Saunders Comprehensive Review NCLEX-RN Anki Deck Review

The Saunders NCLEX-RN Anki deck is free, and the number that decides whether it is worth your time is on its own listing: AnkiWeb counts 1,026 notes. The deck's description calls it "the deck for all of the practice questions for the Saunders Comprehensive Review (8th edition)" and says it is "mostly (~95%+) there", but Elsevier sells the current edition of that book with more than 5,700 practice questions. Those two figures do not fit together.

That does not make the deck bad. The cards are better built than most free nursing decks, because each one puts a full NCLEX-style stem on the front and the answer, the rationale and a test-taking strategy on the back. It makes the deck a partial extract rather than the complete question set it is described as, and it means you should not treat finishing it as finishing Saunders.

Summary Table

The deck's AnkiWeb page. Size, media counts and the last update sit in one line under the title. Source: ankiweb.net, captured October 2026.

Saunders Anki Deck Overview

This is a shared deck, not a product. A nursing student typed the practice questions out of their copy of Saunders while studying, uploaded the file to AnkiWeb in October 2021, and has not changed it since. There is no company behind it, no support channel and nobody fixing errors. The listing notes the creator has shared two other items.

What makes it worth looking at is the card format. Most free nursing decks are one-line recall prompts. These are full exam-style items: a paragraph of patient context, four numbered options, and on the back the correct option number followed by a rationale and a Test-Taking Strategy line lifted from the book. The sample AnkiWeb displays runs a pediatric leukemia question through exactly that shape, explaining why a bone marrow biopsy confirms the diagnosis and why the platelet and white cell counts do not.

What you get:

• 1,026 notes built from the Saunders 8th Edition practice questions.
• A 0.64 MB download with one image and no audio.
• Full rationales and test-taking strategies on the back of each card.
• Anki's spaced repetition scheduling, which is the engine doing the real work.

The creator is candid about the rough edges, which is more than most paid marketing copy manages. The description warns of duplicates, "less than 50-100 cards", and admits "I only started organizing the sections with Adult + PED but the rest is just out of order (sorry!)". Take both at face value.

Downloading is a two-step job. AnkiWeb hands you a file, and shared decks cannot be added to an AnkiWeb account directly: import it in Anki on a computer, then sync so it reaches your phone.

Saunders Anki Deck Review For 2026

The coverage claim does not survive the arithmetic

The deck's note count against the publisher's own question count.

AnkiWeb prints the note count itself, in the heading above the sample cards: 1,026. Elsevier's store page for the 9th edition states "more than 5,700 practice questions in the text and on the Evolve website". Even setting aside that the deck was built from the 8th edition, that is not a small discrepancy, and no page we can find that recommends this deck mentions the count at all.

We cannot put an exact figure on the 8th edition, and we will not guess at one. Elsevier no longer lists that edition anywhere we can open: the store URLs for it redirect to the shop home page, and the publisher's inspection-copy site returns "this title is not available". So the honest statement is the one the numbers support. The deck holds roughly a thousand questions from a book that has carried several thousand in every edition the publisher currently describes, and the listing's claim to hold all of them is the creator's intention rather than a count anyone has checked.

The practical consequence is about how you use it. If you own Saunders, do not clear the deck and conclude you have worked the book. Use the deck for the retrieval reps and work the book's chapters and its Evolve question bank separately. If you do not own the Saunders book, this deck is not a substitute for it.

Nothing in it was written for the Next Generation NCLEX

The listing's update date is 2021-10-08. NCSBN launched the Next Generation NCLEX on April 1, 2023, about 18 months later, to measure clinical judgment through new item types. Every card in this deck predates that change.

That matters more here than it would for a plain recall deck, because these cards look like exam questions. A student drilling 1,026 realistic four-option stems can reasonably believe they are practising the exam. They are practising the format the exam used before 2023, without the case studies, the bowtie items or the trend items that carry clinical judgment on the current test. The NCLEX study guide sets out what the current test plan actually asks for.

The content underneath is mostly fine. Bone marrow biopsy still confirms leukemia, and a rationale written in 2019 for that fact is as true now. The gap is in what the deck trains you to do, not in whether its facts are right.

Good cards, poor filing

The card quality is the deck's real strength, and it comes from the source material rather than from the person who typed it. Saunders pairs every question with a rationale and a test-taking strategy, and because the creator copied both, each card teaches something after you answer it. Compare that with the NCLEX-RN 400+ deck, whose cards are short text prompts with no rationale at all.

The filing is the weakness. Only the Adult and PED sections are in order, by the creator's own admission, which means you cannot reliably unsuspend one body system at a time the way you can with a tagged deck. For a deck of this size that is a real cost: you either turn on all 1,026 notes and accept a shuffled queue, or you spend an evening sorting it yourself before you study.

The crowd signal is thin but positive: 8 thumbs up against 0 thumbs down, and three comments, all from late 2021 and January 2022. Nobody has flagged a bad card, and nobody has flagged anything else either, so quality control is still yours. How we weigh maintenance, sourcing and transparency across every resource is set out in our review methodology.

Pricing

• The deck: $0. The download on the AnkiWeb listing is free and ungated.
• Anki itself: the desktop program is a free download and AnkiDroid for Android is free. AnkiMobile is the official paid iOS app, and the Anki project states that its purchases fund development. AnkiWeb sync is free.
• The book behind it: Saunders Comprehensive Review for the NCLEX-RN, 9th edition, is $75.99 list on the publisher's store. The deck does not include it and does not replace it.

There is no plan to compare and no per-month figure to calculate. The only costs are the hour it takes to import and skim the deck, the price of an iOS app if that is how you study, and the book if you want the chapters the questions came from.

A free resource can still cost you something. If 1,026 pre-2023 questions absorb review time that belonged to a current question bank, the deck has been expensive in the only currency that matters here.

Who The Saunders Anki Deck Is Best For

• Students who already own the Saunders book and want its questions in a spaced repetition queue.
• Daily Anki users who want exam-style stems with real rationales at no cost.
• Anyone rebuilding content knowledge who learns better from a question plus an explanation than from a bare fact.
• People willing to sort or tag an unordered deck before they rely on it.

When You Might Look Elsewhere

• If you want the largest free nursing deck, the Debase27 deck holds 1,419 notes and 2,479 cards, though it is also pre-2023.
• If you want something small and finishable, the NCLEX-RN 400+ deck is 407 notes and was updated in September 2025, which makes it the most current free deck we review.
• If you are comparing free decks generally, the Nursing High-Yield ATI deck is older still, last touched in 2019.
• If what you need is clinical judgment practice, no free deck solves it. A question bank with written rationales such as UWorld is the right spend.

Our NCLEX flashcards page compares the free decks side by side, and the NCLEX hub has the rest of our coverage.

Final Verdict

This is one of the better free NCLEX Anki decks, and the reason is the source material. Full stems, real rationales and test-taking strategies on 1,026 cards, for nothing, is a fair trade for an hour of importing. The creator was honest about the duplicates and the mess, and the 8 thumbs up are deserved.

It is still a 2021 extract of a 2019 book, it is unsorted outside two sections, and the listing claims a completeness the note count does not support.

If you import it, unsuspend a few hundred cards at a time, read the rationale on every card you miss, and check anything that surprises you against a current source before you commit it to memory.

Saunders Anki Deck FAQs

How many cards are in the Saunders NCLEX Anki deck?

The AnkiWeb listing shows 1,026 notes, and the download is 0.64 MB with one image and no audio. The listing describes the deck as holding all of the practice questions from the Saunders 8th Edition, but the publisher advertises several thousand questions for that book, so treat 1,026 as the number that is actually verified.

Is the Saunders Anki deck free?

Yes. The deck downloads free from AnkiWeb with no account gate. Anki for desktop and AnkiDroid for Android are free as well, and AnkiWeb sync is free. The official iOS app is the one paid piece, and the Saunders textbook the questions came from is sold separately.

Is the deck updated for the Next Generation NCLEX?

No. AnkiWeb shows a last update of 2021-10-08, and the Next Generation NCLEX launched on April 1, 2023. The deck has no case studies and no clinical judgment item types, so you need a current question bank for that part of your preparation.

Do I need the Saunders book to use the deck?

Not strictly, since each card carries its own rationale. You will get more out of it if you own the book, because the deck is an incomplete extract and the chapters give you the content review the questions are testing. The book also comes with the publisher's Evolve question bank, which the deck does not include.

Is the deck organized by topic?

Only partly. The creator states that the Adult and PED sections were sorted and the rest is out of order. If you want to study one body system at a time, plan on tagging or reordering the deck yourself after you import it.

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