Semora vs myHomework Student Planner: which is right for you?

Where the deadlines actually come from

Every planner has to answer one question before it is useful: how do the dates get in. There are really only three answers. You type them in yourself, you pull whatever your school posted to its LMS, or something reads the syllabus. The comparison above covers the first two — myHomework is built around manual entry of classes and assignments, with an import from a supported LMS as the shortcut. Semora is built around the third.

In practice that means four import paths. You can photograph the syllabus with your camera, up to 5 pages per scan and about 10 MB of images combined. You can upload the PDF. On the web you can drag the file onto the page, or paste raw text — anywhere from 20 to 60,000 characters — straight out of a PDF viewer or an LMS page. Luna reads whichever one you give it and returns structured fields: course name and code, instructor, class meeting blocks with days, start and end times, kind and room, office hours, semester start and end dates, the letter-grade scale, and every assignment, quiz, exam, project and reading with its due date, due time, percentage weight and a confidence score.

Nothing lands silently. The course itself, its meeting times and its grading scale are written before you review; only the deadlines wait for your approval. On the review screen every extracted item is editable one by one. Anything the model scored under 0.8 confidence is badged "Low confidence — please verify." Anything dated outside the term you just imported is badged "Date looks outside this term — double-check." Items the syllabus listed without a date, the "Final exam — TBA" cases, land in their own "Needs a date" section, deselected, and cannot be saved until you set a date on them.

The point is not that extraction is never wrong. The point is which direction you work in. Reviewing a filled-in list and correcting three rows is a different task from typing thirty rows from scratch, and it is also different from an LMS pull, which can only ever be as complete as what your instructor actually uploaded to the LMS. Weekly readings and percentage weights very often live only in the syllabus PDF.

What the free tier covers for a real course load

Semora's free plan is not a countdown, but it does have a shape worth knowing before you commit. It gives you 5 syllabus scans per calendar month, resetting at the start of each month, and up to 4 courses — inside one semester. That last part is the boundary: a free account supports one semester total, not one per term. Everything inside that semester is generous. Tasks and deadlines are unlimited. Grade tracking with weighted averages is included, not held back , you enter scores and your course grade recalculates, and your semester GPA sits on the courses screen for free as well. Same-day reminders are included. Joining a Course Space a classmate invites you to is free and always will be. No credit card is involved anywhere in that.

Do the arithmetic against a real semester. A standard four-course load is four scans in the month you register, leaving one spare for the professor who posts a revised syllabus in week two, and re-scanning a course you already created does not consume a new course slot, so that path stays open even when you are sitting at the 4-course cap. What the free tier does not do is roll into a second term. Starting a new semester — spring after fall, or a summer session running alongside spring — requires Pro, and the limit is enforced by the database on insert, not just by the app, so there is no way to slip around it. Plan on the free tier as one full semester, start to finish, rather than as something you renew every August.

What is genuinely gated, then, is the next semester and the automation layer. Pro at $3.99 a month or $19.99 a year makes courses and semesters unlimited and takes the monthly ceiling off scanning (there is still a fair-use limit of 20 scans in a day, which no normal course load comes near) and adds Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle import subject to school policy and platform configuration, hosting your own Course Space, Smart Plan, the Workload dashboard, Flashcards, a Focus timer, the AI Tutor, Grade Scale and Forecasting, device calendar sync with .ics export, custom reminder timing at 1 or 3 days out with quiet hours, Academic Risk alerts, Progress Insights, and Share and Streaks. Annual works out to about $1.67 a month, roughly 58% below monthly.

Semora's current Canvas connector uses a personal access token you generate in Canvas. If you are on the free plan, or if your institution disables or prohibits third-party token use, open your Canvas assignments page, select the list, and paste it into the scanner on the web. You get the same extraction and the same review screen without the Pro LMS connection.

What happens the week a due date moves

Every semester an exam slides a week or a paper gets pushed past a holiday. This is where a planner either holds together or quietly rots, because the due date is never the only thing that has to change.

Change a date in Semora and the edit propagates in one pass. Device reminders for that task are cancelled and re-scheduled against the new date. If the task repeats, Semora asks first (this occurrence only, this and every future one, or the entire series) and reschedules the reminders for whichever you pick, so a shifted weekly lab does not leave stale alerts behind on every later week. (The series options need a connection; editing a whole recurring series offline is refused outright rather than half-applied.) If calendar sync is on, the existing calendar event is updated in place rather than duplicated. The cached study blocks are invalidated, so your plan is stale for exactly as long as it takes you to open it.

With auto-reschedule on — it is the default, and a toggle on the planner screen — opening Smart Plan is the reschedule. Completed study sessions stay in your history; every unfinished block is rebuilt from today forward against the current tasks, your settings and your class meeting times, across a rolling 14-day horizon. The rebuild is deterministic and idempotent, so running it again does not duplicate anything, and missed sessions roll forward instead of piling up behind you. Turn auto-reschedule off and nothing regenerates on open — the rebuild waits for the "Save & rebuild plan" button instead. Defaults are 90 minutes a day in 45-minute sessions, starting at 5pm on weekdays and 10am on weekends, avoiding your class blocks and, if you want, your calendar events. All of that is Pro.

The workload picture and the risk report recompute from the same underlying data, so a moved exam changes which week is flagged as your crunch week without you touching anything else. In any planner where a due date is only text in a list, moving the date is the easy part — it is the reminder, the calendar entry and the study time you had already blocked out that get left behind.

How grades, deadlines and study time connect

The scan gives Semora three things a to-do list does not have: what each item is worth, what type it is, and what letter scale your professor uses. Everything downstream runs on those.

Grades first. Each course carries its own scale, taken from the syllabus and editable on Pro. You can set up weighted categories, drop-lowest rules and an extra-credit policy, and enter a score either as a percentage or as points earned over points possible. The weighted average is computed over the weight you have actually attempted, so a 94% in week three reads as a 94% rather than being dragged toward zero by work that is not due yet. On Pro, a what-if card answers the question everyone actually asks — what do I need on the final — using the weights the scan already pulled out of the syllabus.

Study time next. Semora scores each task as its grade weight multiplied by a type factor: exams count triple, projects 2.5x, quizzes 1.5x, assignments 1.2x, readings 1x. That is why an exam with no listed percentage still outranks a reading with none. The same score drives the Workload dashboard's crunch-week view and the order in which Smart Plan fills your sessions, which is the difference between knowing a week is heavy and knowing what to start on Tuesday night.

Risk last. Academic Risk alerts watch three specific things (a grade trending down, work that went past due unfinished, and a week carrying more load than you can absorb) and attach concrete recovery steps rather than a red badge. Progress Insights adds trend charts, a CSV export you can pull from the iPhone or iPad app as well as from the web, and a printable report, which is the one piece that is web-only because there is no print concept on iOS.

What to check before you commit a semester to any planner

Time the entry step against your own course load, not against a demo. Four syllabi is somewhere between thirty and sixty rows of assignments, weights and dates. Whatever tool you pick, the honest question is how many minutes of typing stand between installing it and having your actual semester in it, and how likely you are to still be doing that typing in week six.

Then ask what the free plan actually is, and read where it stops rather than where it starts. Semora's is a full semester of real use (4 courses, 5 scans a month, unlimited tasks and deadlines, weighted grades and semester GPA) and it stops at the edge of that semester, because the second term needs Pro. Knowing the boundary up front is the difference between a plan and a surprise in January. Check the renewal price, not the first price, and check where the purchase lives. Semora Pro is bought inside the iOS app as an App Store subscription and applies account-wide, including on the web app — there is no separate web checkout, the web app reads and refreshes the entitlement, and you cancel through Apple's subscription settings like any other App Store subscription.

Check what happens on change day, and check the exits. Semora exports your deadlines and class meetings as a standard .ics file, and your semester grade report as CSV from the iPhone, iPad or web app, with a printable version on the web — all Pro, so your semester is not trapped. And be honest about hardware: Semora is one universal iOS app for iPhone and iPad plus a web app that runs in any modern browser, sharing one account with near real-time sync. If what you need is a native Windows, Mac or Android client, weigh that against the automation you would be giving up.