Wyrdli vs Kanka: which one runs your campaign?

I built Wyrdli, so read this knowing which side I'm on. Kanka makes being fair easy.

Which one should you use? Think about why you open it.

Kanka is where you and your players look things up: who rules the port city, what the ranger is carrying, which day of the harvest festival it is. It does that very well, for free. Wyrdli is where you prep the next session.

What is Kanka good at?

Structure that doesn't bury you.

You get around 20 kinds of entry (characters, locations, families, items, quests, journals, calendars, timelines and more), each with its own shape. A quest gets ticked off when it's done, a calendar takes as many days a year as your world needs, items sit in a character's inventory. You link entries with an @ mention as you type. Maps take layers and pins, and you decide who sees each pin.

Players join the campaign, roles decide what each one sees, and you can preview it as any member to check you haven't leaked the villain (we've all done it). Relations can be private too.

The free plan gives you unlimited campaigns and unlimited entries. Paying buys bigger uploads, no ads and premium campaigns, which add family trees, a visual relation explorer, plugins and webhooks to Discord.

GMs praise the constraints: no system to design before you write a word, and a wiki that's quick to search when a player asks what that merchant was called. The complaints come from the same place. Some find it rigid, some find it clunky next to Obsidian, and images get grumbled about. Still, fewer complaints than any other campaign tool I looked at.

What is Wyrdli good at?

Wyrdli is built around situations, not plots: scenes the party can walk into, secrets they can find out, and clues that lead there, each carried by an NPC or an item. Open a secret and you see every clue pointing at it and who carries each one, and the campaign keeps track of what the party has found and what's still buried.

Take the sample campaign, The Dragon of Thornwick. Farms are burning and everybody blames the green dragon in the marsh. The baron's court wizard is paying kobolds to set the fires. Four clues point there: lamp oil on straw that didn't catch, a healer who sees oil burns and no dragon poison, a nine-year-old called Pip who saw little men run to the mill, and a brass button under a charred beam.

In Kanka you'd make entries for the wizard, the healer, Pip and the mill, @ mention them in a journal and open a quest called "Who's burning the farms?". Tidy.

In Wyrdli every clue knows its secret and its carrier: Pip carries what he saw at the mill, the healer carries the burns. After session two the secret shows the party found the oil, ignored Pip, and left two ways in untouched. In Kanka that list lives in your head.

Wyrdli has a campaign calendar with events too, so the harvest festival fits either way.

If your group plays on Discord, Wyrdli can also record the session and draft the recap. The AI is optional, never writes your players' characters, and the Essentials plan has none.

What doesn't Wyrdli do?

A lot of what Kanka does. Wyrdli is young and small.

Maps are one image per campaign. No family trees, no manuscript editor, no public world for readers.

And no free plan. The sample campaign opens without an account and there's a 14-day trial, then you pay. Kanka will run yours for years for nothing.

Side by side

What do they cost?

Prices checked on 24 October 2026.

Kanka (US dollars, as shown on kanka.io/pricing; the yearly price is per month, billed yearly):

No ads from Owlbear up.

Wyrdli (euros):

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial. Players never pay. Export works on every plan, even after your subscription ends.

Can I keep Kanka and use Wyrdli too?

Yes. If you love your wiki, keep it. Your players check who the baron is there. You prep in Wyrdli.

There's no Kanka importer, and you don't need one. Copy over the mystery you're running now (its secret, its clues, the NPCs holding them) and leave the lore where it is.

Open the Thornwick campaign, no account needed: wyrd.li/demo.

Your players will keep asking Kanka about the baron. Wyrdli knows they still haven't talked to Pip.