The 5 best World Anvil alternatives (for how you actually run games)

People rarely leave World Anvil because it lacks something. They go looking for World Anvil alternatives because it holds so much: The wiki runs deep, the template library is enormous, and for some DMs all that depth sits between them and Thursday's session. Different DMs need different shapes of tool, and shape, more than features, is what this guide sorts by.

What follows are honest mini-reviews of seven tools, including our own, and every entry lists where it beats us as plainly as where we think we win. One of these is ours; the other six get the same treatment.

What are you actually replacing?

World Anvil is three tools wearing one cloak, so the first question is which one you actually used. If you spent your hours writing linked lore articles, you are replacing a worldbuilding wiki, and LegendKeeper or Kanka will feel like home. If you mostly used it to prep and run sessions, you are replacing a campaign planner, which is a different shape of tool entirely and the reason ours exists. (We compared the two directly in our Dungeon Weave vs World Anvil guide.) And if you mainly kept notes there, a good notes tool with some structure, Obsidian, Notion, or honestly a folder of documents, may be all you ever needed.

Most apps like World Anvil pick one of those three jobs and do it properly. Match the tool to the job you actually do and every recommendation below sorts itself.

1. Dungeon Weave (yes, we put ourselves first)

Our tool, listed first, and labelled so you can calibrate accordingly. Here is the same honest treatment everyone else gets.

We built Dungeon Weave for the DM who preps for the table rather than the archive. Campaigns are organised as story nodes, branching storylines that track which thread your party pulled and what consequences are now live, with encounters, homebrew monsters, traps, items, notes and party tracking attached to the threads they belong to. The principle underneath is that every action has a consequence, and the payoff is that game-night prep matches the story your table is actually in.

Honest limitations: There is no world building wiki, no map-making, and no virtual tabletop, and we are newer and smaller than everything else on this list. If lore archives are your joy, two entries below will serve you better and we will say which.

Price: The free plan is enough for you and your party to enjoy a month's worth of content, then £3.50 a month for the casual DM.

2. LegendKeeper

If your search history currently reads "legendkeeper vs world anvil", then here's the short version: LegendKeeper is the polished, focused take on the same wiki-and-maps job. Pages link cleanly, the map tool is genuinely lovely, timelines and whiteboards are built in, and collaboration is the standout, since guests join projects free and permissions are simple. It is the closest like-for-like World Anvil replacement on this list, with a far calmer interface.

Honest limitations: There is no meaningful free tier for creators. After the 14-day trial, the free plan lets you view, export and collaborate on other people's projects, and creating your own requires the subscription. It is also worldbuilding-first, so session-running structure is largely yours to invent.

Price, at the time of writing: $9 a month, or $7.50 a month billed annually, with unlimited pages, maps, storage and collaborators.

3. Kanka

Kanka is the community-built wiki with the most generous free plan in the category: Unlimited campaigns and entries, all core features, free forever, with characters, locations, quests, calendars, timelines, inventories and a proper permissions system for players. It even publishes a supported self-hosting path, which tells you a lot about the project's spirit. For wiki depth without spending anything, Kanka is the answer.

Honest limitations: The interface is functional rather than beautiful, and the module structure takes an evening to click. Like every wiki here, it records your world rather than planning your sessions, so the campaign-running layer stays in your head.

Price, at the time of writing: Free forever for the core, with paid tiers from $4.99 a month adding premium campaign features, bigger uploads and theming.

4. Obsidian (with TTRPG plugins)

Obsidian is a free notes app that becomes whatever you build: Local markdown files, linked like a wiki, extended by community plugins that add dice rollers, stat blocks, initiative trackers and session templates. Your notes live on your own machine in plain text files that no company can paywall, rename or sunset, which is a form of insurance nothing else on this list offers.

Obsidian came highly recommended to me from multiple sources so it's what I picked to use when I started a new campaign a few years ago. When I started to feel it's limitations is when I started work on Dungeon Weave.

Honest limitations: The blank canvas is the price. Expect a weekend of setup, plugin-hunting and template-building before it feels like a campaign tool, and expect to enjoy that weekend, because if you resent it, Obsidian will always feel like homework. There is no built-in publishing for players without paid add-ons or workarounds.

Price, at the time of writing: Free, including for commercial use, with optional Sync at $5 a month and Publish at $10 a month.

5. Campfire

Campfire comes from the fiction-writing world, and it shows in the best way: Modules for characters, timelines, maps, calendars and even constructed languages, with a manuscript editor beside them. For the DM who is half novelist, building a story bible that might one day become a book, it is the most natural fit on this list, and its module-by-module pricing means you only pay for the shapes you use.

Honest limitations: It is writer-first rather than table-first, so nothing about it helps you run a session, and buying many modules adds up to real money despite the tiny individual prices. Some DMs also find the module structure rigid compared to a freeform wiki.

Price, at the time of writing: A free account with limited use of all modules, paid module subscriptions from around $0.50 a month each, and lifetime purchase options.

What we didn't include

When you are just starting out the temptation to reach for the familiar and go with tools you already use is strong. Most workplaces use Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Notion or Confluence. All of these are solid tools for planning sessions and writing notes in, but none of them know D&D

My school friend ran all his campaigns from a USB stick filled with word files and excel spreadsheets for years before settling on a Wiki style tool, so he could publish content online. The DM for a campaign I joined recently relies on a trusty notebook and pen.

Honest limitations: Nothing links to anything, search gets worse every month you play, and around the fifty-page mark the scroll of doom sets in. Every tool on this list exists because someone hit that wall. But you should hit the wall first, because the wall teaches you which shape of tool you actually need.

The comparison at a glance

Which should you pick?

The lore archivist, building a world for the joy of the world, should look at LegendKeeper if the budget allows and Kanka if it should stay at zero. Both will hold decades of lore and show it to your players properly.

The DM drowning in session notes, whose prep is about what happens Thursday rather than what happened four centuries ago, is who we built Dungeon Weave for, and we would rather earn that recommendation than assert it: Our free plan gets you going without a time limit. It's large enough to kickstart a real campaign, before you form an opinion. Start weaving free, or see how the campaign manager works.

The tinkerer who wants to own every file and build a bespoke system should take Obsidian and enjoy the weekend. The DM who lives in Notion already should stay there and steal a community template. The novelist DM should look at Campfire. And the DM with no budget and no patience for new tools should open a Google Doc tonight with our blessing, because the tool was never the reason campaigns succeed.

FAQs

Is there a free World Anvil alternative?

Several, and good ones. Most people typing 'world anvil alternative free' into a search bar want Kanka, whose unlimited free tier covers serious wiki work indefinitely. Obsidian is free and local for notes-shaped campaigns, Google Docs is free and simple, and our own free plan kickstarts a genuine campaign for a full party. Free here means free to keep using, on every count.

What's the closest like-for-like replacement?

LegendKeeper. It covers the same core territory of wiki, maps, timelines and player sharing with a cleaner interface, and it is the tool most departing World Anvil users describe as what they expected worldbuilding software to feel like. Kanka is the like-for-like pick when the budget matters more than polish.

Can I export my World Anvil content?

Yes, with caveats worth knowing before you rely on it. World Anvil's own documentation offers a whole-world export as a zip archive containing JSON and basic HTML for guild members, and free members can export articles individually. The honest caveat: Those formats are built for backup rather than migration, so no tool on this list imports them directly, though Kanka's community maintains an import script that handles the common cases. For everything else, expect an evening of copy and paste, and check World Anvil's current export page before you start, since the details change.

Do I need any of these to DM?

No. Some of the best campaigns in history were run from a spiral notebook, and some of the worst were meticulously organised in expensive software. Tools reduce friction; they have never once made a session good on their own. Pick one when your notes start costing you prep time or table time, and pick the shape that matches how you actually run games, which is the whole reason this page sorts them that way.