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

At a glance: The GM Deck vs Notion

Where Notion is genuinely better

Notion is a genuinely impressive product and there are good reasons thousands of DMs run their campaigns there.

• Total flexibility

  Notion has no opinion on what your campaign should look like. If you want a Kanban of plot hooks, a calendar of in-world holidays, a relational table of NPC relationships, and a wiki of regional cuisines all linked to each other, you can build that in an afternoon. The GM Deck is opinionated by design; Notion is the opposite of opinionated by design.

• A free tier that actually works for solo DMs

  The Notion free plan is fully usable for a single DM running a single table. The GM Deck has a 14-day free trial but no permanent free tier. If you want to run a campaign at zero recurring cost and you do not need a session runner, Notion is a real option.

• Mature ecosystem of D&D templates

  There is a thriving market of paid and free D&D templates for Notion (Lore Keeper, the Dungeon Master Zone, and dozens of community packs) you can drop in and start filling. If a friend already runs their game on a Notion template you love, the simplest move is staying there.

• Native mobile apps

  Notion ships polished native iOS and Android apps. The GM Deck works on mobile browsers but does not yet ship a native app, so running prep on the train is more comfortable on Notion today.

Where The GM Deck is better than Notion

Once you sit down at the table, the gap opens up. Notion is a document tool; The GM Deck was built for the hour-by-hour work of running the game.

• A purpose-built session runner

  Notion does not have a session runner because it is not a session runner. The GM Deck has a three-column live-play layout for game night with queued plotlines, rich-text notes, and a per-session dice log on one screen. Pins, handouts, and roll results all land in the runner log automatically. You can replicate the outline of this in Notion, but not the live-play behaviour.

• Maps with pins, dice, combat, and roll tables built in

  Notion has no native dice, no combat tracker, no map-pin workflow, and no roll-table editor. Most Notion DMs pair their campaign workspace with a dice tool, an initiative tracker, and a VTT or pin tool, and stitch them together by hand. The GM Deck ships all of these as one tool.

• Templates shaped around tabletop, not databases

  Every entity type in The GM Deck ships with templates that prompt for the fields a DM uses (HP, AC, faction, location, motive, attitudes, rumours). You start by filling in fields; you do not start by designing a database schema. For DMs who would rather spend their prep time on the world than on the tool, this is the largest practical difference.

• Plotlines as a status workflow

  Plotlines are their own page type with seeded / active / resolved status, branching threads, and links to the entities they touch. A Notion equivalent is a manual kanban-and-relations build that you maintain yourself.

• Flat per-DM pricing instead of per-user

  Notion charges per user per month. If you have a co-DM or two collaborating on the workspace, the bill scales with the seat count. The GM Deck is per-account, flat-rate; one DM, one subscription.

Pricing: The GM Deck vs Notion

Coming from Notion?

The most common reason DMs leave a Notion campaign for The GM Deck is the table-time gap: prep happens fine in Notion, but on game night they are juggling Notion, a dice app, a combat tracker, and notes in a separate doc. The GM Deck collapses those into one screen. There is no automated Notion importer; in practice DMs either bring over their campaign by copy-pasting the half-dozen pages they actually reference at the table (the rest stays in Notion as an archive), or they treat the move as a fresh start. Custom entity templates in The GM Deck mirror Notion’s flexible field model, so a Notion DM who already enjoys schema design will feel at home shaping their own page types.