Kanka alternative: the wiki writes itself from the session you recorded

Kanka is a structured worldbuilding database with around twenty typed entry kinds: characters, locations, families, organisations, items, quests, journals, calendars, events, abilities, timelines, religions, and tags. The typing is the point. A character is not a page that happens to describe a person, it is a character record with fields, and everything you attach to it inherits that structure.

It is generous with the free tier in a way that is genuinely rare. A free Kobold account gets unlimited entries and unlimited campaigns, and premium is bought per campaign rather than per account, so the campaign you are actively running can be upgraded while the four half-finished ones you abandoned stay free. The homepage claims over 400,000 game masters and worldbuilders on the platform, which shows in how much community material exists for it.

The maps and the calendars are the features people stay for. You upload a map, add layers, drop pins, and control visibility per pin, so the players see the three towns they have visited and not the lich's tower. The calendar system handles custom years, months, weeks, seasons and moons, with more than one calendar per campaign, and timelines split into eras so a country's history and a character's arc can sit on different scales.

Maps. RollSummary has none. If your table plays on a hand-drawn continent and half your prep is placing pins on it, Kanka wins that outright and nothing on our roadmap changes it this year.

In-world time. Kanka's custom calendars and era timelines let you say the coronation happened in the third month of the seventh year of the current dynasty and have the tool understand it. RollSummary tracks the real dates your sessions happened and orders them, which is a much smaller idea.

Permission granularity. Kanka gives a campaign roles, per-entry and per-pin visibility, and a preview mode that shows you the campaign exactly as a specific member sees it. That preview is a genuinely good idea and we do not have an equivalent: our visibility model is per note (private, shared with the party, or public) with player and co-GM roles, which covers the common case and not much more.

Price, at the bottom of the ladder. Kanka's cheapest paid tier is $4.99 a month, and that buys a campaign more storage and members. Our cheapest paid plan is $10 a month, because every hour of audio we process costs real money on the way through. We are not the budget option and pretending otherwise would be insulting.

Kanka's journals are free-form text: its own documentation describes them as the place for session prep, session recap, and props, written by you. That is the entire session-notes story. There is no audio upload, no transcription, and nothing that reads a session and files what happened. We checked the features page and the docs, and the gap is real, not an oversight in our reading.

RollSummary's whole product is that gap. You upload the recording, you get a transcript, and then a structured recap: a TL;DR, the key events in order, character beats, and what the party is about to chase. A four hour session comes back in about ten minutes. The notes come with it: an NPC note for every named person, a location note for every place, a quest note for every thread, each one wiki-linked to the others, with backlinks and a local graph so the innkeeper's page lists every session he has appeared in without you tagging anything.

Nothing lands as canon behind your back. Every run produces a set of proposed changes you review, edit, or reject before they touch the wiki. That review step is the product, not a disclaimer bolted onto it.

Once the wiki exists you can talk to it. Campaign chat reads every note, plus any sourcebook or campaign PDF you have uploaded, and answers with links to the notes it used, so you can check the sources before you say something out loud at the table.

Both tools take this seriously, which is worth saying out loud in a hobby full of walled gardens. Kanka exports a campaign as JSON, which includes entry images and can be imported back into Kanka, or as markdown, which is readable but cannot be re-imported. Exports run once a day and the resulting ZIP is downloadable for 120 minutes before it is deleted.

RollSummary exports the campaign as an Obsidian vault: one markdown file per note, sorted into Sessions, Quests, NPCs, Locations, PCs and Notes, with YAML frontmatter carrying aliases and tags, and the wiki-links preserved so the vault opens with its graph intact. It is available on every plan and to every role, including the free one and including players, because a note you cannot take with you is not really yours.

Neither tool imports the other's files today. If you are running both, the realistic pattern is Kanka for the map and the calendar, RollSummary for what happened at the table, and a markdown export from whichever one you eventually consolidate into.