6 apps post-secondary students swear by

For this week’s No More Ls column, we’re looking at apps that students can download and use to save money and time—and hopefully result in a good salary after they graduate.

There’s no shortage of apps promising to make you a better student: from financial apps to keep you on budget to ones that make finding rentals off campus dead simple. But which ones actually help you with your studies? I asked students across the post-secondary spectrum—from undergrads and PhD candidates to professional certification students newly in the workforce—to share the tools they rely on. Their picks solve different problems, but they have one thing in common: They make learning and excelling easier.

Best app for making study prep a whole lot easier

Quizlet free version is available; Quizlet+ costs $13 a month or $60 for the year.

Studying psychology means plenty of material to memorize, so Mykala Pomes, a fourth-year psychology student at the University of Guelph, regularly turns to Quizlet for flashcards and practice tests. And searching by course code can turn up study materials other students have already created—a nice bonus.

“Studying is already such a time-consuming process,” she says, so using existing study sets means she can spend less time preparing and more time actually studying.

Quizlet’s free version lets students create their own flashcard sets and search millions of sets created by other students and teachers. Free users can also try some of its more advanced study tools with limits, including one free practice test per flashcard set and limited access to AI-generated study guides.

Upgrading to Quizlet+ expands access to tools such as customizable practice tests, study guides, practice questions, textbook tips and AI-powered study guides—all without ads.

Best app for catching what your eyes skim over

Kurzweil 3000 is paid software; a one-year individual web licence is listed at $419 through Canadian retailer Bridges Canada. Check whether your school’s accessibility services office provides access. If not, lobby your student council to get it.

After staring at the same text for hours, your brain can become an unreliable copy editor. That’s where Kurzweil 3000 comes in for Sarah Rewega, PhD candidate (who also happens to be this writer’s little sister!). This assistive reading and writing software can read her work back to her using text-to-speech, helping her recognize awkward sentences, errors and ideas that aren’t quite landing as intended. “To hear your work back is very different than just reading it in your head,” she says. “You can hear all the things that might not make sense.”

Rewega accesses Kurzweil through her university’s disability services, which covered the cost for her—a good reminder to check what assistive technology your school may already provide before paying out of pocket.

Kurzweil 3000 offers a free trial, while the paid software includes customizable reading speeds, text-to-speech voices in 13 languages and 18 additional dialects, along with tools for writing, note-taking, studying and test-taking.

Best app for for notebook lovers who want to travel light

Goodnotes has a free version available; Essential tier costs $15. a year.

Alice Hinchliffe likes writing her notes by hand, but working on a PhD degree in English and theatre studies at the University of Guelph, while travelling made hauling around stacks of notebooks very impractical. “Lugging notebooks was just not feasible for me.”

Goodnotes gives her a way to keep the benefits of handwriting without the baggage. Using an iPad and pen, she creates digital notebooks for books she’s reading, meetings, classes and other parts of her academic life. “Goodnotes allows me to centralize everything,” she says.

The free plan lets students create and organize up to three files (notebooks, whiteboards and text docs), import files and record up to 20 minutes of audio per notebook.

Upgrading to Essential unlocks syncing across devices, unlimited files and audio recordings, math AI, unlimited Q&A support, meeting transcription and watermark-free exported documents.

Best app for turning dead time into study time

Speechify has a free version available; Premium tier costs $200 a year through the App Store.

Studying doesn’t necessarily mean sitting at a desk for Miles Macklem, who is taking a course with the Professional Picture Framers Association. Macklem uses Speechify to convert the PDF course textbooks into audio, so he can learn by listening to the material as he performs the exact task being discussed. Macklem is head framer at Soho Framing in Toronto and is working toward his Certified Picture Framer designation.

“Speechify makes the PDFs a lot less tedious and more interesting, which in turn makes me more excited to learn with them,” he says.

Speechify’s free text-to-speech plan offers adjustable listening speeds, up to 1.5 times the default speed, and 10 basic voices.

Premium lets you turn anything into audio, adds more than 200 human-like voices, creates AI podcasts and summaries, delegates tasks to AI agents, builds slide decks and more.

Best app for getting your schoolwork out of your head

Todoist has free Beginner plan available; Pro tier costs $10 a month or $84 for the year.

When deadlines, assignments, study periods and other tiny tasks start competing for brain space, Waed Hassan, PhD, who graduated June 2026, turns to Todoist.

“I can put all my deadlines, assignments, study tasks, and random little things I need to remember in one place instead of constantly worrying that I’m forgetting something,” she says. Better yet, there’s the small dopamine hit of checking things off: “It gives me so much peace of mind because I don’t have to keep everything in my head.”

Todoist’s free Beginner plan lets students organize tasks across up to five personal projects, set recurring dates, use list and board layouts and receive automatic reminders for tasks with a date and time. Students can also connect Google or Outlook Calendar to see calendar events alongside their tasks.

Upgrading to Pro adds up to 300 personal projects, calendar layouts, task durations and time blocking, deadlines, custom reminders and a full activity history.

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Best app for avoiding a group-chat nightmare with your group projects

Basecamp has a free plan available; Freelancer tier costs USD$25 a month. Find out if your school offers this to students, or lobby your student council for access.

Anyone who’s survived a group project knows that the assignment is only half the battle. The other half is figuring out who’s doing what—and finding the one file that someone swears they’ve already sent.

Miggy Mignon, a 2026 Humber Film and Television Production graduate, says their instructors recommended Basecamp for managing group projects. It keeps tasks, deadlines, conversations and shared files organized in one place.

Their description may be the better sales pitch: “It’s basically as if Google Drive, Google Calendar and Google Docs all had a giant baby, and it was in one place, and it was super organized.”

Basecamp’s free plan includes one project for up to five users and one gigabyte of storage, along with its core project-management tools, including to-dos, messaging, group chat, scheduling and file sharing. And while Mignon primarily used it for collaborative film projects, they say it works for solo ones, too: you can create your own tasks and deadlines.

Paid plans include a 30-day free trial. They range from the Freelancer tier with three projects,  500 GB of storage and up to 20 users, while the top-tier Basecamp Pro Unlimited adds unlimited users and projects, five terabytes of storage and additional administrative and timesheet tools.

Read more from this issue of The Get:

1. Paycheque deductions decoded: How to read a pay stub
2. What happens to your finances after a divorce in Canada
3. Interior Designer Tommy Smythe on buying a good home
4. How to stretch your paycheque, improve credit and avoid payday loans