Notion to Anki: Add-On, Converter, or a Straight Paste

The job, in one export dialog. Somewhere between a Notion page and an Anki deck sits a format gap, and crossing it is the whole job. Notion's export dialog names three format families (PDF, HTML, Markdown & CSV) and offers no deck format at all, so a 40-row vocabulary database leaves as a CSV and somebody still has to turn rows into notes. The routes that follow from that gap: toggles that must land in Anki go through a small add-on or the 2anki converter, a database can ride its CSV export into Anki's importer, and if what you wanted all along was cards rather than Anki, a plain paste skips the roundtrip entirely. One disclosure before those routes — I build Piccard, whose paste-import is the paste route below, and the test at the center of this piece is my own tool run on real Notion-shaped content last night. Discount accordingly.

What does Notion give you when you export?

Text files, sorted by what you built. The help doc draws the line by block type:

> "Any non-database Notion page can be exported as a Markdown file. Full page databases will be exports as a CSV file [sic], with Markdown files for each subpage."

(Notion Help, Export your Notion content)

So a toggle page becomes Markdown, and a database becomes a CSV with your column headers sitting in row one. Anki's importer takes the second kind without ceremony, and the manual is specific about what those columns become:

> "Fields in your text file can be mapped to any field in your notes, including the tags field."

(Anki Manual, Text Files)

Your header row is what Anki reads to count columns, so keep every row's column count honest. The other preprocessing step is encoding, and the manual states it flat:

> "The files must be in UTF-8 format (see below)."

Re-save the CSV as UTF-8 while you are still in the spreadsheet, because accents are where encoding failures show up first.

The manual route, then, is database, CSV export, a UTF-8 check, Anki's import dialog. Free, no accounts, and databases-only; the importer has a concept of fields and separators and no concept at all of a toggle. That gap is why the add-ons exist.

What do the Anki add-ons actually do?

Two of them rank today, and both are small indie projects. The whole first page of results for this job is indie: two AnkiWeb add-ons, a converter site appearing twice, Notion's own connections page, a couple of GitHub repositories, and a backup service's how-to. Nobody big has claimed this corner.

The toggle add-on. Notion Toggles to Anki (code 576859862, 15 reviews, last updated 2025-03-13) is the one people land on. The review that explains why it survives against the converter sites, from June 2026:

> "This is really super helpful, especially since the other Notion to Anki platforms online require a subscription. Thank you so much for keeping this accessible for students!"

(AnkiWeb listing)

The page-configuration add-on. Notion2Anki (7 reviews, updated 2026-09-08, source on GitHub) is newer, and its one substantive review doubles as documentation:

> "It's essentially 'Notion Toggles Loader' Addon but instead of pushing all notes to one and the same deck you can configure separate decks for each configured notion-page."

(AnkiWeb listing)

That names the 2023 ancestor, Notion Toggles Loader (code 1940767534), still listed and unmaintained-looking. Both add-on pages also carry AnkiWeb's standing caution, word for word: "As add-ons are programs downloaded from the internet, they are potentially malicious. You should only download add-ons you trust." The caution describes the actual shape of desktop Anki's extension model, where a route through add-on land means installing a stranger's code and staying current with their maintenance.

How does the converter route work?

It works on the workspace instead of the file. 2anki's Notion converter leads with its pitch:

> "Connect Notion once, paste any page link, get a .apkg deck. Toggles become cards. No add-on, no copy-pasting."

And its FAQ names which blocks carry the weight:

> "Toggle blocks are the primary card source: the toggle heading becomes the front, the body becomes the back."

The rest of the page is concrete about what survives the trip (cloze markers become real cloze cards, images embed, strikethrough becomes tags). Pricing runs from a free signup through a "$6 Day Pass" up to an Auto Sync tier that refreshes decks every few minutes. The connection is the trade. "You authorise read access once — we use it only to read pages you select." In exchange you stop exporting forever, and a third party holds a key to your workspace. Fine for study notes. Worth ten seconds of thought for everything else in there.

Do you have to grant workspace access?

Not on every route. The file routes (export, CSV, import) and the clipboard routes never ask. The connection routes, 2anki's converter and the newer add-on's configured-page syncing, work through Notion's official integrations machinery, the same system Notion advertises on its connections page, and they need you to authorize a reader.

Piccard sits firmly on the no-access side. It does not sync with Notion, and nothing installs on the Notion end, because you copy out of Notion and you paste. Shorter feature list than a sync, and deliberate: the shortest path from a table to cards should not require handing anybody a key.

What happens when you paste Notion content directly?

I ran this part rather than reading about it (last night, September 18 around 00:50 AEST, on the live propose pipeline, Spanish to English). Notion hands a clipboard two very different shapes depending on what you copied, and they do not come out equal.

The toggle paste

Copy a toggle list and it collapses in a plain textarea to alternating single lines, Spanish term on one line, English definition on the next. I pasted eight pairs in that shape. All eight came back as candidate cards, both sides intact, orientation correct. The collapse into bare lines did not break parsing.

The leaner cards

Enrichment was thinner than the same vocabulary fed as rows. The example field fell back to the source line itself (el desayuno serving as its own example), no phonetics, shorter definitions. Usable cards, visibly less dressed.

The table paste

A copied Notion database or table view lands as term, tab, definition on one row per line. The same vocabulary in that shape came back fully enriched: generated example sentences ("I need to buy a train ticket." on the ticket row), part of speech, US and UK phonetics, and one accent quietly repaired. I typed la estacion; the card came back estación.

One session frames all of this, an 8-pair toggle sample and a 12-row tab-separated sample, so it establishes tested behavior on those two shapes and nothing broader. The practical split still held. Copy the table view when you want the full enrichment; copy the toggles when you want the cards fast and don't mind them plain.

The round arithmetic

A list-sized paste proposes its strongest 25 candidates or fewer per round, and the confirm step takes at most 40 cards at a time on the paste and document path; only a document over 120,000 characters gets split four ways, proposing toward 100 per round. Re-pasting the same text inside ten minutes brings the same leaders back (that is the cache), so a long list goes deeper only when its next slice arrives. Every kept card costs one energy. Image cards exist as AI images per card, a paid toggle on the generate screen. Captioned YouTube is the other door, a video with a caption track, with at most 20 cards per confirm there. Everything confirmed schedules on FSRS-6 with the defaults left alone.

Which route for which workspace?

Read the page first; what it holds picks the route.

The last row is my own tool's honest edge: no .apkg, no CSV, no export out of Piccard. If your deck list is sacred, the first two rows are yours. The file-format side of the same journey is written up in PDF to Anki, the closest kin to this piece; the longer export-and-extension crawl is covered in Exporting Language Reactor to Anki.

The short version

Notion exports text, Anki imports text, and everything in between is somebody's add-on or somebody's connection. A database rides the CSV export into Anki's importer — check UTF-8, mind the header row. Toggles need the small add-on (alive, updated 2025, free) or 2anki's converter (clean .apkg, day-pass pricing, a workspace read grant). And the paste route turns either shape into cards without sync, add-on, or any export step — richer off a table, leaner off toggles, 25 candidates to a round, 40 cards to a confirm, one energy per kept card, FSRS-6 doing the scheduling. The Spanish vocabulary end of that pipeline, if you'd rather download a deck than paste one, is surveyed in The Best Anki Spanish Decks.

The free tier is 150 energy (about 150 cards), then prepaid top-ups at $5 / $10 / $20; no subscription, and topped-up energy never expires. To start: Piccard on the Chrome Web Store.

All guides: Piccard Blog.