Wyrdli vs Obsidian: which one runs your campaign?

I built Wyrdli, so you know which side I'm on. Plenty of GMs swear by Obsidian, with good reason.

Which one should you use? If you want every note about your world in files on your own disk, still readable in twenty years, keep Obsidian. If you want to know what your party can find out next session, and how, that's what I built Wyrdli for.

What is Obsidian good at?

Your notes are yours. They're plain Markdown files on your device: offline, private, no lock-in. If Obsidian vanished tomorrow, your campaign would still be a folder of text.

Link notes and you get a personal wiki, with a graph view, an infinite canvas and thousands of community plugins to shape it into almost anything.

And it's free, for any purpose, no sign-up.

The complaint I read most in GM forums: Obsidian starts blank, and you build your own campaign system out of plugins and templates before you prep a single scene. Some love that (I get it). Others lose weeks to it.

I know that rabbit hole from the inside. In 2022 I wrote RPG Manager, an Obsidian plugin for running campaigns, and you can still find it in the community plugins. I don't maintain it any more. Every time I wanted a clue to know which secret it pointed at, or last session to feed the next one, I hit the edge of what a plugin could bend Obsidian into. So I took all of it into Wyrdli.

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 burn and everybody blames the green dragon in the marsh. The truth: the baron's court wizard is paying kobolds to set the fires. Four clues lead there. Lamp oil on straw that never caught. A healer who sees oil burns and no dragon poison. Pip, nine, who saw little men run to the mill. A brass button under a charred beam.

In Obsidian that's five notes and a few links, maybe a canvas. It works. But the link from the button to the wizard is a line between two files. It has no idea the button is a clue, or that the party pocketed it last week.

After session two, Wyrdli tells you the party found the oil, ignored Pip, and still hasn't touched the healer or the button.

Recording is the other big gap. On Discord, Wyrdli records only when you hit start, transcribes the session and drafts the recap. On the AI plans it also gathers your players' feedback and suggests NPCs, scenes and complications you accept, edit or bin. The AI never writes your players' characters, and the audio is gone after 14 days. Essentials has no AI, and Wyrdli works without Discord.

What doesn't Wyrdli do?

The thing Obsidian does best. Wyrdli is a web app on our servers in Europe, with no offline mode. Export works on every plan, but it's still an export, not files you already hold.

No plugins, so you prep the Wyrdli way. Maps are one image per campaign, no markers or layers. No family tree, no manuscript editor, no public world for readers. No free plan either: the sample campaign opens without an account, your own needs a subscription after the trial. It's young and small.

Side by side

What do they cost?

Prices checked on 24 October 2026, on obsidian.md.

Obsidian (US dollars):

Catalyst ($25 one-off) and a commercial licence ($50 per user per year) are optional. You need none of these to use Obsidian.

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 Obsidian and use Wyrdli too?

Yes, and if you love your vault, you should. Obsidian holds the lore and the midnight scribbles. Wyrdli holds what's in play: the open secrets, the scenes around them, the campaign calendar.

There's no importer. Copy over only the arc you're running now, two or three secrets and the NPCs carrying their clues. One evening, and most of it is prep you owed the table anyway.

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

The button is still under that beam. Go and see who finds it.