Semora vs Mindgrasp: which is right for you?

Syllabus-first vs. file-first, mechanically

The difference between these two tools is not AI quality. It is what the AI is pointed at and what it leaves behind. Semora reads one specific document , your syllabus, and writes durable structure out of it: a course record with its code and instructor, the class meeting blocks (days, start and end time, kind, room), office hours, semester start and end dates, the letter-grade scale, and every assignment, quiz, exam, project, and reading with a due date, a due time, and a percentage weight. That structure is the thing you keep and edit for four months. A file-first tool, by design, produces an artifact per upload — notes, a summary, flashcards, a quiz for that one file. Both are legitimate jobs. Only one of them ends with a calendar.

Semora also splits the write into two stages on purpose. The course, its meeting times, and its grading scale are saved as soon as the scan finishes, because those are rarely contested and you want them on your schedule immediately. Only deadlines wait for your approval. The review screen lists every extracted item with a per-item edit control, badges anything the model scored under 0.8 confidence as "Low confidence — please verify," badges anything dated outside your term as "Date looks outside this term — double-check," and parks undated items like "Final exam — TBA" in their own "Needs a date" section, deselected, so an invented date never reaches your calendar.

The practical effect is that you correct a scan in week one instead of discovering a wrong date in week nine, and the version that gets saved is the one you edited, not the one the model guessed.

What the free tier actually covers for a real course load

Free means: 5 syllabus scans per calendar month, up to 4 courses, full deadline and task tracking, grade tracking with weighted averages, a semester GPA, same-day reminders, and joining a Course Space a classmate invites you to. No credit card. Nothing on the free tier runs on a clock either — its limits are counts you can check against your own course load before you commit a single week to it.

One of those counts decides whether free works for you at all, so it belongs first: a free account gets one semester, total. The app sets that limit to 1, and a BEFORE INSERT trigger on the semesters table enforces it server-side, so it is not a client-side nudge you can route around. The practical reading is that the four-course cap is not a per-term allowance that refills in January — it is four courses inside the single semester a free account holds. Pro is what lifts both ceilings: unlimited courses and unlimited semesters.

Run the arithmetic against a normal semester anyway, because within that one term the free tier is genuinely usable. Four courses costs four of your five scans in the first week, which leaves one spare. The scan counter resets at the start of each calendar month, so a professor handing out a revised syllabus in week three draws on a fresh allowance rather than forcing an upgrade, and re-scanning a course you already have does not consume one of your four course slots. A fifth course does, and that is where Pro starts. You have four ways to feed the scanner: a camera photo of up to 5 pages per scan (budgeted at roughly 10 MB combined), a PDF upload, drag-and-drop on the web app, or raw text pasted into the web app, anywhere from 20 to 60,000 characters. On Pro the monthly scan cap goes away entirely and only a fair-use ceiling remains — 20 scans in a day, after which the parser asks you to come back tomorrow.

One more limit worth stating plainly: Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle import is a Pro feature, gated on the server, in the settings screen, and on the deep link. The current Canvas connector uses a personal access token and should be used only where your institution permits third-party token connections. If it is unavailable or not permitted, or you are on the free plan, open your Canvas assignments page, select the list, and paste it into the web scanner as text. You get the same extraction and the same review screen — you have simply done the fetching yourself.

How deadlines, grades, and planning are wired together

Every deadline Semora extracts carries two fields that most task apps do not have: a task type and a percentage weight, both read off the syllabus. Those fields are what let one scan drive three different views instead of one flat list.

Grades come first. The running course grade is a weighted average computed against your professor's real rules (grade categories, drop-lowest policies, and an extra-credit setting) and converted to a letter using the scale the scan lifted from the syllabus. Weighted course grades and your semester GPA are both on the free tier. Pro adds the forecasting layer: a "What do I need?" card that, for each letter on your scale, shows the average you would need across the weight still in play and labels it "Locked in," "avg 84% on the rest," "Needs extra credit," or "Out of reach"; plus a final-exam what-if that projects the course grade for a hypothetical score without saving anything.

Planning uses the same fields. The Pro Workload dashboard buckets your incomplete dated work into ISO weeks and scores each week by weight times a prep multiplier (exams count triple, projects 2.5x, quizzes 1.5x, assignments 1.2x, readings 1x) then flags a week as crunch only when it is a genuine outlier: a full standard deviation above your own semester mean, and holding at least two items. Academic Risk alerts, also Pro, watch three separate signals: overdue work, a course whose last three graded items average seven or more points below the three before them (or sits under 70 percent), and five or more deadlines inside a seven-day window. Each one arrives with a specific first step rather than a red badge.

What happens when a due date moves

Professors move dates, and that is where a planner either earns its place or becomes another thing to maintain. In Semora you change the due date once, on whichever device is in your hand, and everything derived from that date follows. Reminders for that task are cancelled and rebuilt — same-day on free, plus 1-day and 3-day advance notices with quiet hours on Pro. The device calendar event refreshes if calendar sync is on; that sync is a Pro feature and it writes to the calendar on your iPhone or iPad, not inside a browser tab, though the .ics export downloads on the web just fine. The week scoring in the Pro workload view recomputes, which can move a crunch week or clear one.

Smart Plan, also Pro, re-plans over a rolling 14-day horizon using your own settings: a daily study budget of 60, 90, 120, or 180 minutes, sessions of 25, 45, or 50 minutes, separate weekday and weekend start times, and whether weekends count at all. It schedules around your class meetings and your calendar events rather than on top of them. Sessions you missed get auto-rescheduled and labeled "Moved from" the original date, so you can see what slipped. When work due inside the horizon genuinely will not fit your budget, the plan reports those minutes as at risk instead of quietly overbooking you.

All of this propagates across iPhone, iPad, and the web app in near real time on one account. A tool whose output is a per-file study artifact has no date to move — that is not a flaw in it, it is simply a different job.

What to check before committing a semester to any planner

This is worth doing regardless of which app you pick. Five questions separate tools that survive a semester from tools you abandon by October. Does it hold all of your courses in one place, or does it work one file at a time? Can you see and correct what the AI extracted before it becomes your calendar? Are the free tier's limits published as numbers you can check (scans, courses, terms) rather than left vague until you hit one? If you pay on your phone, does the subscription apply on your laptop? And does it compute your grade from your syllabus's actual weights, or just store the scores you type in?

Semora's answers, for the record: every course lands in one deadline list; deadlines pass through an editable review screen with confidence and out-of-term warnings before they are saved; the free tier is exactly three numbers (5 scans per calendar month, 4 courses, and 1 semester per account) with nothing expiring on a date; Pro is $3.99 a month or $19.99 a year (about $1.67 a month on the annual plan), bought once in the iOS app through StoreKit and applied account-wide, with the web app reading and refreshing that entitlement rather than running a second checkout — there is no web checkout at all; and the gradebook uses the weights the scan pulled off your syllabus.

The limits deserve the same directness. Google Classroom and Google Calendar sync exist in Semora's codebase but are not shipped, so do not plan around them. Device calendar sync is iPhone and iPad only — a browser cannot write to your system calendar, and the .ics download is the web equivalent. Browser notifications on the web only fire while a tab is open. And Semora launched recently, so there is no long public rating history to point you at. Ask the same five questions of Mindgrasp on its own site before you decide — third-party pricing and feature summaries go stale quickly, and both products are worth checking firsthand.