Semora vs Taskade: which is right for you?

What "syllabus-first" actually changes

A general-purpose workspace gives you views and lets you decide what goes in them. That flexibility is the product. Semora goes the other way: it already knows what a syllabus is, so the structure arrives before you do. When a scan finishes, Semora has already written the course, its meeting blocks (days, start and end time, kind, room), its office hours, the semester start and end dates, and the letter-grade scale the document specified. Only the deadlines wait for your approval.

That approval step is a review screen, not a silent import. Every extracted assignment, quiz, exam, project, and reading shows up with its due date, due time, and percentage weight, each one editable in place. Items the model was unsure about are badged "Low confidence — please verify." Dated items that fall outside the term you just imported are badged "Date looks outside this term — double-check." Items the syllabus never dated at all — the classic "Final Exam — date TBA" — sit in their own "Needs a date" section, deselected, because a deadline without a date is not a deadline. If most of the dated items are already in the past, you get a banner saying so; that usually means you scanned last year's recycled PDF.

The practical difference is where the opinion comes from. In a configurable workspace you decide what a course record is, which fields an assignment carries, how weights roll into a grade, and what a term boundary means, and then you maintain that schema for four months. Semora ships those decisions. That is a real trade: you get less freedom to model your own system, and you stop spending September building one.

What the free tier covers for a real course load

Semora's free tier is $0 with no credit card and no time limit: 5 syllabus scans per calendar month, up to 4 courses, full deadline and task tracking, grade tracking with weighted averages, a current-semester GPA estimate, same-day reminders, and joining any Course Space a classmate invites you to. One number matters more than the rest and it is the easiest to miss on a feature grid: a free account gets one semester, total, not one at a time.

Run the math against an actual semester. Four courses is four scans, which leaves one spare for the professor who reissues a syllabus in week two. The scan window resets each calendar month, so a course you add in October does not draw down September's allowance. The course cap is written as four per semester, but because a free account only ever holds the one semester, four courses is the whole account. Where the free tier genuinely runs out, then, is a five-course term, a habit of re-scanning the same document to see whether the parse improves, and, the hard one, the next term. The free semester limit is one, checked in the app and again by a before-insert trigger on the semesters table, so starting a second semester is not a nag screen you can click past: the record is refused until you upgrade. Plan on one free semester and make the call in December rather than in September.

Two things students often assume are free here are not, and it is worth being blunt about them. Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle import is a Pro feature — the sync function itself returns a Pro-required error, and the provider list and connect deep link are both gated. The current Canvas connector uses a personal access token and should be used only where your institution permits it. Hosting your own Course Space is Pro as well, though joining one someone else hosts is free and stays free. The fallback for LMS import is not a consolation prize: open your assignment list in Canvas, copy the text, and paste it into the web scanner, which accepts anywhere from 20 to 60,000 characters. It runs through the same extraction path a PDF does and lands on the same review screen.

What happens when a due date moves

This is the question that separates a planner from a list, and it is worth asking of any tool you are considering. A professor pushes the midterm back a week. What updates by itself, and what do you have to remember?

In Semora, changing a due date is not just a field write. The device reminders already scheduled for that task are cancelled and re-scheduled against the new date and time — same-day on free; your custom 1-day and 3-day timing and your quiet hours on Pro, since the custom offsets are themselves the paid part and the scheduler falls back to same-day defaults for everyone else. If device calendar sync is on — Pro, and on iPhone or iPad, since it deliberately no-ops in a browser — the existing calendar event is updated in place rather than duplicated. The study blocks that referenced the task are invalidated. The next time you open Smart Plan (Pro), the plan rebuilds deterministically: completed sessions stay in your history, every unfinished block is regenerated from today forward across a two-week horizon, work you missed carries forward, and sessions route around your class meeting times.

The workload dashboard re-derives at the same time. A crunch week there is not a week with a lot of items in it — it is a statistical outlier, a week whose load score sits at least one standard deviation above the mean of your loaded weeks and that holds at least two items. Move one exam and a week can stop being flagged while the week you moved it into starts.

On a manually maintained board, moving a card moves a card. The reminder, the calendar entry, the study time you had blocked out, and your sense of which week is the bad one are all only as current as the last time you updated them yourself, unless you built an automation to do it, and then you own that automation for the rest of the term.

Grades, weights, and study time are the same data

When the scanner reads a syllabus it pulls the percentage weight attached to each item and the letter-grade scale for the course. That single number then does two different jobs, which is why the grade side and the planning side of Semora stay consistent with each other.

On the grade side, weights drive a weighted average against your course's own scale rather than a generic one. The "What do I need?" card (Pro) inverts that math: for every letter on that scale it computes the average you would have to hold across your remaining weight, and shows it as a plain answer — "avg 84% on the rest," "Locked in" when the letter is already secured, "Needs extra credit" when it is reachable only by banking the ungraded extra credit still on the table, and "Out of reach" when it is not reachable at all. Base grade tracking with weighted averages is free, and so is the current-semester GPA estimate on the Courses tab; the forecast is the Pro layer on top.

On the planning side, the same weight feeds a load score scaled by a per-type prep multiplier — exams count triple, projects two and a half, quizzes one and a half, assignments slightly above a reading. That is why an exam with no weight recorded still reads as heavier than an unweighted reading, and it is the signal behind both the crunch-week flags and the per-course ordering that tells you which class needs attention first.

Academic Risk alerts (Pro) sit on top of both: a grade trending down, work that has gone missing, and a week that is overloaded, each returning a short recovery plan pointed at the specific task, plan, or course rather than a generic nudge.

What to check before committing a semester to any planner

Whatever you choose, week nine is a bad time to discover a limitation. Four questions are worth putting to any tool before you move a semester into it. Does it understand that a term has a start and an end, or is it an infinite list? Can it tell you a grade, or only a date? Can you get your data back out in a format something else can read? And when you stop paying, what happens to what you already put in?

Semora's answers, for the record: semester start and end dates come out of the syllabus itself and bound the term, which is what makes the outside-the-term date warning possible in the first place, and what makes the one-semester free limit a real boundary rather than a paperwork detail. Grade tracking and the semester GPA estimate are on the free tier, not behind the paywall. On the way out, Pro includes device calendar sync on iPhone and iPad , it does not run in a browser, plus an .ics export that works with Google Calendar or Outlook, and a CSV export of the semester report with a browser print view for carrying a clean grade summary into an advising meeting. Courses and tasks created or edited without a connection queue locally and flush with exponential backoff when you are back online, rather than vanishing.

Pricing shape is worth a look too, and it is where these two products stop being comparable. A team workspace prices around collaborators and seats (Taskade's own pricing page lists Pro at $10/month billed annually, Business at $25, and Max at $100) which is a reasonable structure for a company and an odd one for a single student. Semora Pro is $3.99/month or $19.99/year, which works out to about $1.67 a month annually. It is bought inside the iOS app through the App Store, there is no web checkout to go looking for, and the entitlement applies to your whole account, so the same login is Pro in the browser too.

One last thing to budget honestly: assume you are paying from day one, and let the free tier carry you until you actually need something in Pro. There is no promo code to chase and nothing to buy on the website; the purchase happens on iPhone or iPad, and Restore Purchases re-attaches it if you change devices, while signing in on the web simply re-reads the entitlement your account already has. In practice the moment free stops being enough is specific and predictable: a fifth course, the first permitted LMS import you choose to use, hosting a Course Space instead of joining one, or the day you try to start your second semester.