You guys know I love a good study tool. Not just any tool, though — the kind that actually changes the way you learn, the kind that saves you time, reduces stress, and makes studying feel just a little less like a chore. If you share that excitement and passion, or if you’ve just been wanting a single study tool that could handle everything — your notes, summaries, practice questions, flashcards, and even your exam prep — then you’re going to love Medly.
It is a web‑based study tool that promises to save you time by generating the materials you’d normally create manually. The exact kind of app I wish I had when I was in med school. Could have really saved me a lot of time.
Medly isn’t just another note‑taking app. It isn’t just an AI summariser, or flashcard generator. It’s an all‑in‑one platform that wants to take your entire study workflow — from the moment you upload your lecture slides to the moment you sit down to revise — and make it smoother, faster, and a lot less stressful. Honestly, that’s a bold promise. Especially for a tool that costs $33 a month, or half that if you go for the annual plan.
Medly is ambitious in a way that immediately caught our attention. And if you’ve ever spent hours jumping between different tools, copying and pasting content, or trying to organise your study materials across multiple platforms, you’ll understand why that ambition matters. I want to show you what Medly does well, where it struggles, and whether it can genuinely support your learning without adding more chaos to your workflow. So, let’s get into Medly — the study tool that wants to do it all.
Getting started with Medly — uploading your resources
One of the first things you notice when you start using Medly is just how easy it is to get your material into the app. And honestly, that matters more than people realise. Medly lets you bring in your notes, assignments, lectures, exam papers—pretty much anything you’re working on—as long as it’s under 50 MB and in a supported format. And the list of supported formats is surprisingly generous. You can upload PDFs, Word documents, Pages files, rich text, plain text, markdown, PowerPoint presentations, and even HTML. If you’re studying from digital textbooks, you’ll appreciate that the AI tool also supports ePub.
I only wish it supported images. Because sometimes, especially during lectures or tutorials, you just want to take a quick picture of the board or a diagram and drop it straight into your study tool for processing. It’s one of those small conveniences that can make a big difference in real‑world studying, and I hope it’s something they add in the future.
But even without image support, the upload experience is incredibly smooth. You’re not tied to a specific device or a specific workflow. Some people like to start with their lecture slides. Some want to jump straight into exam prep. Medly doesn’t care — it just adapts to whatever you’re doing in that moment. There is even a simple version where you just add documents without doing anything with them yet—no pressure, no immediate decisions. Just store them and come back when you’re ready.
That’s what I appreciate about Medly. It doesn’t force into a rigid system or a specific order of doing things; you build your own flow, whether you’re a planner, a last‑minute reviser, or someone who likes to prepare everything in advance. That flexibility is refreshing.
AI study notes — fast, clean, impressively accurate
Of course, the real magic happens after you upload your files — when Medly starts generating your lecture notes, summaries, practice questions, and everything else. This is the moment the app really shows you what it’s capable of.
Medly’s AI can generate lecture notes from your handouts, and it doesn’t just dump text onto a page. It actually pulls out the core information, trims away the unnecessary explanations, and formats everything into clean, structured notes with headings, bullet points, tables, and even LaTeX equations. It feels intentional, not automated.
What impressed me the most was how logical the notes were. The AI wrote in the exact same style I typically would — tables to compare information, arrows to show processes and flow, and headings that actually make sense. And those headings come with a table of contents, which makes navigating long documents so much easier. It’s the kind of structure that helps you learn faster because everything is laid out clearly.
But the best part? You can edit the notes. You’re not stuck with whatever the AI gives you. If something is inaccurate or incomplete, you can fix it. Medly gives you a decent set of tools for that: headings, basic formatting, highlights, and the ability to add dividers, links, citations, photos, and quotes. The only limitation — and it’s a big one — is that images must have a URL (meaning they have to be online somewhere). You can’t add images stored locally on your device. That immediately cuts out screenshots, diagrams, and photos you’ve taken yourself, which is frustrating for anyone who studies visually.
To perfect your notes, you can ask the AI to add missing details exactly where you want them. The accuracy is impressive. Medly follows instructions naturally, and doesn’t fight you. But sometimes, you do have to be very precise to get the exact output you want. Over time, that can get a little tiring. Which is why I was surprised that there’s no option to copy responses from your AI chats. That alone would simplify so much of the workflow.
Another limitation you’ll feel quickly: Medly only opens one document at a time. So if you want to cross‑check your notes with the original PDF, you’ll need a second device or a physical textbook. A split‑view option, or even a floating window, would dramatically improve this study experience.
Then there’s the colour situation. Or rather, the lack of it. There’s only one text colour. The highlighter is green — which is an unusual choice for a highlighter — and there’s no way to change it. I naturally gravitate towards yellow, but that’s not an option here. The only place you get colour is inside tables, where you can change both the text and background colours for individual cells. It’s nice, and makes you want to put everything in a table just to get some colour into your notes. Practical? Not really. Tempting? Absolutely.
But here’s the question that kept coming up for me: Could this be the death of handwritten notes?
Because when AI can generate such clean, structured, editable notes in minutes… why would you handwrite anything from scratch? You could spend less time creating notes and more time actually learning from them. And honestly, that’s a compelling argument.
Visual summaries — colourful and fun
If it’s colour you’re craving, visual summaries are where Medly finally gives you a little something to work with. After spending so much time in the lecture notes section — where everything is black, white, and that one stubborn green highlighter — opening a visual summary almost feels like stepping into a different app. There’s colour. There’s brightness. There’s life. For a moment, you think, finally!
But before you jump for joy, let me say this: visual summaries are best reserved for exactly that — summaries. Short, simple overviews. The kind of content where you’re capturing the big picture, not the fine details. Because once you try to build anything more complex, the limitations start to show.
You get only five colours for your diagrams. Really grateful for them, considering lecture notes have none. But five colours can only take you so far… Then you have three shapes to work with: a rectangle, circle, and diamond. That’s it. After a while, the repetition becomes noticeable. Your diagrams start to look the same, and your creativity hits a ceiling pretty quickly. Even the arrows — which are essential for mind maps — are extremely simple. They work, but they don’t give you the expressive flexibility you need to build meaningful, visually rich connections.
Rearranging items is easy enough. You can move things around without much effort. But because the tools are so limited, getting an intuitive diagram often requires a lot of manual fixing. You’ll find yourself nudging shapes, adjusting spacing, and trying to force a structure that the tool just isn’t designed to support. It’s why I think having blank canvases specifically for visual summaries would be a great addition. Right now, they only exist for documents, and it feels like a missed opportunity.
Practice Questions & Flashcards — The Best Part of Medly
Practice questions and flascards work hand‑in‑hand, and together they form what I think is the strongest, most exciting part of the entire app. Let’s start with practice questions, because honestly, they are a massive game‑changer.
Medly can generate practice questions from any of your documents in the app — even the AI‑generated notes you just created. The variety is fantastic. You get multiple‑choice, structured questions, and the kind of short‑answer prompts that actually make you think. It’s not just surface‑level recall. It pushes you to understand the material.
What I love most is how interactive the whole experience is. You can type your answers, or — if you’re like me and you love handwriting — you can write them out. Medly checks them in real time. It highlights the key points in your answer, shows you what you got right, and gently corrects what you missed. It’s like having a tutor sitting next to you, guiding you through the material.
The handwriting recognition is surprisingly good. It still needs some work on palm rejection and the general feel of the pen tool, but the fact that it recognises handwritten answers at all is impressive. And because you can’t adjust the pen thickness or colour, I was relieved to see that the default settings actually work well for answering questions.
Practice questions are genuinely fun to go through. They make studying feel active, not passive. If you’re preparing for exams, this feature alone could save you hours of time.
But — and you knew there was a “but” coming — I would have loved the option to export the questions as PDFs. Or even retake the entire test. At the moment you can only reset each question one-by-one. It’s a lot of work. Unless you only want to redo questions you got wrong. In which case, not a bad idea.
Flashcards in Medly are simple, clean, and incredibly easy to create as well. The interface is so straightforward that you can build a full deck in minutes. But — and this is where the simplicity becomes a limitation — they’re too basic. There’s no spaced repetition, no progress tracking, or learning statistics on how well you’re doing. They work, but they don’t give you the advanced features we’ve come to expect from digital flashcards. It’s not a deal‑breaker, but it does mean you’re missing out on the deeper learning insights that make flashcards so powerful.
Working Across Multiple Files — Great for Big Exams
For everyday studying, Medly is great. But where it truly becomes powerful is during big exam seasons — the moments when you’re juggling multiple topics, dozens of documents, and a mountain of revision material. The app lets you combine several files to create mock exams, full study guides, or even mind maps for an entire subject. That kind of flexibility gives you the freedom to really focus on your learning.
There’s virtually no limit to what you can build inside Medly. From the moment you receive your course materials, through assignments, quizzes, and all the way to your final exams, the tool supports every stage of your learning journey. It’s designed to grow with you, adapt to your workflow, and help you stay organised without feeling overwhelmed.
The Cons — Where Medly Needs Work
Medly is not without flaws, though. You will mostly deal with minor bugs. Lecture notes that sometimes fail to generate, and flashcard edits failing to save. But, there is no app without bugs. The only real problem we encountered was zooming in on pages. It hides the toolbar at the bottom, and makes it difficult to work sometimes.
Device Experience
Medly works best on a laptop or desktop. The iPad is great for fact‑checking or handwriting answers. But the phone? Too small, not optimised, and honestly not worth the effort.
Pricing — Is It Worth It?
At $33 a month, Medly definitely sits on the higher end of study tools. The annual plan makes it a little easier to manage, but when you look closely at what you’re getting, the value becomes hard to ignore. Medly is the closest thing to affordable private tutoring, and in that context, the pricing suddenly looks very different.
Even on the cheaper end, private lessons can start at around $5 an hour for a single subject. Compare that to Medly’s $33 a month — and you’re getting unlimited support across all your subjects, any time you need it, for the entire month. No scheduling. No hourly limits. No extra fees. Just open the app and study.
And for students who are struggling to afford private tutoring, this is exactly what you need. You should be willing, though, to invest the time to learn the tool and have the discipline to study on your own. Medly can genuinely offer the kind of academic support that would otherwise be out of reach.