Comparison
Obsidian vs LegendKeeper vs World Anvil
Three good tools that want completely different things from you. Here is what each one actually costs, what it does better than the others, and the trade-off nobody mentions on the pricing page.
You are not choosing a tool. You are choosing what happens in session 14.
Every campaign-management tool demos beautifully. You make a world, you make a city, you make an NPC, the graph lights up — and then you close the tab and run a session, and the tool has to survive contact with an actual table: a player asking who the blacksmith's sister was, a plot thread you dropped in session 6, a village you improvised and never wrote down.
That is where tools diverge. One of these three is free forever and keeps your notes as files on your disk. One is a beautiful subscription wiki that your players can browse. One charges monthly and makes it genuinely fast to build a world map. Picking wrong is not fatal — but migrating a 40-session campaign is a weekend you will not enjoy.
So: the honest version, from someone who has run campaigns in all three.
The comparison, without the marketing
1Obsidian
Pick it if you want to own your notes, pay nothing, and you are willing to spend an evening on structure.
Plain Markdown files in a folder on your disk. Infinitely extensible, works offline, no account. The catch: it does nothing until you tell it what you want.
2World Anvil
Pick it if worldbuilding is the hobby and your players will read the wiki between sessions.
Purpose-built worldbuilding templates, player-facing pages, timelines, maps. The catch: a subscription, a busy interface, and your world lives on their servers.
3LegendKeeper
Pick it if maps are central to your campaign and you would rather pay than configure.
The nicest map-pinning workflow of the three and a clean, fast editor. The catch: no free tier, and a smaller ecosystem than the other two.
| Obsidian | World Anvil | LegendKeeper | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost to run a campaign | Free Personal use. Optional add-ons: Sync from ≈$4/mo, Publish from ≈$8/mo. |
Free tier, paid tiers ≈$5–13/mo Cheaper billed yearly; higher tiers unlock features, not just capacity. |
≈$9/mo, no free tier Free trial; cheaper billed yearly. |
| Where your notes live | Your disk, as .md text files | Their servers (export available) | Their servers (export available) |
| Works with no internet | Yes, always | No | Partial (offline-tolerant, syncs back) |
| Time to a usable setup | An evening — or 2 minutes with a prebuilt vault | Minutes — templates are ready-made | Minutes |
| Learning curve | Gentle to write, steep to configure | Steep — many fields, many concepts | Gentlest of the three |
| Links & backlinks between notes | Excellent — plus a live graph | Good | Good |
| Maps with clickable pins | Plugin required (Leaflet) | Built in | Built in, best in class |
| Player-facing pages | Needs Publish (≈$8/mo) or a static export | Core feature, with per-article secrecy | Yes, shareable worlds |
| Auto-updating dashboards | Yes — Dataview queries your own notes | Fixed views, not query-based | Fixed views |
| Dice, initiative, stat blocks | Plugins — Dice Roller, Initiative Tracker, 5e statblocks | Built-in dice & statblocks | Light |
| If the company disappears | Nothing happens — files still open in any editor | You need that export to have been recent | Same |
| Best for | DMs who want one system for prep, running and campaign memory | Worldbuilders with an audience | Map-led campaigns, low patience for setup |
Sources: obsidian.md/pricing · worldanvil.com · legendkeeper.com. Prices vary by billing period and region — confirm before you commit.
What World Anvil is genuinely better at
Do not let the "own your data" argument talk you out of the right tool. World Anvil wins when the world is the point: you enjoy writing lore for its own sake, you want timelines and family trees and a searchable encyclopedia, and you want your players reading it between sessions with the secrets hidden from them. It has a prompt-and-template system that will drag a world out of you on the days you are uninspired, and its player-facing wiki takes zero engineering. Obsidian can approximate all of that. It will take you a weekend and three plugins.
Where LegendKeeper wins
Maps. If your campaign is a hexcrawl, a city with districts, or a dungeon your party will revisit for nine sessions, LegendKeeper's map-pin-to-article workflow is the fastest and the least fiddly of the three. The editor is quiet and quick — closer to Notion than to a wiki — and there is essentially no configuration step. You pay monthly for that, and you accept the smaller community: fewer templates to steal, fewer YouTube tutorials, no plugin ecosystem.
Why most DMs land on Obsidian anyway
Three reasons, in the order they matter:
- It is free, permanently. Not free-tier free — free. A campaign that runs three years costs the same as one that runs three sessions.
- Your notes are files. A folder of Markdown on your own disk. Back it up with Dropbox, a git repo, a USB stick. In ten years it will still open, because a .md file is just text.
- It becomes what you need. Dataview turns your notes into a self-updating DM screen, Templater stops you retyping the same fields, Initiative Tracker runs combat. You are not waiting on a roadmap.
And the honest cost: Obsidian ships as an empty room. No folder structure, no templates, no dashboard — that is yours to build. That is exactly the hour that makes people bounce off it and go back to Google Docs.
You can also cheat. Nothing stops you keeping prep in Obsidian and publishing a player wiki on World Anvil's free tier. Plenty of DMs do. Your private notes stay fast and yours, and your players still get a pretty encyclopedia.
Which one fits you?
Six questions, no email required, answer in twenty seconds.
Obsidian
You want retrieval and ownership more than presentation — which is the case for most DMs once a campaign passes session ten. Free, offline, your files, and a dashboard that answers "who was that blacksmith" in one keystroke.
Start with the step-by-step setup guide, or skip the evening of folder-wrangling and grab the free DM Quick-Start Vault below.
World Anvil
You are a worldbuilder with an audience. The templates, timelines and player-facing wiki are worth the subscription, and the prompts will pull more world out of you than a blank page ever will.
One suggestion: keep your session prep — scenes, secrets, what the villain does next — in something private and fast. Plenty of World Anvil users run prep in Obsidian; here is that half of the workflow.
LegendKeeper
Maps matter to you and configuration does not appeal. LegendKeeper gives you the best pin-to-article workflow of the three with no setup tax, and the monthly fee buys back exactly the evening you did not want to spend.
If the price is the sticking point, the free alternatives are here — with an honest account of what you give up.
Migration reality check
Whatever you choose, run a two-session test before you move a live campaign: create five NPCs, two locations, one quest and one session note, then try to answer a question from the table mid-session. Speed of retrieval under pressure is the only benchmark that matters, and it is not on any feature list.
Free resource
Free: the DM Quick-Start Vault
A miniature version of QuestForge you can open tonight: a working DM Screen dashboard, three templates (NPC, quest, session note) and both plugins already installed and configured. Unzip it into Obsidian and it runs.
- DM Screen dashboard (auto-updating Dataview tables)
- 3 templates: NPC, quest, session note
- Dataview + Templater pre-installed and configured
Download the free vault Name your price — $0 is fine. Delivered by email from Gumroad.
Done-for-you
Or skip the setup entirely
Everything on this page is free to build yourself, and it works. It also takes an evening or three. QuestForge is that build, finished: unzip, click “Trust author”, start writing.
- DM Screen dashboardDataview tables that update themselves: open quests, NPCs, recent sessions, locations, factions.
- 7 templatesCampaign hub, NPC, location, faction, quest, session prep, session recap.
- 1 fully linked example campaign“The Missing Caravan” — learn the system by reading it, then delete it and start your own.
- 2 random tablesd20 “what’s in the room” and d8 “NPC first impression”, for when the players go sideways.
- Plugins pre-installed and configuredDataview + Templater are already in the vault. Unzip, click “Trust author”, done.
- Start Here onboardingA README and a walkthrough note that get you running in about two minutes.
- Lifetime updates + email supportOne-time payment. Every future version is yours.
Questions DMs actually ask
Can I use two of these at once?
Yes, and it is a common setup: private prep in Obsidian, public wiki in World Anvil. The cost is discipline — decide which one is the source of truth for each kind of note, or you will write the same NPC twice and trust neither copy.
Is Obsidian really free for a DM?
Yes, for personal use — and running your home game is personal use. Obsidian sells optional Sync and Publish subscriptions, and a commercial licence for people using it at work. Your campaign vault needs none of them.
What happens to my World Anvil or LegendKeeper world if I stop paying?
Both let you export, and both keep your world accessible in some reduced form on a free or lapsed account — but the details change, so export before you cancel, not after. With Obsidian the question does not arise: the files were always on your disk.
Which is fastest in the middle of a session?
Whichever one you can search without thinking. In practice that means: Obsidian if you have built a dashboard and stuck to a naming convention, LegendKeeper if your answer is usually on a map, World Anvil if you have been diligent with its article types. An unstructured vault is slower than a good wiki — structure is the variable, not the logo.