Comparison
Semora vs Studley AI: which is right for you?
Semora is a syllabus-first app that automatically turns a scanned syllabus into a semester of deadlines and grades, while Studley AI is a materials-first app that turns whatever you upload — PDFs, slides, videos, or photos — into flashcards, quizzes, and AI-narrated study podcasts.
What each product does
Semora
Semora (iPhone, iPad, and web) starts with your syllabus. You import it by camera photo (multi-page, up to 5 pages), PDF upload, drag-and-drop on the web, or pasted text, and OpenAI GPT-5.6 Luna extracts the course name, instructor, meeting times, office hours, semester dates, grading scale, and every assignment, exam, quiz, project, and reading with its due date — building deadlines, a grade tracker, and a class schedule automatically.
Studley AI
Studley AI (iOS, Android, and web) lets you upload PDFs, lecture slides, YouTube videos, article links, or a photo of handwritten notes, and its AI converts that material into a study set: flashcards, multiple-choice quizzes, fill-in-the-blank exercises, written-response tests, and an AI tutor for questions about that content. A "Solve" feature lets you photograph a homework problem for a step-by-step explanation, and a podcast feature turns material into AI-narrated audio. Progress is tracked across four mastery levels (unfamiliar, learning, familiar, mastered). Per its own App Store materials, Studley AI has been downloaded 460,000+ times with a 4.74/5 rating from 31,000+ reviews, and the company states over 1,000,000 users.
Semora vs Studley AI: feature comparison
| Semora | Studley AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Syllabus & deadline handling | Core purpose of the app. Photo, PDF, drag-and-drop, or pasted-text import auto-extracts every assignment, exam, quiz, project, and reading with due dates. | No syllabus-parsing or deadline-extraction feature found in Studley AI's public materials. It converts uploaded material (PDFs, slides, YouTube videos, articles, photos) into study sets, not a due-date calendar. |
| Canvas sync | Canvas import is a Pro feature. The current connector uses a personal access token generated in Canvas and may be disabled or prohibited by your institution. Confirm your school's policy; if it is unavailable or not permitted, scan the syllabus or paste the Canvas assignment list into Semora. | Not publicly described. No LMS integration is mentioned in Studley AI's available materials. |
| Grade tracking | Included in the free tier; Pro adds Progress Insights with trend charts, CSV export, and a print view on web. | Not publicly confirmed. Studley AI tracks mastery of uploaded study material across four levels (unfamiliar to mastered) rather than a course grade. |
| Study planning | Pro's Smart Plan builds an AI-generated, deadline-adapting study schedule; the Workload dashboard flags crunch weeks; Academic Risk alerts warn of falling grades or overloaded weeks. | A "Solve" feature gives step-by-step homework help from a photo, and an AI tutor answers questions about uploaded material. No dedicated study-schedule or deadline-planning feature was found. |
| Pricing | Free tier available (5 scans/month, up to 4 courses within one semester, one semester total). Pro is $3.99/month or $19.99/year, purchased in the app, applying account-wide including on web. | Free: 1 study set per day. Unlimited: reported at $12.88/month or $97.76/year, per third-party review coverage of the app — check Studley AI's current pricing directly to confirm. |
| Platform availability | iPhone and iPad (one universal iOS app) plus web, sharing one account with near real-time sync between them. | iOS, Android, and web (studley.ai). |
Cheaper on Pro: Semora Pro is $3.99/month or $19.99/year — roughly a third of Studley AI's reported Unlimited plan ($12.88/month or $97.76/year), per third-party review coverage.
Syllabus-first and materials-first are different starting points
The mechanical difference is what you hand the app and what it hands back. Semora takes one document per course, the syllabus, and returns structured records: 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 a due date, due time, percentage weight, and a confidence score. A materials-first app takes a chunk of content and returns study objects built from that content. Studley AI sits squarely in that second group: uploaded PDFs, lecture slides, YouTube videos, article links, or a photo of handwritten notes become flashcards, multiple-choice quizzes, fill-in-the-blank and written-response exercises, an AI tutor scoped to that material, and AI-narrated audio, with progress tracked across four mastery levels.
That difference decides what each app can answer. A syllabus-first tool answers what is due, when, and how much it is worth, across every course at once. A materials-first tool answers help me learn this specific pile of material. Neither answer substitutes for the other, which is why the two categories tend to coexist on the same phone rather than replace each other.
Semora also splits the write into two stages on purpose. The course itself, its meeting times, and its grading scale are saved as soon as the scan finishes, because those are low-risk and you want them there. Only the deadlines wait for your approval. The review screen shows every extracted item with per-item editing: anything the model scored below 0.8 confidence is badged "Low confidence — please verify," a dated item falling outside the semester window is badged "Date looks outside this term — double-check," and undated items like "Final exam — date TBA" sit in a separate "Needs a date" section, deselected, so they cannot quietly land on the wrong day. Saving is all-or-nothing: one batch insert, and if it fails you stay on the screen with your selections intact.
What happens when a due date moves
Professors move dates. This is the part that separates a planner you keep from one you abandon in week six, because the cost of a schedule change has to be one edit rather than a re-import. In Semora, changing a task's due date cancels that task's existing reminders and reschedules them against the new date and time. If device calendar sync is on (Pro), the calendar event is updated in place through a stable task-to-event map rather than a duplicate being created, and if you had deleted that event by hand, the update fails and a fresh one is written instead.
Grades recompute rather than sit stale, because a course grade is calculated from the current task list at read time: weighted categories, drop-lowest rules, points earned over points possible, and your extra-credit policy all resolve on the fly. The workload dashboard re-buckets by ISO week using a load score of grade weight times a per-type multiplier, so an exam still reads as a heavier week than a reading even when the syllabus put a percentage on neither.
Smart Plan (Pro) replans over a rolling 14-day horizon against your own settings: daily study minutes, session length, separate weekday and weekend start times, whether weekends count at all, and whether to route around your class meetings and calendar. With auto-reschedule on, a moved deadline reshuffles the plan without you touching it. Edits made offline queue locally, flush with exponential backoff when you reconnect, and reschedule reminders afterward, so a date change typed on the bus is not lost.
What the free tier actually covers for a real course load
Free is 5 syllabus scans per calendar month and up to 4 courses within one semester, with one semester total and no credit card. Run that against a normal load: four courses cost four scans, leaving one spare for the syllabus that gets revised in week two. A multi-page photo scan counts as one scan, not one per page, up to 5 pages and roughly 10 MB combined, so a dense four-page syllabus is still a single scan. Re-scanning a course you already created does not consume a new course slot either.
Inside those limits the free tier is not a demo. You get the unified deadline list across every course, tasks and subtasks, weighted grade tracking against the letter scale your own syllabus specified, same-day reminders, and the ability to join a Course Space a classmate invites you to. Joining a shared course is free and stays free; it is hosting one that requires Pro.
Pro at $3.99/month or $19.99/year is where the rest lives: unlimited scans and courses, Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle import, hosting your own Course Space, Smart Plan, the workload dashboard, flashcards, the focus timer, the AI tutor, grade scale and forecasting, device calendar sync with .ics export, 1-day and 3-day reminder timing with quiet hours, academic-risk alerts, and Progress Insights with CSV export and a print view on web. The current Canvas connector uses a personal access token and should be used only where the institution permits it. If it is unavailable or not permitted, or you are on the free tier, copy assignment text out of a Canvas page and paste it into the scanner on web, anywhere from 20 to 60,000 characters.
Where the two categories overlap, and where they don't
Semora Pro does generate flashcards, so the overlap is real, but the input differs. Semora's cards are built from that course's own syllabus topics plus any lecture notes you upload to the course as a PDF or image, extracted server-side, and a deck can be scoped to a single exam or quiz instead of the whole course. The generator deliberately skips administrative content (office hours, grading policy, late-work rules) because none of that is quizzable. The AI tutor is grounded on the same syllabus-plus-notes material.
What Semora does not do is accept the wider range of inputs a materials-first app is built for. Studley AI's public materials describe YouTube videos and article links as valid uploads, a "Solve" feature that gives step-by-step help from a photo of a homework problem, and AI-narrated podcast-style audio. Semora has none of those. Going the other direction, no syllabus parsing or deadline extraction appears in Studley AI's public materials, and no LMS integration is described there.
The honest read is that these are complements more often than alternatives. If you already have a study-set app you like, adding a syllabus-first planner does not duplicate it. If you already have a planner, a study-set app does not replace the deadline and grade layer underneath it. The question is which half you are missing, not which app wins.
What to check before you commit a semester to any planner
Five things are worth checking on any app in this space before your semester depends on it, whichever one you pick. First, does it show you the extraction before it commits it? An AI that writes forty due dates straight into your calendar with no review step is one bad date away from a missed final. Second, is the free tier permanent or trial-shaped? A tier that expires after a couple of weeks is a discount, not a free plan.
Third, can you get your data back out? In Semora that means CSV export and a print view for grade reports on the web, plus .ics export for deadlines, both on Pro. Fourth, does anything depend on your school? Yes. LMS import is a Pro feature, and the current Canvas connector uses a personal access token that should be used only where your institution permits it. If it is unavailable or not permitted, scan the syllabus or paste the Canvas assignment list into Semora.
Fifth, check the devices honestly. Semora is one universal iOS app for iPhone and iPad plus a web app, sharing a single account with near real-time sync; there is no Android app and no Mac app, and browser notifications fire only while a tab is open. Pro is purchased in the iOS app through StoreKit and applies account-wide, including on web — there is no web checkout, so a student who only ever uses the browser cannot subscribe from there.
Which one fits your situation?
Semora may fit better if you...
- Want your syllabus turned into a calendar of deadlines automatically, instead of typing them in by hand
- Want grades, assignments, and class schedule tracked in one place all semester, included free
- Want Pro Canvas import through the current token connector, your institution permits it, and syllabus scanning or pasted assignment text as the fallback
- Want an AI-generated study schedule that adapts as deadlines change
Studley AI may fit better if you...
- Have a specific PDF, slide deck, YouTube video, or set of notes you want turned into flashcards and a quiz in one pass
- Want AI-narrated podcast-style summaries of study material
- Want a photo-based homework solver for step-by-step problem help
- Aren't looking for syllabus parsing or a semester-long deadline calendar at all
Studley AI's growth and download numbers above come from its own App Store materials and third-party review coverage, not from independent verification — treat them as the company's self-reported figures.
Frequently asked questions
Does Studley AI extract deadlines from a syllabus the way Semora does?
Based on its public materials, no. Studley AI is built to turn uploaded material — PDFs, slides, videos, articles, or photos — into flashcards, quizzes, and study aids; it doesn't appear to parse a syllabus or extract assignment due dates onto a calendar. Semora is built specifically for that job.
Is Semora or Studley AI free to use?
Semora's free tier includes 5 syllabus scans per calendar month, up to 4 courses within one semester, one semester total, full task and deadline tracking, grade tracking, and same-day reminders (calendar sync with .ics export is a Pro feature). Studley AI's free tier is reported as 1 study set per day, with an Unlimited plan around $12.88/month or $97.76/year per third-party review coverage.
Does Studley AI sync with Canvas?
Not publicly described. No Canvas or other LMS integration is mentioned in Studley AI's available materials. Semora's current Pro Canvas connector uses a personal access token generated in Canvas and may be disabled or prohibited by the institution. Confirm your school's policy; if it is unavailable or not permitted, scan the syllabus or paste the Canvas assignment list into Semora.
Which is cheaper, Semora or Studley AI?
Semora's pricing is confirmed directly: free, or Pro at $3.99/month or $19.99/year. Studley AI's Unlimited plan is reported at roughly $12.88/month or $97.76/year via third-party review coverage — check Studley AI's current pricing page to confirm exact figures.
What happens in Semora when a professor pushes a due date back?
You change the date on the task and everything downstream follows from that one edit. Semora cancels that task's existing reminders and reschedules them against the new date and time, and if device calendar sync is on it updates the same calendar event in place instead of leaving a duplicate behind. Your course grade recalculates from the current task list, the workload dashboard re-buckets that week, and Smart Plan replans its 14-day horizon when auto-reschedule is on.
Does Semora generate flashcards from course material the way Studley AI does?
Semora Pro includes flashcards with spaced repetition, but they are built from your course's syllabus topics and any lecture notes you upload to that course as a PDF or image, and a deck can be scoped to one exam or quiz rather than the whole course. It skips administrative content like office hours and late-work policy. Studley AI's materials describe a wider input range, including YouTube videos and article links, which Semora does not accept.
Can I use Semora and Studley AI at the same time?
Yes, and for a lot of students that is the sensible setup, because they solve different halves of the problem. Semora turns your syllabi into one deadline list, a weighted gradebook, and a class schedule across all your courses. Studley AI turns a specific pile of material into flashcards, quizzes, and study aids. No syllabus parsing or deadline extraction appears in Studley AI's public materials, so neither app makes the other redundant.
Does a multi-page syllabus use up more than one of my five free scans?
No. A photo scan can cover up to 5 pages and roughly 10 MB combined, and the whole thing counts as one scan against your monthly free allowance. The same holds for a PDF upload, a drag-and-drop on web, or pasted text. Re-scanning a course you already created also does not use a new course slot, so a syllabus corrected in week two costs you a scan but not a course.
See your own syllabus turned into a semester plan
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