The GM Deck vs Kanka: which is right for you?

At a glance: The GM Deck vs Kanka

Where Kanka is genuinely better

Kanka has been built in the open by a small team for years and it shows in the places that matter to free-tier and self-hosting users.

• A genuinely usable free tier

  The free Kobold plan is not a crippled trial; it covers a real single-DM campaign with most of the entity types unlocked. Caps apply to file uploads and a few advanced features, but you can run a campaign for a year on it without hitting a paywall. The GM Deck is paid-only with a 14-day trial.

• Open-source codebase

  Kanka publishes its source on GitHub and accepts community contributions. If you care about software you can audit, self-host, or fork, that matters. The GM Deck is a closed-source commercial product hosted on AWS.

• Multi-user collaboration with granular permissions

  Kanka campaigns can have multiple members with per-entity permissions, so co-DMs and even players can edit the parts of the world they own. The GM Deck is a single-DM tool today; we offer share links for player handouts but no shared editing.

• A wider menu of entity categories

  Calendars, religions, races, families, journals, conversations, and more come pre-modelled in Kanka. The GM Deck’s built-in entity types are intentionally narrower (the work goes into deeper templates rather than more categories), but if you love a setting with a dozen distinct lookup categories Kanka provides them out of the box.

Where The GM Deck is better than Kanka

The GM Deck is shaped around running the table, not modelling every possible facet of a setting.

• A real session runner

  Kanka has an entity for sessions but no runner: you read your wiki and take notes in a separate document at the table. The GM Deck has a three-column live-play layout for sessions, with queued plotlines and locations on the left, rich-text notes in the middle, and a per-session dice log on the right. Pins, handouts, and roll results land in the runner log automatically.

• Combat and initiative built in

  The GM Deck includes a combat tracker with initiative, HP and condition tracking, and turn order. Kanka has no built-in combat tracker, so most DMs there pair it with a separate initiative tool at the table.

• Templates that prompt you for the right fields

  The GM Deck’s entity templates are tabletop-shaped from the start: Generic NPCs ask for stats, faction, motive, and attitudes; Taverns ask for proprietor, rooms, and rumours; Mobs ship statblock-shaped fields. Kanka offers custom attributes you can add to any entity, but the starting page is closer to a blank wiki article than a structured form.

• Plotlines as a status workflow

  Plotlines are their own page type with a seeded / active / resolved status, branching threads, and links to the entities they touch. Kanka has a Quests entity with parent/child relationships, but no first-class status workflow you can use to drive the plot forward session by session.

• A modern, focused UI

  Kanka covers a lot of ground and the UI shows it: lots of menus, lots of options, lots of categories. The GM Deck’s interface is narrower by design, with a dark D&D-themed aesthetic and far fewer top-level surfaces. Whether that is a win is a matter of taste; for DMs who bounce off Kanka’s density, it tends to be the deciding factor.

Pricing: The GM Deck vs Kanka

Coming from Kanka?

The most common reason DMs move from Kanka to The GM Deck is a missing session-running surface: Kanka is excellent for the wiki side of worldbuilding but most DMs end up keeping a separate document or VTT open at the table for live play. There is no automated Kanka importer today, but Kanka’s entity exports are JSON-shaped and our entity templates accept the same kind of structured fields, so a copy-paste pass through the entities you actually reference works in practice. If your campaign relies on Kanka’s multi-user permissions or its open-source nature, those are real reasons to stay; The GM Deck is single-DM and closed-source today.