Nowadays, there’s an app for everything. (Seriously, everything, from legal day trading to monitoring your bowel movements. Ew.) Thankfully, this industry extends to nursing and nurse education, which benefit enormously from the tools that have been designed to streamline education, information reference, daily scheduling, and overall time management.
And so, as a team obsessed with optimizing productivity, we spoke to our nursing education partners about the best apps for nurses and, in this article, we present their recommendations in the following categories:
- The best study apps for nursing students in 2025
- The best reference apps for nurses in 2025
- The best time management apps for nurses in 2025
We hope that you find one (or many) to be game-changers for your career!
Pssst. Short on time? Watch this quick video instead...
The Best Study Apps for Nursing Students in 2025
Whether you’re in school just trying to digest the daily firehose of content pointed at your cerebrum, or you’ve graduated and are preparing to take on the NCLEX, here are some outstanding apps for nursing students to check out.
Brainscape's Flashcard App for Nurses
What is it? A complete collection of flashcards for the NCLEX RN and NCLEX PN exams, curated and vetted by a team of experts.
What does it offer? Brainscape’s NCLEX-RN exam prep has over 3,000 flashcards covering the most important concepts you need to pass the exam … the first time around. The format of the flashcards focuses on content knowledge and memorization and is an indispensable complement to whatever main NCLEX course or book you may be taking.
Availability: iOS and Android; free download with in-app purchases; monthly, semester, annual, or lifetime subscription.
For an in-depth guide, check out How to use Brainscape in nursing school.
NCLEX RN Mastery Study App
What is it? A nursing app that provides NCLEX RN practice questions.
What does it offer? NCLEX RN Mastery has a bank of hundreds of sample questions and quizzes, which you can use to practice for the exam. When you get an answer wrong, you’ll get a detailed explanation of why so that you don’t make the same mistake again.
Nursing Essentials App for Nurses
What is it? A quick reference app for nursing students.
What does it offer? Nursing Essentials is super nifty for nurse students (or licensed nurses) who need a quick reference tool to help them look up or review a concept. You can also use it to take notes, mark sections for later reference, and perform clinical calculations.
Human Anatomy Atlas 2025
What is it? A comprehensive guide to human anatomy and physiology.
What does it offer? The Human Anatomy Atlas offers thousands of models to help understand and communicate how the human body looks and works; and includes textbook-level definitions. You can use this nursing app as a reference, instead of an anatomy textbook or to create virtual lab experiences.
Med Mnemonics
What is it? A mnemonic memorization app
What does it offer? Med Mnemonics packs 1,900+ acronyms, rhymes, and memory tricks to help you learn and remember critical information, from medical conditions, symptoms, and terminology to medications, indications, and side effects. It’s easy to use and even allows you to add your own personalized mnemonics.
The Best Reference Apps for Nurses in 2025
Now let’s turn our attention to licensed, working nurses and the suite of reference apps they might find helpful in getting quick access to crucial clinical information. But before we dive in, I’d like to point out that many of the aforementioned nursing apps are still useful once you’ve graduated and can even serve as valuable tools in the clinical working environment.
Brainscape, in particular, isn't just great for nursing students but is also one of the best apps for nurses, particularly new nurses, helping them to constantly review and refresh older content while drilling themselves on all the new information they’ll undoubtedly learn throughout the working day.
In fact, downloading all of Brainscape's NCLEX flashcards to your mobile device makes them searchable, allowing you to quickly search them for key words, terms,
Here are some other excellent reference apps for nurses...
Epocrates app
What is it? A clinical care assistant app for nurses
What does it offer? Affectionately referred to by healthcare experts as “my second brain”, Epocrates makes it onto our best nursing apps list because of its profound depth of content. Access up-to-date information and resources to make more informed clinical decisions, manage complex diagnoses and treatment plans and streamline searches for information on prescription drugs, drug interactions, and pill identification.
Diseases Dictionary
What is it? A medical app for quick-referencing the A to Z of diseases and their symptoms.
What does it offer? Completely offline and free medical dictionary app containing medical disorders and diseases with detailed definitions, symptoms, causes, and treatment information.
Lippincott Nursing Advisor
What is it? Nursing app for clinical-decision support
What does it offer? Lippincott Advisor is the single source for immediate, evidence-based, online nursing clinical-decision support. It delivers instant, 24/7 access to the latest evidence-based information that clinicians need at the point of care with over 17,000 monographs and patient teaching handouts.
Nursing Central app for nurses
What is it? A comprehensive reference resource app for nurses
What does it offer? Nursing Central offers information and reference for diseases, drugs, and tests for nurses, as well as a literature search function. This nursing app includes access to Davis’s Drug Guide, Taber’s Medical Dictionary, Diseases and Disorders, and MEDLINE Search and Journals, among other databases.
MediBabble
What is it? A medical translation app for nurses
What does it offer? If English isn’t your first language or that of your patients, you can easily improve your quality of communication and, therefore, your standard of care with this translation tool. It consists of medical phrases organized in a standardized history-taking format. (Brainscape also has a complete collection of Medical Spanish flashcards.)
Medscape nursing app
What is it? Comprehensive medical resource, including latest medical news
What does it offer? For immediate clinical answers to the full spectrum of inquiries, look no further than the Medscape nursing app. Within its virtual coffers is detailed information on 8,500+ prescription and OTC drugs, herbals, and supplements; 6,200+ reference articles for decision-making support; and clinical tools that include a drug interaction checker, calculators, and pill identifier.
PEPID medical app
What is it? A drug and clinical resource for healthcare professionals, including nurses.
What does it offer? With versions for different professions, including nurses (and EMTs, physicians, students, and more), PEPID medical app provides detailed information for all elements of patient care. Students gain a credible and complete resource guide for coursework, lab exercises, and clinical practice.
Pill Identifier app by Drugs.com
What is it? A nursing app for identifying pill medications by color, shape, and imprint
What does it offer? The Pill Identifier app is a searchable database of more than 24,000 Rx/OTC medications found in the U.S. The app allows nurses to search by imprint, drug name, shape, and color, which can provide crucial, potentially life-saving information in the clinical setting.
Taber’s Medical Dictionary
What is it? Well, it’s a comprehensive medical dictionary!
What does it offer? Taber’s Medical Dictionary contains definitions for more than 75,000 medical terms with full-color illustrations, videos, integrated audio pronunciations, and in-depth appendices, making it one of the most comprehensive nursing apps on the market.
uCentral from Unbound Medicine
What is it? A nursing app for clinical-decision support
What does it offer? uCentral combines trusted resources, clinical tools, and local content to provide critical answers at the point of need. It’s an easy and quick reference app for nurses, and while it’s recommended for studying in nursing school, many use it long after graduation.
The Best Time Management Apps for Nurses
If there’s one thing most nurses could benefit from, it’s more hours in the day. But since the Earth would literally have to slow down its rotational speed in order to achieve that—bringing about apocalyptic conditions on the planet—we’ll go with the second best option: these time management apps!
Evernote
What is it? An intuitive platform for managing the workday.
What does it offer? Evernote is one of the best nursing apps for time management because it's an intuitive platform for nurses to manage their workday. Remember everything, find things fast, and tackle any project with your notes, tasks, and schedule all in one place.
NurseGrid
What is it? A scheduling and communication app for nurses
What does it offer? If you want your calendar, colleagues, your career at your fingertips, NurseGrid is the best nursing app for you. Developed by nurses to manage the often complicated scheduling process, this app lets you schedule across all worksites, view who’s on your shift, message other nurses, and much more.
MYDUTY Nurse Calendar
What is it? An all-in-one calendar app for nurses.
What does it offer? MYDUTY helps nurses and hospital staff managers to easily create, manage, and even to share their calendars. You can also track all the duty changes in one place without going back and forth through a complicated roster.
A Final Note on the Best Nursing Apps in 2025
All of these nursing apps are, in one way or another, designed to make your studies, job, career, and life easier. But first, you’ve got to figure out which one works the best for you so we recommend that you charge up your phone and start playing.
However, irrespective of which app or apps you ultimately choose, we (naturally) heartily recommend that you use Brainscape’s NCLEX flashcards to keep your learning at the very razor’s edge of efficiency. And that’s because Brainscape is optimized to leverage your very own cognitive wiring to help you learn as fast and as efficiently as humanly possible.
All the best with your nursing education and career!
**NCLEX-RN® is a registered trademark of the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN), which neither sponsors nor endorses this product.