling is generous enough for a full multi-course syllabus.

What the review screen actually asks you to approve

Semora splits the scan result into two categories rather than dumping everything into one confirm-all list. On a course's first scan, the course itself, its meeting times, and its grading scale are written to your semester before you review anything, because those are stable facts you would have typed identically. Only the deadlines wait for your approval. Re-scanning a revised syllabus into a course you already have is more conservative still: the meeting times and office hours are not rewritten at all, and an extracted letter scale is applied only if you never touched the default one, so your own schedule and grading edits survive and only the new deadlines come through for review. Either way the review step stays short enough that you actually read it.

Every extracted item carries a confidence score, and the review screen uses it. Anything below 0.8 is badged "Low confidence — please verify". Any dated item that falls well outside the term the scan extracted — roughly six weeks either side of the semester start and end dates, to allow for early postings and finals-week spillover — is badged "Date looks outside this term — double-check", and when the scan could not find term dates at all the same check still runs against a wide window around today rather than being skipped. Items the scan found but could not date drop into a separate "Needs a date" section, deselected, so an undated reading never quietly becomes a deadline for today. If most of the dated items land in the past, the screen shows a banner warning that this may be an old syllabus before you save anything.

This is deliberate, and it is worth applying as a test to any AI planner you evaluate. Extraction from a scanned PDF is probabilistic. A tool that hides that fact and presents 40 confidently wrong dates is worse than no tool, because you will trust it and stop reading the syllabus. Ask to see the review step before you commit a semester. Photo scans are budgeted at 10 MB combined across up to five pages per scan, which covers a normal phone capture of a multi-page syllabus without you compressing anything first.

When a due date moves

Due dates move. A professor pushes the midterm a week, a snow day shifts the reading schedule, a group project slides after half the class asks. What that costs you is one of the more useful things to test in any planner, because in a lot of tools the answer is re-import everything and clean up the duplicates.

In Semora you edit the date once on the deadline itself, and the rest follows from that edit. Device reminders for that task are cancelled and rescheduled against the new date and time rather than left pointing at the old one. If device calendar sync is on — a Pro feature, and one that does not run in a browser — the existing calendar event is updated in place instead of a second event appearing next to the stale one. Smart Plan rebuilds every unfinished study block from today forward the next time you open the planner, carrying missed sessions forward while leaving completed sessions in your history, so the schedule reflects the new deadline without you rebuilding it by hand. The Workload dashboard recomputes its crunch weeks because the item moved into a different week bucket, and Academic Risk re-evaluates what is now overdue.

On the free tier, the deadline and its same-day reminder move with the edit. The study-plan rebuild, the calendar-event update, and the risk re-evaluation are Pro. Either way, the point is that one edit propagates rather than requiring a fresh scan, which also matters because on the free tier a re-scan would spend the single AI action the account ever gets.

What the free tier honestly covers for a full course load

The free tier is one AI action for the lifetime of the account and unlimited classes synced free from Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle plus one course you add by hand, with no credit card. You pick what that one action goes on — a syllabus scan, a lecture recording, or turning a document into notes, whichever you reach for first. Nothing resets afterwards, and there is no monthly allowance to wait for. A standard four-course semester therefore means connecting Canvas, which brings all four across for nothing and keeps them current, or spending the one action on the syllabus that would take longest to type and adding one more by hand. There is a third cap the arithmetic above hides, and it is the one worth knowing before you start: a free account covers one semester, total. The single AI action and the one hand-added course both live inside that one term, the limit is enforced in the app and by a database trigger on the semesters table, and starting a second semester requires Pro. Neither rolls over into a fresh term, because a free account never gets a fresh term. Canvas classes are the exception to all of it: free, uncapped, and never counted.

Re-scanning a course you already have does not consume a second course slot. Semora matches an incoming scan against your existing courses in that semester by course code at a word boundary, so "CS 101" matches your existing CS 101 and does not match CS 10, and folds the new deadlines into the course that is already there. That behavior matters most on Pro, where re-scanning a revised syllabus is routine; on free, the one action is the whole budget, so spend it on the messiest syllabus you have.

Free covers Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle sync with no cap on how many classes you bring across, full deadline and task tracking, grade tracking with weighted averages against the letter scale the scan extracted, semester GPA, your class schedule, same-day reminders, and joining a Course Space a classmate invites you to. Pro, at $4.99 per month or $29.99 per year — about $2.50 a month on the annual plan — adds unlimited courses and unlimited semesters, syllabus scanning with no cap at all (a fair-use ceiling of 20 scans per day applies), hosting your own Course Space, Smart Plan, the Workload dashboard, Flashcards, the Focus Timer, the AI Tutor, Grade Scale & Forecasting, device calendar sync with .ics export, custom 1-day and 3-day reminder timing with quiet hours, Academic Risk alerts, Progress Insights, and Share & Streaks. Pro can be bought two ways — with a card on the web at app.semoraai.com, processed by Stripe, or inside the iOS app through the App Store — and either way it applies account-wide, including on the web app, so you only ever pay once.

A permanently free product and a free tier under a paid product are different bets, and it is fair to weigh them as such. A free tier tells you how the paid version is funded and what happens if the developer needs revenue. A free product tells you nothing about that, favorably or unfavorably. With Semora the shape of the bet is unusually clear: free is one real term, with your real courses and one AI action to spend inside it, and everything past that is a paid decision. Make it on how the term actually went rather than on a feature list.

What to check before committing a semester to any planner

First, check whether you can get your data out. Semora exports a semester of deadlines and weekly class meetings as a standard .ics file you can import into Google Calendar or Outlook, and Progress Insights produces a CSV semester report plus a printable grade report on web, both Pro. Account deletion is available in the app. Ask any competing tool the same question before you type in a semester of work.

Second, check the devices you actually use. Semora is one universal iOS app for iPhone and iPad plus a web app, sharing a single account with near real-time sync, and there is no Mac app and no Android app. Browser notifications on the web app fire while a tab is open; they are not closed-tab push, and device calendar sync does not run in a browser at all. If you live on a Mac or an Android phone, that constraint should decide the question before any feature comparison does.

Third, check what the tool does when you are offline and when you stop paying. Semora lets you create courses and tasks, edit them, and tick them off with no connection at all, keeps the last seven days of your semester cached on the device so there is something to open in the first place, then flushes the queue with exponential backoff, parking anything that fails permanently instead of retrying forever, and it detects conflicts when the server row changed underneath you. On the paid question: a lapsed subscription in Semora falls back to same-day reminders rather than quietly continuing Pro reminder timing.

Fourth, and simplest: run one real syllabus through anything you are considering during add/drop week, before the first exam, while the cost of switching is a lost afternoon rather than a lost semester. Scan the messiest syllabus you have, the one with the reading schedule in a table and the exam dates buried in a paragraph, and read the review screen line by line. Whatever survives that test is the tool to use.