Kanka vs Dungeon Diary: the honest free-tool comparison

The short version

Kanka is broad, free, system-agnostic, and has been the default open-source campaign organizer for years. It handles any TTRPG (D&D, Pathfinder, Vampire, anything). It's been built and maintained by a small team with real love for the craft.

Dungeon Diary is narrower on purpose: D&D 5e only, built around running active sessions (real-time combat tracker, structured stat blocks, AI generation grounded in your world). The trade is system breadth for 5e-specific depth.

Both are real options. Which one fits depends on what you want the tool to do, not which one wins on a checklist.

What Kanka does well

It's free, and the free tier is genuinely usable. Most things you'd want are on the free plan. The paid tiers add character limits, file storage, calendar features, and concurrent users — not "you can't actually do worldbuilding without paying."

System-agnostic. Kanka doesn't care whether you're running 5e, Pathfinder 2e, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire, Cyberpunk, or your own homebrew system. Same entity types (characters, locations, organizations, items, journals) work for any of them.

Mature taxonomy. Years of iteration have produced a clean, opinionated set of entity types: characters, families, organizations, locations, items, races, religions, conversations, quests, journals, events, calendars, abilities, notes. The relationships between them are flexible.

Permissions model. Per-entity DM-only vs shared visibility is well-thought-out. Players see what you want them to see, including different per-entity for different players.

Self-hostable. Kanka is open source. If you want to host your own instance for total data ownership, that's an option. Few competitors offer this.

Active community. Years of forum posts, templates, and shared worlds you can browse.

Where Dungeon Diary is the better fit

Running sessions in real time. Kanka has a tracker, but it isn't the focus. Dungeon Diary's combat tracker is the spine of the app — initiative, HP, conditions, turn timing, with player views that update live via WebSocket. Dice rolls sync. Whispers actually whisper (per-user channels). If "the way I want to play involves running combats with the players seeing what's happening in real time," Dungeon Diary is built for that day.

Structured 5e data. A Kanka character is a free-form entity with custom fields. A Dungeon Diary character is a structured 5e sheet — class, level, spells, attacks, AC, HP, conditions — that the combat tracker can use directly. The price is system lock-in (only 5e). The benefit is the data is actually usable for play.

Session prep. Dungeon Diary's session view pulls together the recap, open quests, NPCs the party recently met, and faction status — so the prep workflow is "open the session, see what matters, prep what's missing." Kanka makes you navigate to each entity manually.

AI that knows your world. Optional, but when used, Dungeon Diary's AI generation (NPCs, stat blocks, session recaps, world-gen) pulls from your campaign's actual NPCs, factions, and lore. Kanka doesn't have first-class AI generation grounded in your data.

Polish on common 5e tasks. Picking a 5e monster, looking up a spell, balancing an encounter, attaching a stat block to an NPC — Dungeon Diary has SRD content built in and integrated. In Kanka, you'd add these as custom entities or paste them as text.

Where Kanka is the better fit

You don't run 5e. Dungeon Diary is 5e only and doesn't pretend to handle other systems well. Kanka actually does.

You want to write a long-form world. Kanka's article fields are more prose-friendly than Dungeon Diary's structured worldbuilding. If your goal is a beautiful wiki to share with readers, Kanka wins.

You want to self-host. Open source matters to you. Dungeon Diary is a hosted product.

You're cost-sensitive and free is non-negotiable. Kanka's free tier is more permissive than most. Dungeon Diary is also free for one campaign right now, but the long-term pricing will gate AI features and team scale.

You like Kanka's existing community and templates. A lot of DMs have invested years here. That investment matters.

The migration question

If you're already running campaigns in Kanka and considering Dungeon Diary, the honest answer is: don't migrate mid-campaign. Migrating between any two of these tools is painful regardless of who you're going to. Wait for a new campaign and try Dungeon Diary then.

If you're between campaigns or starting your first 5e campaign, Dungeon Diary's 5-second demo is the fastest way to feel the difference. You don't have to commit anything to test it.

What I'd tell a friend

If a friend asked me to choose between these two without context, I'd ask:

1. Are you running 5e specifically? If no → Kanka.
2. Do you spend more time prepping/running sessions or building world depth? Sessions → Dungeon Diary. World depth → Kanka.
3. Do you want AI to do some of the grunt work? Yes → Dungeon Diary. No, or it makes you uncomfortable → Kanka.
4. Is open source / self-hosting important to you? Yes → Kanka.

Most DMs end up at Dungeon Diary on question 1 + 2 if they're playing weekly. Most worldbuilders or non-5e DMs end up at Kanka.

There's no shame in starting with Kanka and switching later, or starting with Dungeon Diary and adding Kanka if you want the broader worldbuilding article surface. They're not enemies. Both make this hobby better.

Try Dungeon Diary in 5 seconds

The fastest test is the demo. One tap, no signup, no email. We seed a sample campaign called Ravenmoor Reach with NPCs, quests, a faction conflict in motion, and a session in progress, and drop you straight in. Try it as a DM or as a player — both views work and you can switch.