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Notion vs Obsidian vs World Anvil vs Kanka for running D&D campaigns

The AeloDM team · August 30, 2026

Every Dungeon Master eventually hits the same wall. Your campaign has outgrown a single Google Doc, you have NPCs whose motives contradict each other three sessions apart, and your players keep asking "wait, what was that tavern called?" So you go shopping for a real tool. The four names that come up most are Notion, Obsidian, World Anvil, and Kanka.

They are all good at something, and this guide gives each its honest due. But keep two questions in mind as you read, because they are the two that decide whether a tool actually carries your campaign: can it show the right lore to your players without exposing the twist, and does any part of it survive contact with game night?

Notion

Notion is the mainstream default: a general-purpose docs and database workspace that DMs adapt with templates.

Pricing (2026): Free tier at 0 USD; Plus at 10 USD per seat per month; Business at 20 USD per seat per month. The free tier caps uploads at 5 MB and guests at 10. Campaign templates commonly run 8.50 to 17 USD.

What it does well: Low friction, an attractive interface, and relational databases that link NPCs to locations to factions cleanly. The template market means you never start from a blank page, and offline mode finally shipped in 2025.

Where it falls short: It is an office tool, and the seams show the moment you use it as a DM. There is no way to hide a secret inside a shared page, so you maintain separate player-safe copies by hand, and real permissions cost 20 USD per seat. Large workspaces get sluggish. And nothing in Notion has ever heard of a d20: no maps, no tokens, no initiative, no table.

Obsidian

Obsidian is a free, local-first Markdown app that DMs assemble into a campaign toolkit with community plugins.

Pricing (2026): Core app free; optional Sync at 4 USD per month and Publish at 8 USD per month.

What it does well: Free, no lock-in, plain-text files you own, and the most powerful TTRPG plugin ecosystem anywhere: statblocks, initiative trackers, dice, maps, timelines. For the DM who enjoys building the machine, nothing is more flexible.

Where it falls short: Building the machine IS the cost. Configuring a vault swallows evenings, every plugin is a maintenance burden, and abandoned vaults are a community meme for a reason. There is no native player view, so secrets mean maintaining two vaults by hand. And for all its plugins, your players never see any of it; the actual session still runs somewhere else.

World Anvil

World Anvil is the oldest and largest dedicated worldbuilding wiki, dual-marketed to DMs and novelists.

Pricing (2026): Free tier at 0 USD; Master at 6.50 USD per month; Grandmaster at 12 USD per month. The free tier has no private settings at all: every word you write is public until you pay.

What it does well: The deepest pure worldbuilding feature set in the category and by far the largest community. Its secrets and subscriber-group system is genuinely granular once paid for, and for publishing a setting to the public it has no equal.

Where it falls short: The interface is the recurring wound in every review: cluttered, BBCode in the writing path, a guessing game of save buttons, an aggregate rating around 3.1 out of 5. The one feature a DM most needs, privacy, cannot be tried before paying. And its depth ends at the table edge: no scenes, no tokens, no combat. Game night still means alt-tabbing to a VTT that has never read your wiki.

Kanka

Kanka is a community-driven, system-agnostic campaign manager built on linked entities.

Pricing (2026): Free tier with unlimited entities and campaigns; paid tiers from 4.99 USD per month.

What it does well: The most generous free tier of the four, real RPG structure (characters, quests, journals, calendars), a workable visibility model with a view-as-member preview, and self-hostability.

Where it falls short: You organize your world Kanka's way, not yours; the structure is rigid and the interface clunky enough that the developers renamed the entire vocabulary in 2026. Maps are images with pins, not places your party can stand. It is the best free wiki of the four, and still only a wiki.

The two gaps all four share

Read the four "falls short" sections back to back and the pattern is impossible to miss.

Gap one: secrets. Notion and Obsidian have no player-facing model at all, so you maintain duplicate content by hand. World Anvil has a robust model you cannot try without paying. Kanka's works but lives inside the clunkiest interface here. For a DM, deciding what players see is not a side feature; it is the daily job, and one mis-click exposes a twist you spent months building.

Gap two: the table. All four stop dead at game night. They are prep tools. The session, the part the whole hobby exists for, happens in a different product that knows nothing about your world. You are the copy-paste bridge between your own wiki and your own table, every single week.

AeloDM closes both

AeloDM is built so those two gaps do not exist, because the wiki and the table are the same product on the same screen.

The secrets model is the foundation, not a feature: your DM text IS the secret, and players see only what you have released, in the same interface you prep in, enforced on the server. Even search respects the veil; players cannot find what you have not released. One view-as-player lens answers "what can they see right now" at any moment.

And when the session starts, you do not leave. Your NPC pages drag onto the scene as tokens with vitals and conditions. Items from your lore land in players' hands in chat. The map you painted in the built-in map builder IS the scene your party stands on, with fog, token vision, initiative, and music. Release a secret mid-encounter and your players read it at the table without switching apps. No campaign wiki or VTT has wired those pieces together like this before; each category only ever built its half.

There is no free tier to decode. The live demo is a real 225-entry campaign world with dated quests, playable characters, and a live scene, no signup, yours for 24 hours. The whole product, wiki and table together, costs less per month than World Anvil's wiki by itself.

If you live in spreadsheets, Notion will feel like home. If you love tinkering, Obsidian is free forever. If you want maximum worldbuilding depth for publishing, World Anvil has it. If the budget is zero, Kanka is generous. But if what you want is to prep your world and then run your game in the same place, with your secrets safe the whole way, that is the exact thing AeloDM was built to be.

Explore the live demo and see the whole loop on one screen.