When you switch to a Skritter alternative that is free on iOS, the useful question is not what the app lacks, it is what you keep. Most of what builds skill survives the switch. One feature does not, and it is easy to replace by hand. Here is the exact trade.
The short answer
A free iOS alternative keeps writing-from-memory, stroke-order guidance, and spaced repetition. It usually drops automated per-stroke grading and the biggest deck libraries. You cover the grading gap by self-checking each character against a stroke-order guide, which takes about five seconds. Ringotan and Kanji Write Practice are the writing-first free options worth installing first.
Feature by feature: what you keep and what you drop
| Feature | Keep on free? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Write the character from memory | Yes | The core skill, and the whole point |
| Stroke-order guidance | Yes | An on-demand guide to self-check against |
| Spaced repetition | Often | Ringotan and others schedule reviews for you |
| Automated per-stroke grading | No | The paid feature you usually trade away |
| Huge prebuilt deck library | Partly | Smaller built-in sets, add your own |
The pattern is clear. The skill-building reps are free. The convenience layer, instant grading and a giant library, is what Skritter charges for. That is a fair deal on their side, and a fair trade on yours if you do not mind checking your own work.
The one feature you lose, and how to cover it
The feature people miss is stroke-by-stroke grading: Skritter telling you instantly that stroke three went the wrong way. It is genuinely useful, and no free app fully matches it. But you can get most of the benefit by self-checking, because the errors that matter are consistent and easy to spot once you know the rules.
The high-value fixes are almost always wrong stroke order, wrong direction, and connecting strokes that should stay separate. If you can catch those three, you have covered most of what grading would flag. We go deeper on the common faults in how to fix broken kanji strokes.
The three errors self-checking catches
Concrete examples make this easy. Most handwriting mistakes fall into three buckets, and you can catch all three by eye:
- Wrong order. In 田, the outer box opens first and is closed along the bottom last, with the cross inside built in between. Write the inside first and the character can look right while being built wrong, which quietly hurts speed and muscle memory.
- Wrong direction. Horizontal strokes go left to right and verticals go top to bottom. A stroke drawn backward can look identical on the page yet feel wrong every time, and it slows your hand down.
- Strokes joined that should stay separate. In characters like 王, the count and spacing of the horizontals is the whole identity of the shape, so a merged or missing line changes the character.
Once you know these three failure modes, a quick glance at a stroke-order animation tells you which one you hit, if any. That is the bulk of what automated grading would flag, available for free.
How to self-check a character in five seconds
- Write the character from memory in your free app of choice.
- Pull up the stroke-order animation, in a stroke-order app, on Jisho, or against the stroke order rules reference.
- Compare three things only: did each stroke start in the right place, go the right direction, and finish in the right order. Fix the one that was off, then write it once more correctly.
Do that for ten characters a day and you are training the same skill Skritter grades, for free. If you want a single writing-first habit that keeps all of the above in one place, Kanji Write Practice is built for exactly that, and our free Skritter alternative guide compares the free options honestly.
When you should still pay for grading
Self-checking has one weakness: it relies on you noticing. If you are the kind of learner who rushes, skips the check, and bakes in errors, automated grading earns its keep by refusing to let a wrong stroke pass. If that sounds like you, a paid tool with grading may genuinely save time. For everyone else, the five-second check is enough, and the habit of checking is itself good practice. The point of going free is not to do less, it is to spend on a habit you control rather than a subscription you might forget. On iPhone you can do every step with a finger, and on iPad an Apple Pencil makes the strokes feel closer to paper, neither of which costs anything beyond the device you already own.
