SimpleNursing NCLEX App Review

SimpleNursing is worth buying if the thing standing between you and a pass is content you never properly learned, and the NCLEX-RN plan costs $60 a month or $139 as a one-time 90-Day Pass. The NCLEX Pass Guarantee that SimpleNursing advertises is not included in either of those plans. It sits on the $312 Full Journey Pass, the bundle that also carries nursing school content you have already finished.

That gap matters because the guarantee is the reason a lot of students pick this app. On SimpleNursing's own plan comparison, the row reading "NCLEX Pass Guarantee, keep access until you pass" says Not included against NCLEX for RN, NCLEX for PN and the Nursing School Pass, and Included against Full Journey alone.

This review covers what the app holds on each plan, what all four tiers cost in 2026, why the question bank is the weakest part of a strong product, and who should buy something else.

Summary Table

The plan picker this review is built on. Source: simplenursing.com (captured September 2026).

SimpleNursing NCLEX App Overview

SimpleNursing is Nurse Mike's video library with a question bank bolted on. The teaching is animated: a pathophysiology chain becomes a cartoon, a drug class gets a memory trick, and the explanation runs two to ten minutes instead of forty. That is the whole proposition, and it is why the app has 100K+ downloads on Google Play and a 4.9 there from 668 reviews.

The app is free to download, and neither store listing advertises in-app purchases. You subscribe on the website, then sign in. On iOS it is listed as Nursing School & NCLEX Prep from developer SmartFit Investments, Inc, 61.7 MB, rated 4.6 from 2.1K ratings. On Android it is SimpleNursing RN & NCLEX Prep. Two names, one product, and two very different rating samples.

An NCLEX-RN subscription includes:

• 1,200+ animated lecture videos covering nursing school and NCLEX content
• 1,000+ digital study guides that pair with the videos
• 4,500+ NCLEX-RN questions with rationales, of which 1,400+ are NGN-format
• Adaptive CAT practice tests, which simulate how the real exam picks your next item
• 6 readiness assessments with a pass prediction
• The NCLEX Review Lecture Series with Nurse Mike, a crash course SimpleNursing sizes at 26 hours
• Live NCLEX cram sessions, run through the NGN question types
• Exit Exam and HESI Prep Series, useful if you still have a school exit exam ahead

What it does not include is the 4,000+ course questions that come with the cheaper Nursing School Pass. SimpleNursing splits its question content by product, so the NCLEX plan gives you exam questions and takes away coursework questions.

SimpleNursing NCLEX App Review For 2026

The pass guarantee is on one plan, and it is not the NCLEX one

SimpleNursing's guarantee reads well. The pricing page defines it as access until you pass: if you do not pass the NCLEX, your subscription is extended free until you do, on top of two years of full access. There is no refund in that sentence. You are promised more time with the product, not your money back, which is a meaningfully weaker promise than the one NCLEX RN Mastery makes.

The harder problem is which plan it attaches to. SimpleNursing sells four: the Nursing School Pass, NCLEX-RN Prep, NCLEX-PN Prep and the Full Journey Pass. The guarantee row on the comparison table is Included on Full Journey and Not included on the other three. So a new grad who buys the obvious product, the NCLEX-RN 90-Day Pass at $139, has bought no guarantee at all. To get it, you pay $312 for a bundle whose other half is nursing school content.

Two more rows behave the same way. The adaptive study plan built around your test date, and priority support, are also Full Journey only. Those are the three features an anxious retaker would most want, and all three sit behind the most expensive door.

The videos are the product, and students say the question bank is not

Ask nursing students about SimpleNursing and you get a consistent answer with a consistent caveat. On a November 2025 r/PassNclex thread about content review, one commenter put it plainly: "If you are a visual learner, Simple Nursing is the way to go! It honestly saved my life. However, stay away from their qbank. I thought the questions were very weird and the way in which their case studies are presented are not ideal." Another in the same thread said they kept thinking back to the SimpleNursing diagrams during the exam itself, while using a different bank for practice.

That split shows up in the app reviews too. Google Play reviewers describe a grading bug on select-all-that-apply items, where the app marks an answer wrong and then prints a rationale showing it was right, and complain about video lag. SimpleNursing has been shipping against it: the release notes list quiz builder improvements in 2.9.0, readiness assessment fixes in 2.9.1, and scoring rule fixes back in 2.7.5.

So the honest read is that you are paying for teaching, not for testing. The NGN question types are the hardest part of the current exam, and if the case studies in your bank do not feel like the real ones, you will find that out on test day. UWorld and Archer Review exist because that job is a specialism.

The two store listings do not agree with the pricing page

Count the content and you get three answers from one company. The App Store listing advertises 900+ study guides, 4,000+ NCLEX-RN and PN questions, and 27 hours of the NCLEX Review Lecture Series. The pricing page, updated for the 2026 plans, says 1,000+ study guides, 4,500+ RN questions, 1,400+ NGN items and a 26-hour crash course.

None of those gaps is huge, and the likeliest explanation is that the store listing has not been rewritten since the plan overhaul. It still matters when you are comparing products on numbers. Treat the pricing page as current, because it is the page tied to what you are actually buying, and treat any question count you see on a review site as a figure that needs checking against it.

The same scepticism belongs on the headline claim. SimpleNursing's NCLEX practice questions page says the company has served over 1 million nurses since 2012 with a 99 percent NCLEX pass rate. No sample size, period or methodology sits next to that number. For scale, the national first-time pass rate for US-educated candidates was already 91.2 percent in 2024, as our NCLEX pass rate breakdown sets out from NCSBN's own statistics. A self-reported figure from a subset of paying customers is not comparable to a national one, and we do not rate products on it. Our review methodology explains what we do count.

Pricing

SimpleNursing repriced in 2026. The Essentials, Premium and Elite packages are gone, replaced by four plans sold by who you are rather than how much you want.

SimpleNursing 2026 plans, cheapest billing option for each. Source: SimpleNursing plan comparison, read September 2026.

For a typical NCLEX window the 90-Day Pass is the plan to buy. $139 for three months beats $180 of monthly billing over the same period, it does not auto-renew, and three months is roughly what a working new grad needs. Against the field it is cheap: Archer's Q-Bank plus CAT runs $129 for three months, and UWorld's nursing bank costs considerably more for a comparable window.

Two rules catch people out. Refunds are honoured only within 48 hours of purchase on non-subscription memberships, and a processing fee of 10 percent comes out of any refund, with a $10 minimum and a $25 maximum. Refunds on monthly subscriptions are prohibited outright. Separately, a one-time membership has to be activated before the clock starts, and once activated it cannot be paused or suspended for any reason. Students on Reddit talk about pausing a subscription between semesters. On a 90-Day Pass, you cannot.

One account covers up to 4 devices. Sharing it gets the membership terminated without a refund.

Who SimpleNursing Is Best For

Buy it if you are a retaker who never understood the content. This is the clearest case. If your first attempt failed because pharmacology and acid-base never made sense, not because you ran out of practice questions, 1,200+ animated explanations are the right purchase. The 90-Day Pass at $139 is the plan.

Buy it if lecture-style video puts you to sleep. Archer's videos are recorded lectures over slides. SimpleNursing's are animated and short. Students who bounced off one often stick with the other, and that is a learning-style question rather than a quality one.

Buy the Full Journey Pass only if you are still in nursing school. $312 for 24 months with the guarantee and the adaptive study plan is reasonable value when you will use the nursing school half. If you graduated last month, you are paying for content you no longer need, and the $189 NCLEX-RN Pass Guarantee tier gets you the same guarantee for less. Either way that guarantee pays out in access, not cash.

Skip it if you already own a good question bank and understand the material. You would be buying teaching you do not need.

When You Might Look Elsewhere

You want the exam simulated, not explained. Archer Review is built the other way round: unlimited adaptive tests and a readiness percentage first, video second. Retakers who need score feedback week by week usually do better there, and it is the pairing students in that Reddit thread recommended alongside SimpleNursing's videos.

You want the rationales to be the product. UWorld charges more and earns it on explanation depth per question. If your gap is clinical judgement on NGN case studies, that is the bank to buy.

You want facts to stick rather than concepts to click. Picmonic at $12.99 a month is a mnemonic library, not a teaching library. Lab values and drug suffixes are its job, not pathophysiology.

You want a guarantee that returns money. NCLEX RN Mastery offers triple your money back on a long list of conditions. It is harder to qualify for and worth more if you do.

You want the full course rather than the app. SimpleNursing's course-side product is covered in our SimpleNursing NCLEX course review, and the rest of the field sits in our best NCLEX apps roundup and the NCLEX exam hub. If you are still deciding how long to study, our NCLEX pass probability calculator shows how the 85 to 150 item stop rule decides the result.

Final Verdict

SimpleNursing earns 4.0. The teaching is the best on our NCLEX app list for students who need concepts built from scratch, the 90-Day Pass at $139 is honestly priced against UWorld and Archer, and the app is maintained on a real release cadence. It loses points for a question bank its own users tell people to avoid, for content counts that differ across its own pages, and for a 48-hour refund window that leaves no room to change your mind.

SimpleNursing NCLEX App FAQs

How much does the SimpleNursing NCLEX app cost?

NCLEX-RN Prep is $60 a month billed monthly, or $139 once for the 90-Day Pass, which works out at $46 a month and does not auto-renew. NCLEX-PN Prep is priced the same. The Full Journey Pass, which bundles nursing school and NCLEX-RN content, is $312 once and covers 24 months.

Does SimpleNursing have an NCLEX pass guarantee?

Yes, on two plans. The NCLEX Pass Guarantee comes with the $189 NCLEX-RN Pass Guarantee tier and the $312 Full Journey Pass. SimpleNursing's plan comparison marks it as not included on the Nursing School, the $60 monthly NCLEX-RN and the $139 90-day plans. It extends your access free until you pass rather than refunding you, so it is a time guarantee, not a money-back one.

Is the SimpleNursing app free?

The app itself is a free download on iOS and Android, with no in-app purchases advertised on either store listing, and SimpleNursing offers a free 75-question NCLEX practice exam without a card. Everything else needs a paid subscription bought on the website. A lot of Nurse Mike's teaching is also on YouTube for free, which is worth checking before you subscribe.

Can you pass the NCLEX with SimpleNursing alone?

You can, but most students who pass with it pair the videos with a separate question bank. SimpleNursing's own users consistently praise the content teaching and criticise the question bank, so the common plan is SimpleNursing for content review plus UWorld or Archer for practice questions and readiness scoring.

Is SimpleNursing better than Archer for the NCLEX?

They are built for different jobs. SimpleNursing teaches content through short animated videos and costs $139 for 90 days. Archer is a question bank with unlimited adaptive tests and readiness scoring, at $129 for three months. If you failed on understanding, start with SimpleNursing. If you failed on test-taking, start with Archer.

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