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 setup 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 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 does more than change one field. 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. If device calendar sync is on — Pro, and on iPhone or iPad, since it does not run in a browser — the existing calendar event is updated in place rather than duplicated. The study blocks that referenced the task are cleared. The next time you open Smart Plan (Pro), the plan rebuilds: 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 updates at the same time. A crunch week there is not just a week with a lot of items in it — it is a week whose load stands well above your typical week 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 are saved on your device and sent once you are back online, rather than vanishing.

Pricing shape is worth a look too, and it is where these two products stop being comparable. Taskade's plans are team plans: its pricing page lists Pro at $10/month billed annually with up to 10 users included, and Business at $25 and Max at $100 a month, also billed annually. That is a reasonable structure for a company and an odd one for a single student. Semora Pro is $4.99/month or $29.99/year, which works out to about $2.50 a month annually. It is bought either with a card on the web at app.semoraai.com, processed by Stripe, or inside the iOS app through the App Store, and the entitlement applies to your whole account, so the same login is Pro in the browser too.

One last thing on paying: you can pay whichever way suits you, a card on the web, handled by Stripe, or the App Store on iPhone or iPad, where Restore Purchases re-attaches it if you change devices. Either way, signing in anywhere else simply re-reads the entitlement your account already has. The moment the free plan stops being enough is usually predictable, and it is never an LMS import: Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle stay free on every plan. The limits that do apply are listed on the pricing page.