The best D&D note-taking apps in 2026

Obsidian keeps plain markdown files in a folder on your own disk. That is the entire pitch and it is a very strong one: no vendor can take your campaign away, it works with no connection, and backlinks and the graph view make a sprawling wiki navigable without any setup beyond typing two square brackets. The community plugin library is enormous, and there is a free open-source D&D plugin at archivist.gg that adds stat blocks, clickable dice, and an SRD compendium on top.

It is free for personal use with no account. The paid extras are Sync at $4 per user a month billed yearly, or $5 monthly, Publish at $8 per site a month billed yearly, or $10 monthly, and a commercial licence at $50 per user a year. In practice, if you want your vault on your phone as well as your laptop, budget for Sync.

The catch is that it produces nothing. Every NPC, every recap, every session log exists because you typed it. If your problem is that the notes never get written, Obsidian is a beautiful place for the notes you are not writing. There is also real setup friction: folder structure, templates, and half a dozen plugins before it feels like a campaign wiki rather than a text editor.

Notion's strength for a campaign is relational databases. An NPC table with a status property, a faction relation, and a rollup of the sessions they appeared in is genuinely useful, and sharing a filtered view with your players is a two-click job. It is also the tool most people already have open for something else.

Free is $0 with unlimited blocks for solo use, a 5 MB file upload cap, seven days of page history, and up to 10 guests. Plus is $10 per member a month, Business is $20, and Enterprise is quoted. Export gives you PDF, HTML, markdown for non-database pages, and CSV for full-page databases, with the include-subpages option on PDF reserved for Business and Enterprise.

For a tabletop campaign the gaps are obvious once you look for them: no dice, no stat blocks, nothing that knows what a session is, no graph view (backlinks only), and a big linked-database wiki that gets sluggish as it grows. The generative features are gated to the $20 Business tier, and even then they are aimed at meeting notes rather than at your Sunday game.

Kanka gives a free account unlimited entries and unlimited campaigns, which almost nothing else on this list does, and sells premium per campaign rather than per account so your dead campaigns cost nothing. Entries are typed: characters, locations, families, organisations, items, quests, journals, calendars, timelines, religions, and about a dozen more, each with fields rather than a blank page.

It is strongest on maps and in-world time. Maps take layers and pins with per-pin visibility, and the calendar system handles invented years, months, seasons and moons with timelines split into eras. Paid tiers are $4.99, $9.99, and $24.99 a month, all per campaign.

Session notes are journals: free-form text you write, described in Kanka's own docs as the place for session prep, session recaps, and props. There is no audio, no transcription, and nothing that reads a session. Export is JSON, which re-imports, or markdown, which does not, once a day, with the zip available for 120 minutes.

World Anvil is the biggest of these by a distance, claiming over 3.5 million worldbuilders, and it is aimed at people whose worldbuilding is a hobby in its own right. More than 25 article templates, interactive maps with layers and journey lines, timelines, family trees, character sheets and stat blocks for a claimed 100 plus systems, Foundry VTT integration, a manuscript editor for the novel, themes and CSS, and two annual writing challenges with prizes.

The free Freeman tier gets 2 worlds and 100 MB of storage, shows ads, and does not include private articles or secrets. Master is $7 a month or $54 a year, Grandmaster is $12 a month or $99 a year with a $650 lifetime option, and Sage is $34 a month or $300 a year with a $1,350 lifetime option, all excluding VAT.

Two things to know before committing. Content is written in BBCode rather than markdown, which is why community scripts exist purely to convert World Anvil exports into Obsidian vaults. And the structured export, a zip of JSON plus basic HTML, is documented as a paid Guild feature, so a free account's export is the browser's own save or print. Nothing on the platform records or transcribes a session: the campaign manager is for taking notes live, and the audio features are for playing ambience at the table.

LegendKeeper is the one people describe by how it feels. Infinite page nesting, auto-linking, templates, slash commands, full-text search, real-time collaboration with visible cursors, offline editing that syncs later, collaborative whiteboards for flowcharts and pointcrawls, and an atlas that takes 14,000 pixel maps with styled, tag-filterable pins. Fog of war is on the planned list rather than shipped.

Pricing is two lines. Basic is free forever and lets you view, export, and collaborate on other people's projects. Pro is $9 a month or $90 a year and removes every limit, and unlimited guests collaborate free because only the project owner subscribes. The trial is 14 days with no card.

Its FAQ answers the question about generative features with a flat no, and means it. Export is markdown (partial, missing maps, boards and properties), JSON, or a compressed .LK file, and it works on every tier including free, with a public commitment that you can always leave. If you want a tool that will never write a word on your behalf, this is the best-built one on the list.

D&D Beyond added a journal to its virtual tabletop: the DM presses J for a Quick Jot during play to capture a reveal, a bargain, an NPC secret, or a quotable line, and the entries organise by session date in a campaign journal view. It is deliberately small and it is right where you already are if your table plays on their maps.

The subscription tiers are Free, Hero at $2.99 a month or $2.17 billed annually, and Master at $5.99 a month or $4.58 billed annually. As of September 2026 their own announcement says the virtual tabletop can be used to its full potential with no subscription required, with Master still needed for homebrew map uploads and custom tokens. The journal announcement does not say whether the journal itself is gated, and we could not confirm it either way.

Treat it as a session log rather than a knowledge base. There is no NPC or location database, no linking or backlinks, no tags, and nothing that records or summarises audio. The player-facing collaborative version is announced as a future update, so today it is DM-only.

Two unrelated products share this name, and confusing them wastes an evening. archivist.gg is a free, open-source D&D plugin for Obsidian and Logseq: stat blocks, clickable dice, an SRD compendium, notes staying on your machine. myarchivist.ai is a paid service that ingests your session and produces recaps and a campaign wiki, and it is the closest thing on this list to a direct competitor of ours.

It is a good product and it is fair to say so. Sessions come in through a Discord bot, an audio upload, a play-by-post or thread import, a raw transcript, or a direct Foundry VTT sync, and come back in around ten minutes as recaps and tracked entities. The wiki links NPCs, locations, factions, quests, and a timeline, with a chat over the top. The Discord bot and the Foundry sync are two ingest paths we do not have.

Pricing is by session count rather than by hour: Casual $10 a month for 1 campaign and 4 sessions, Seasoned $20 for 3 and 10, Pro $35 for 5 and 20, Legend $60 for 10 and 40, with extra sessions at $2 and an extra campaign pass at $6. The trial is 30 days with no card, capped at 1 campaign and 2 sessions. Their pricing page lists no file export format, and the official Obsidian connector runs the other way, importing a vault into Archivist rather than out of it, so check that before you commit a long campaign to it.

This is ours, so here is the specific version rather than the pitch. You upload the audio or video from the night you played. You get a timestamped transcript you can click into line by line, and a structured recap with a TL;DR, the key events in order, character beats, and the threads the party is about to pull. A four hour session takes about ten minutes.

Then it files itself: an NPC note per named person, a location note per place, a quest note per thread, all wiki-linked with backlinks and a local graph, so a tavern keeper's page lists every session he turned up in with nobody tagging anything. Nothing becomes canon until you approve it, note by note, and you can edit or reject any proposed change. Recaps and notes come back in the language your table actually speaks.

The free tier is one session, up to 90 minutes, with its recap and wiki, no card. Paid plans are $10 a month for 6 session hours, $25 for 20, and $49 for 40, with unlimited campaigns, notes, and players on every one of them. Export is an Obsidian vault zip with YAML frontmatter and wiki-links, available on every plan and to every role including players.

What we do not have: maps, stat blocks, invented calendars, whiteboards, manuscripts, offline editing, a Discord bot, or a Foundry integration. If any of those is the thing you are shopping for, one of the seven tools above is a better buy and we would rather you found that out here.