Notion vs Obsidian for D&D Campaign Management (2026)

The DIY route is romantic until you're three weeks in

Every DM I know has tried to build their own campaign manager at some point. In Notion, in Obsidian, in OneNote, in a Google Doc that grew tabs and tabs of nested headings. There's something appealing about it. Your brain, your structure, your custom system. No software opinions.

Here's the part nobody mentions in the YouTube videos. The first three weeks are exciting. The next three months are when you realize you're spending more time maintaining your campaign manager than running your campaign.

I've done the DIY thing in both Notion and Obsidian. I shipped a Notion D&D template at one point. I've also moved campaigns off both tools because they hit walls. So this isn't a hit piece, and it's not a sales pitch for purpose-built tools. It's an honest look at what each one is good at, where the walls are, and when you should pull the plug.

Notion for D&D: the strengths

Notion is a database disguised as a document editor. That sounds dry until you realize how useful it is for D&D.

You can build a NPCs database with custom properties. Faction (relation to a Factions database), location (relation to a Locations database), motivation (text), secret (text), HP and AC (number), tags. Filter, sort, group by anything. Switch between table view, gallery view, board view.

You can build a Sessions database. Session number, date, attended players (multi-select), summary, NPCs encountered (relation to NPCs), loot awarded. Now your sessions are queryable. "Show me every session where Marcus was present" is a one-click filter.

You can cross-link everything. Mention an NPC in a session, click their name, see their full profile, see every other session they appeared in. This linking is genuinely powerful when it works.

You can collaborate with players. Share specific pages, hide specific properties, give read-only access to a "world wiki" view that's stripped of DM secrets.

The community templates are huge. Eldritch Aestus, the Dungeon Master's Workshop, the Dungeon Master's Vault, Notion D&D Companion, dozens more. The good ones are genuinely impressive feats of Notion engineering.

If you already use Notion for work or personal stuff, the cognitive load of staying in one tool is real. You don't have to context-switch.

Notion for D&D: the walls

Here's where it gets harder.

Setup time. A serviceable D&D campaign manager in Notion takes hours to days to set up. Even with a community template, you'll spend significant time customizing it to your campaign, deleting stuff you don't need, adding properties the template missed. Plan for a weekend at minimum. Two weekends if you're new to Notion.

No D&D mechanics. Notion has no concept of D&D 5e. A character sheet is a database row with stat properties, not a real sheet. Spell slots are a number field. Class features are text. There's no calculation. Your wizard's spell save DC doesn't update when their proficiency bonus changes, because Notion doesn't know what those things are. Player character pages in Notion are reference notes, not playable sheets.

No dice roller. You can embed a Dice Roller widget. It's not great. Most groups end up rolling on Discord or in their VTT instead, which means Notion isn't actually at the table.

No SRD library. You'll be copy-pasting spells, monster stat blocks, and items from D&D Beyond or other sources. Or buying a Notion D&D content pack template, which adds another layer of setup.

Performance with large databases. Once your NPCs database has 200 entries, your Locations database has 80, and your Sessions database has 40, Notion gets sluggish. Filtering and sorting take noticeable seconds. Mobile is worse.

Mobile UX is rough. Running a session in person? Notion mobile is okay for reference but painful for editing. Pulling up an NPC mid-conversation, scrolling through their secret notes, then back to the session log, you're going to fumble.

The "always-on" tax. Notion is heavy. The desktop app is an Electron app. Each campaign workspace adds to your Notion clutter. If you DM multiple campaigns, the workspace switching overhead adds up.

Pricing. Notion's free tier is fine for individual use, but you'll hit limits when you start sharing pages with five players and accumulating session history. Plus is $10/month per member. If you're sharing a workspace with players and you all have Plus, the costs stack.

Obsidian for D&D: the strengths

Obsidian is a different shape of tool. Local-first markdown notes with a plugin ecosystem. Your data lives in a folder of .md files on your hard drive. If Obsidian goes away tomorrow, your campaign survives.

This is the killer feature for some DMs. Plain text portability. Version control via Git if you want it. No vendor lock-in. No cloud dependency.

The plugin ecosystem is genuinely impressive. There are plugins specifically for D&D. 5e Statblocks renders monster stats from a YAML or markdown frontmatter. Initiative Tracker runs combat. Dice Roller (yes, the same name as Notion's, but it's actually good in Obsidian) handles all your rolls. Fantasy Calendar gives you a custom calendar for your world. Dataview turns your notes into queryable databases similar to Notion's, but using markdown.

Linking is fast. Type [[ and start typing a name and Obsidian autocompletes from your vault. Backlinks show every place an NPC is mentioned. The graph view (yes, it's a gimmick, but it's also fun) shows your campaign as a network.

For tech-comfortable DMs who already keep notes in markdown, Obsidian is a natural extension. You're not learning a new tool, you're configuring an existing one to do D&D.

The community has assembled excellent vault templates. The Forge Vault, the TTRPG Toolkit, the Dungeon Master's Vault. These give you a starting structure with plugins pre-configured.

Pricing is friendly. Obsidian is free for personal use. Sync is $4 a month if you want it (or you can use iCloud, Dropbox, or Git instead).

Obsidian for D&D: the walls

The walls are different from Notion's, but they're real.

Setup is harder. You'll spend more time configuring Obsidian than Notion. Plugins need to be installed and configured. Templates need to be created or imported. Hotkeys need to be set. CSS snippets if you want pretty styling. This is a weekend at minimum, more like two weekends, even with a vault template.

The plugin maintenance tax. Obsidian plugins are community-maintained. Most are reliable. Some go unmaintained. When you update Obsidian and one of your plugins breaks, you might lose a feature you depended on. This is rare but real, and it's stressful when it's the night before a session.

No native collaboration. Obsidian is single-user by default. To share with players, you need Obsidian Sync (paid), or Git (technical), or Obsidian Publish (paid, more polished), or you have to manually export and share specific notes. None of these are as smooth as Notion's "share this page" or a purpose-built tool's player-view feature.

Markdown limitations. Markdown is great until you want a complex table with merged cells or a layout that's not a single column of text. Then you're either dropping into HTML in your markdown (ugly) or accepting limits.

No real-time at the table. If you're running an online session, Obsidian doesn't connect to your VTT. You're flipping between windows. If you're running in person, you can pull up Obsidian on a tablet, but the mobile app is okay-not-great for active session use.

No AI generation. There are some plugins that integrate ChatGPT, but they're not campaign-aware. The AI doesn't know your factions, NPCs, or lore. You'll get generic output unless you stuff context into every prompt manually.

Steep cliff if you're not technical. Notion has a fast onboarding ramp. Obsidian doesn't. If you've never used markdown, never touched a plugin manager, and don't enjoy fiddling with config, Obsidian will be exhausting. If you do enjoy that stuff, it's heaven.

How to choose between them

If you're choosing between Notion and Obsidian specifically, here's the rough decider.

Pick Notion if:

You already use Notion for other things
You want a faster ramp from zero to "okay this works"
You're going to share extensively with players and want it to be smooth
You want something that works on phone and desktop equally well
You don't mind paying $10/month or staying within free tier limits

Pick Obsidian if:

You like markdown and plain text
You care about owning your data locally
You enjoy plugin tweaking and configuration as a hobby
You're tech-comfortable and don't mind a learning curve
You want unlimited customization and don't mind trading polish for power

Both can become campaign managers. Both will require significant setup. Both will hit walls eventually if your campaign gets complex enough.

When DIY is the right choice

I want to be fair to both tools, because there are real cases where DIY beats purpose-built.

You're running a system that doesn't have purpose-built tools. Pathfinder 2e has Foundry, but if you're running Mothership, or Mausritter, or some indie game with twelve total players, no campaign manager is going to support it. DIY is your only option.

You're running multiple systems. If you're a Forever DM running D&D 5e for one group and Call of Cthulhu for another, having one tool (Notion or Obsidian) that holds both campaigns is convenient. Purpose-built tools tend to be system-specific.

You like the building. Some DMs genuinely enjoy the meta-game of building their tooling. They get satisfaction from a beautifully configured Obsidian vault or an elegant Notion template. If that's you, DIY isn't a cost, it's a hobby. Don't let me talk you out of it.

You're running a one-shot or short adventure. Three sessions, a couple of NPCs, no faction politics. A Google Doc is enough. Notion or Obsidian is overkill. Purpose-built tools are also overkill.

When DIY is the wrong choice

The other side. The cases where DIY costs you more than it saves.

You're spending more than two hours a week on tooling. If your prep time is dominated by maintaining your Notion or Obsidian setup, the tool has become a drag, not a leverage.

You're avoiding adding NPCs because of the friction. This is the tell that your DIY system is hurting your game. If you find yourself thinking "I'd add this character but I don't want to fill out all the properties in Notion," your tool is now editing your creative output. That's a problem.

You're forgetting things between sessions. The whole point of a campaign manager is to remember things you forget. If your Notion or Obsidian setup is so unstructured that you can't find what you need mid-session, it's not a working manager.

You're running a long-form campaign where world consistency matters. Months and years of campaign history puts pressure on the structure. Purpose-built tools have spent product effort on the schema. Your DIY one hasn't, and the cracks show.

You started using AI for prep and the results feel generic. Raw ChatGPT plus a Notion doc gives you generic AI output because the AI doesn't have your campaign context. Campaign-aware AI (like the kind we built into Dungeon Diary using vector embeddings on your campaign data) gives you outputs that fit your setting. Once you've felt the difference, the DIY route feels like writing in crayon.

What I'd actually do

Honest take. If I was starting fresh today and didn't have a strong existing preference for Notion or Obsidian, I wouldn't go DIY. I'd use a purpose-built tool. I built Dungeon Diary because I was tired of fighting Notion every prep night.

If I already had a Notion setup that was working, I'd keep it until it stopped working, then switch. Don't migrate for the sake of migrating.

If I was a hobbyist DM who enjoyed tinkering with Obsidian, I wouldn't switch at all. The hobby tool is part of the fun.

If I was running multiple systems, I'd do Notion for the worldbuilding and lore (cross-system), and use system-specific tools for each game's mechanics.

The whole DIY thing only really hurts when you're using it for the wrong reasons. "It's free" isn't a good reason if you're spending 5 hours a week maintaining it. "I like the customization" is a good reason. Be honest with yourself about which one you're doing.

The closing thought

Notion and Obsidian are good tools. They're not great D&D campaign managers, because they're not D&D tools. They're general-purpose tools that you can twist into D&D shapes with effort.

Sometimes that effort is worth it. Sometimes it's not. The question isn't "which one is better." It's "what's your goal." If your goal is to run great sessions with minimum prep, look at purpose-built. If your goal is to build a beautiful personal knowledge system that happens to include D&D, DIY in Obsidian or Notion is probably better.

There's no wrong answer, but there are wrong reasons. Pick for the right ones.