World Anvil vs Kanka vs StoryGuard: An Honest Comparison for GMs
World Anvil, Kanka, and StoryGuard all help you run a campaign, but they’re built for different jobs. World Anvil is a deep worldbuilding platform. Kanka is a full-featured campaign wiki with a generous free tier. StoryGuard is a session notebook that updates itself from what happened at the table. Pick on the wrong axis and any of them will disappoint you. Here’s the head-to-head by what you actually need.
Disclosure: StoryGuard is our product. We’ve tried to describe World Anvil and Kanka by what they genuinely do best, including where they beat us. (For the wider field, including LegendKeeper, Notion, and Obsidian, see our full roundup.)
The one-line difference
- World Anvil is an encyclopedia for your world, with a campaign manager attached.
- Kanka is a structured campaign wiki your players can log into, free for nearly everything.
- StoryGuard is a notebook for the session: prep before, notes during, and the bookkeeping after, done for you.
The first two are about building and storing your world. The third is about keeping up with what happens to it every session. That’s the fault line.
World Anvil: the world as an encyclopedia
World Anvil has the most depth of the three. Article templates cover everything from deities to military campaigns. It adds interactive maps, timelines, statblocks, and a campaign manager with session reports. Its secrets system lets you embed hidden blocks in articles and show each one to a different group of players, and you can publish the whole world publicly.
Best for: GMs whose setting is a project in itself, and tables where players enjoy reading lore between sessions.
Where it falls short: the depth comes with weight. Setting up a world properly takes real time, and the interface has a learning curve. It stores what you write, so after each session, updating the articles to match what happened is still your job.
Kanka: the free, structured all-rounder
Kanka covers characters, locations, organizations, families, quests, maps, calendars, and timelines, with @mentions to link them. Its free tier includes unlimited campaigns and all core features, which is unusually generous. Its permissions are excellent: hide a whole entry or a single field from players, keep GM-only secrets, and invite players in with roles that control what they can see. Players can even keep their own theories.
Best for: GMs who want a complete campaign wiki for free, with fine-grained control over what players see.
Where it falls short: it’s dense, so it takes a while before it feels quick. And like World Anvil, it’s a place to keep facts. It doesn’t read your session notes or tell you when they contradict what you’ve recorded.
StoryGuard: the notebook that keeps up
StoryGuard is ours, so read this knowing that. It’s built around the session, not the wiki.
- Before: a prep sheet pulls together last session’s recap, open quests, loose threads, and the secrets still waiting to be found.
- During: one page of notes with your plan pinned beside it.
@mentionan NPC to link them, or add a new one on the spot. - After: What changed? reads your notes and proposes codex updates, like who died, who moved, and which item changed hands. You approve each one. Then it drafts a spoiler-free recap for your group’s Discord, and warns you if a secret slipped in.
- Throughout: a continuity check flags new notes that contradict what you’ve established. Secrets can be a whole entry or a single fact, and you record the session the party learned them.
It also has packs: ready-made taverns, towns, and factions from us and other GMs that you can drop into your campaign, or publish yourself.
Best for: GMs whose notes always fall behind, and who’d rather have the bookkeeping done than build a wiki.
Where it falls short: it’s newer and narrower. There are no geographic maps, no statblocks, no timelines or calendars, and no player accounts. Players only see the recaps you share. If you want a lore wiki your players can browse, either of the others does that better.
Head-to-head by what you need
| Your priority | Best fit |
|---|---|
| A deep, public world encyclopedia | World Anvil |
| Interactive maps and timelines | World Anvil or Kanka |
| A complete campaign wiki for free | Kanka |
| Players logging in to read what you allow | Kanka or World Anvil |
| Notes that update the codex for you after each session | StoryGuard |
| Catching contradictions before your players do | StoryGuard |
| Spoiler-free recaps for your group chat | StoryGuard |
| Ready-made NPCs and locations to drop in | StoryGuard packs |
Can you use them together?
Yes. A common setup is a wiki for the world and a notebook for the sessions. Keep your setting’s lore and maps in World Anvil or Kanka, where players can read it, and run your sessions in StoryGuard, where the bookkeeping happens. The tradeoff is two tools and a boundary you maintain by hand. If you don’t need a player-facing wiki, StoryGuard on its own covers the session side, and Notion or Obsidian can hold anything else.
Bottom line
There’s no overall winner, only a winner per job. If your world is a destination in its own right, World Anvil. If you want everything a campaign wiki can do without paying, Kanka. If the thing that keeps biting you is notes that fall behind, and a player asking about the NPC you forgot was dead, that’s the gap StoryGuard was built for. For the method behind it, whichever tool you choose, see how to keep track of your D&D campaign.