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The Best D&D Campaign Managers in 2026, Compared

The AeloDM team · August 30, 2026

Every long-running campaign eventually outgrows the Google Doc. So you go shopping, and you find the same six names: TiddlyWiki, Notion, Obsidian, World Anvil, Kanka, LegendKeeper. All of them are good at something real, and this guide gives each its due.

But read to the end of any of those six pitches and notice what is missing. Not one of them runs your game. They organize your world, and then on game night you alt-tab to a VTT, a dice bot, and a rulebook, and you spend the session copy-pasting between the tool that knows your world and the tool your players are looking at.

That is the actual problem, and it is the standard this guide compares against: not which wiki is prettiest, but how much of the job of being a DM the tool actually does.

TiddlyWiki

What it does well. Free, open source, a single portable HTML file you own outright, fully offline, endlessly hackable. For a technical DM who wants total ownership at zero cost, that is a real offer.

Why it is not enough. It is a filing cabinet with a steep learning curve. There is no player view of any kind, so keeping secrets means maintaining a second copy of your world by hand. There are no maps, no NPCs as structured things, no table, no dice. Everything a DM does with the notes after writing them is your problem.

Notion

What it does well. The lowest-friction writing experience of the bunch, with relational databases that link NPCs to factions to quests cleanly, and a huge market of cheap campaign templates.

Why it is not enough. It is an office tool wearing a wizard hat. There is no purpose-built way to hide a secret inside a shared page, so DMs maintain separate player-safe copies by hand, and genuinely granular permissions are gated behind a 20 USD per seat business plan. It has no maps, no tokens, no dice, no table. Notion organizes the campaign; it cannot run one minute of it.

Obsidian

What it does well. Free, local-first, plain-text files you own, and the most powerful plugin ecosystem in the category. If you enjoy building your own toolkit, nothing is more flexible.

Why it is not enough. The system becomes the prep. Every capability is a plugin you install, configure, and maintain, and there is a well-documented pattern of vaults lovingly built for three sessions and then abandoned. There is no native player view at all, so secrets mean a second vault. And even fully plugined-out, it is a solo prep tool: your players never touch it, and the session still happens somewhere else.

World Anvil

What it does well. The deepest pure worldbuilding feature set in the category and the largest community. Its secrets and subscriber system is real and granular, and for publishing a setting to a public audience it has no equal.

Why it is not enough. Depth without usability. The interface is the recurring complaint in every review: cluttered, BBCode in the writing path, a guessing game of save buttons. Its privacy model, the one feature a DM most needs, cannot even be tried without paying. And after all that depth, it still stops at the table: no scenes, no tokens, no combat. You alt-tab to Foundry or Roll20 and your world stays behind in the other tab.

Kanka

What it does well. Solid RPG structure (characters, quests, calendars, journals), hosted sharing, a real visibility model with a view-as-member preview, and self-hostability for those who want it.

Why it is not enough. The structure is rigid: you organize your world Kanka's way, not yours. The interface is the polite word reviewers use. Maps are static images with pins, not places your party can stand. Like everything above, game night happens in a different app.

LegendKeeper

What it does well. The cleanest interface in the pure-wiki category, nice nested maps, and a private-by-default permissions model with unlimited guest viewers.

Why it is not enough. It is a beautiful wiki, and only a wiki. You cannot create anything on its free plan, and if your subscription lapses you lose edit access to your own world. There is no game table, no tokens, no initiative, no items, no dice, and by its own admission no mobile app. It is a lovely place to write about your world and one more tab to close when the session starts. A small single-developer operation also means the roadmap moves at one person's pace.

The pattern

Six tools, one shape. Each one is a place to write about your world, ranging from bare (TiddlyWiki) to beautiful (LegendKeeper) to bottomless (World Anvil). Then the session starts, and every single one of them hands you off to a different product. Your wiki does not know your table exists. Your table has never read your wiki. You are the integration layer, every week, forever.

AeloDM: the wiki IS the table

AeloDM was built by a 20-year DM to delete that handoff, and it is the one tool in this comparison where everything above is a single product in a single default view:

• The wiki with typed NPCs, factions, quests on a living calendar, items, lore, and homebrew calendars.
• The secrets model as the core, not an add-on: your DM text IS the secret, players see only what you have released, in the same interface, enforced on the server. Even search respects it.
• The map builder: paint terrain, rivers, roads, stamps, and labels inside the app, then hand the finished map to a live scene in one click.
• The game table: scenes, fog of war, token vision, initiative, dice, and music, on the same screen as your notes.
• And everything interacts. Drag an NPC page onto the scene and it IS a token with vitals and conditions. Drag an item from your lore onto a token and it lands in that player's hands in chat. Release a secret mid-combat and your players see it without leaving the table. No wiki, VTT, or worldbuilding environment has connected those pieces like this before, because each of them only ever built half the job.

There is no free tier to decode and no feature matrix to study. The live demo drops you into a full 225-entry campaign world with quests, playable characters, and a live scene, no signup, for 24 hours. The whole product, wiki and table together, costs less than World Anvil's wiki alone.

If you want the deepest publishing platform, buy World Anvil. If you want to tinker forever, Obsidian is free. If you want the prettiest pure wiki, LegendKeeper earns its praise. But if you want to prep your world and then actually run your game in the same place, that category has exactly one tool in it.

Explore the live demo and walk around a fully populated world.