Comparison · Checked 13 August 2026

New Quest vs Novelcrafter

Novelcrafter is a writing app built around the Codex, a structured story bible of characters, locations, lore and items with aliases, per-entry relationships, and automatic detection of mentions in your prose. You plan, draft and revise in the same place, and the codex feeds only the relevant entries into each prompt. It is model-agnostic by design: you bring your own API key and point it at whatever model is best the week it ships. Subscriptions run $4 to $20 a month; the AI is billed separately by your provider.

Novelcrafter's codex is read by a model inside Novelcrafter; New Quest's is read by whatever model you already use, wherever you already write.

Everything below was true on Novelcrafter’s own site on 13 August 2026. If we have it wrong, tell us and we will change it. Their site.

The ledger

The same question, asked of both.

Can my model read the bible while I'm drafting somewhere else?
Novelcrafter
The codex reaches a model through Novelcrafter's own prompt assembly, inside Novelcrafter. There is no official MCP server and no public API, so a chat in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor cannot see it. A community bridge exists on GitHub, deadshot465/novelcrafter-mcp, and it is experimental and unsupported.
New Quest
The bible is a hosted remote MCP server. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Cursor connect to it as a client, with nothing installed on your machine.
What am I paying for the software?
Novelcrafter
Scribe $4 a month, Hobbyist $8 with the AI features, Artisan $14 with Workshop chat, Specialist $20 with collaboration and teams. Every tier is unlimited books, series and universes, and annual billing gives you two months free.
New Quest
Free for one book. $39 a month for the app on its own, or $29 through the Guild, which includes the Skool community.
What does the AI cost on top of that?
Novelcrafter
You bring your own key and pay the provider directly. Their docs say Anthropic keys are not accepted, so Claude has to be routed through OpenRouter: a second account and a markup. None of it is on the sticker price, and for a working novelist the tokens typically run $20 to $150 a month.
New Quest
Nothing extra. New Quest never calls a model. Your model calls us, on the Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus subscription you are already paying for.
Has it been doing this long enough to trust with a series?
Novelcrafter
Several years, a large active community, and a deep ecosystem of shared prompt libraries. The codex is the best-established structured story bible in this category.
New Quest
Younger, smaller, and still filling in. Prose storage in particular is new enough that you should keep your own copy of the manuscript.
Will it write the prose for me?
Novelcrafter
Yes. Chat, scene generation from beats, a revision matrix and snippets, with the codex supplying the relevant entries to each prompt.
New Quest
No, and that is deliberate. New Quest contains no text generation. It answers questions about your world and records what a scene changed.
Can I hold a level, an XP total or a skill tier as a real number?
Novelcrafter
Codex entries are free-text fields. Levels, XP, skill trees and System state live in prose you maintain by hand, and nothing validates them.
New Quest
Typed. Stat blocks, levels, XP, skills and inventory are structured fields, and each change is an event tied to a scene, so what tier a skill was in chapter 62 has an answer rather than a guess.
Will anything catch a contradiction before a reader does?
Novelcrafter
The codex spots mentions of your entries in prose and scopes which ones enter a prompt. There is no timeline you can validate against, so numeric continuity is yours to police by hand.
New Quest
A continuity check that never calls a model, so it returns the same answer twice: dead characters walking, spells nobody learned, HP over max.
Where does the manuscript itself live?
Novelcrafter
In Novelcrafter, next to the codex, in a drafting environment several years more mature than ours.
New Quest
In New Quest, in scenes that hold the drafted prose, next to the bible. Word and Scrivener files import.
Can I get the finished book out as an ebook?
Novelcrafter
No EPUB export, and nothing for an audiobook narrator.
New Quest
EPUB out, the whole book compiles to a single Markdown file, and there is a pronunciation guide built for narrators.
Can I find out whether I like it without paying?
Novelcrafter
A 21-day trial of every feature, no card. There is no free plan after it ends.
New Quest
No free tier for writing: $29 a month through the Guild, or $39 for the app alone. A free account can read and export for ever.

Choosing

One of these is probably you.

Choose Novelcrafter if

You want one app to plan, draft, revise and keep the bible in, and you are comfortable managing an OpenRouter key. That is precisely what Novelcrafter is, and it has been that for years.
Price is the deciding factor. $8 a month buys a mature codex and a full writing environment, against $39 for New Quest. On value it is the best in this category and it is not close.
You want the software to help write. Scene generation from beats, chat, a revision matrix: New Quest does none of it.
You want to follow the frontier. Novelcrafter is model-agnostic by design, so you can point it at whatever shipped last week.
You draft inside Novelcrafter and you are content there. If your world never needs to be readable by a model outside that tab, you do not need us.

Go and look at Novelcrafter →

Choose New Quest if

You draft somewhere else. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, a plain Word document, and you want the bible to follow you there instead of waiting in another tab.
You already pay for Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus and would rather that subscription did the work than meter tokens through a second account.
Your book has numbers in it. Levels, XP, skill tiers and System state as typed fields, with every change tied to the scene that caused it.
You are deep enough into a series that you want contradictions caught rather than filed, by a check that runs the same way every time.
You want the book out at the end: EPUB, one Markdown file, and a pronunciation guide for whoever narrates it.

Join the Guild · $29/mo →Or the app alone · $39/mo

An open book on a night-time desk, a gold network of characters, cities and roads rising from its pages, ringed by floating panels of world stats.

Questions

What people ask before switching.

Is New Quest really five times the price?

On the sticker, yes. Hobbyist is $8 a month against our $39, or $29 through the Guild. The picture changes once tokens are in it, because Novelcrafter's AI is not included and a working novelist typically spends $20 to $150 a month on them, while New Quest runs on the Claude or ChatGPT subscription you already have. It is still not cheap. If you draft inside Novelcrafter and it works, the difference buys you nothing.

Can I bring my codex across?

Not automatically. Novelcrafter has no public API, so there is nothing for an importer to talk to, and codex entries come over by hand. The manuscript is easier: paste it in and it lands split into chapters and scenes, and Word and Scrivener files import directly.

Do I still need an OpenRouter account?

No. New Quest never calls a model, so there is no key to supply and no second bill. Your model connects to us over MCP, on your own account, and if you connect nothing at all the bible, the continuity check and the export still work.

Can I use both?

Yes, and some writers should. Draft in Novelcrafter, keep the canonical bible in New Quest where your other models can reach it. The cost is real: two places to update, and the one you skip is the one that goes stale. It only pays off if you genuinely work outside Novelcrafter.

What happens to my world if I leave?

Export hands you the world and the manuscript, and the whole book compiles to one Markdown file. We never train on your work, and delete means delete. That is a commitment from a small company rather than a folder on your own disk, so keep your own copy of the manuscript as well.

There is a Novelcrafter MCP server on GitHub, isn't there?

There is: deadshot465/novelcrafter-mcp, an experimental desktop client that bridges Claude Desktop's MCP to Novelcrafter codices. It is unofficial, unsupported and Claude Desktop only, which makes it proof that people want this rather than something to build a series on. New Quest's MCP server is the product itself, hosted and supported, with nothing to run on your machine.