Comparison · Checked 13 August 2026

New Quest vs World Anvil

World Anvil is the deepest worldbuilding wiki that exists, with more than ten years of accumulated work behind it. Over twenty article templates covering magic systems, ethnicities, conditions, military formations and combat mechanics. Interactive layered maps, timelines and chronicles, family trees, diplomacy webs, statblocks, and an autolinker that cross-references the lot. It is also a publishing platform: your world can be a public site your readers browse between books, with spoilers hidden from specific readers paragraph by paragraph, subscriber slots and Patreon tie-ins. The Manuscripts module links your prose back to those articles. It is a wiki and RPG tool that grew a novel module rather than a novelist's tool that grew a wiki, and it is shaped accordingly.

World Anvil turns your world into a wiki your readers can browse; New Quest turns it into a record your model can query mid-chapter.

Everything below was true on World Anvil’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 LLM read this while I draft?
World Anvil
There is no first-party AI, and World Anvil has said publicly that building it is out of scope and that you should bring your own tools. The public Boromir v2 REST API has produced at least two community MCP servers, one of them a Claude Code plugin covering articles, maps, timelines, manuscripts and notebooks. API application keys are issued only to members at Grandmaster rank and above, and both servers are unofficial, unsupported, and can break when the API changes.
New Quest
The MCP server is the product. It is hosted and remote, so you paste a URL into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Cursor once and it works from any device with nothing installed. No key to issue yourself, no rank to reach, and when it does break it is ours to fix rather than a volunteer's.
Can I write down more kinds of thing than a character sheet?
World Anvil
More than twenty purpose-built article templates, plus family trees, diplomacy webs, layered interactive maps and chronicles. By a wide margin the broadest ready-made schema of any tool in this category.
New Quest
Characters, stat blocks, locations, items, factions, rules, scenes and a timeline. Fewer shapes, chosen for drafting a series rather than describing a world.
Do my readers get to see any of this?
World Anvil
Yes, and nothing else in this category comes close. Your world becomes a public site fans can browse, with serial fiction publishing, Patreon and Kickstarter integration, subscriber slots, and per-reader secrets that hide spoilers from specific people on a per-paragraph basis. At the top tier it runs on your own domain with no World Anvil branding.
New Quest
No. Nothing you write is public and there is no reader-facing surface at all. The bible is for you and the model you connect.
What does a decade of this cost?
World Anvil
The tier that includes Manuscripts is roughly $6.50 a month, Grandmaster is around $12, and both Grandmaster and Sage can be bought outright as lifetime memberships that include every feature ever added to that tier. We could not verify the tier ladder: World Anvil's pricing page refuses automated requests, and the secondary sources disagree with each other about which tier sits where. Treat these figures as a ballpark and check their page yourself.
New Quest
$29 a month through the Guild, $39 for the app alone. There is no lifetime option and no plan to pretend one is coming. Over ten years the gap is enormous and it is not in our favour.
What happens when my world outgrows the plan I am on?
World Anvil
Article count, storage and map count are tier limits. The free Freeman tier is two worlds, around 42 published articles, 100MB of media and 20 statblocks. A hundred-chapter series with hundreds of entities moves you up the ladder.
New Quest
There are no caps on characters, locations, scenes or events. The free tier is one book. After that the price does not move because your cast grew.
Does it keep the numbers straight in a LitRPG?
World Anvil
Statblocks exist, and they are built for tabletop stat lines. There is no model of progression: nothing tracks a level, an XP curve or a skill tier as it changes across a hundred chapters.
New Quest
Levels, XP, skills, inventory, buffs and wounds are typed fields. Every change is an event tied to a scene, and a continuity check that never calls a model catches HP over max, spells nobody learned, and dead characters walking.
Can I draft the actual chapters in it?
World Anvil
Manuscripts is a full novel-writing module, unlocked from the Master tier upwards, and the autolinker connects your prose to your world articles, which is a genuinely good trick. The editor itself is an embedded third-party service rather than part of the app, so it does not feel of a piece with the rest.
New Quest
Scenes hold the drafted prose, you can import from Word and Scrivener, and the whole book compiles to one Markdown file. There is an EPUB export and a pronunciation guide for your audiobook narrator.
How long before I am actually using it?
World Anvil
The learning curve is the single most common complaint in reviews. The number of fields on an article is a documented onboarding wall, and the five-tier ladder leaves people unsure which one they actually need. Plenty of writers build a beautiful world and then never open it while drafting.
New Quest
Paste a manuscript and it lands split into chapters and scenes. Connecting a model is a URL and about two minutes. There is less to learn because there is less here.
Can I take it all with me if I leave?
World Anvil
World export is possible, but it means generating an API token and supplying a Google email address. Community members have written scraper tools, WorldAnvil-to-MD among them, specifically to get their worlds out into Obsidian.
New Quest
Export hands you the world and the manuscript, the book as a single Markdown file, whenever you ask. We never train on your work, and delete means delete.

Choosing

One of these is probably you.

Choose World Anvil if

You want your world to be somewhere readers can go. A browsable public site, serialised chapters, subscriber slots, Patreon and Kickstarter tie-ins, and spoilers hidden from specific readers paragraph by paragraph. New Quest does not do any of this and is not trying to.
You would rather pick a template than design a schema. Over twenty article types, family trees, diplomacy webs and layered interactive maps, all built already, is more structure than anyone else offers.
You run tabletop games alongside the fiction. World Anvil doubles as campaign management, and on that there is no contest at all.
The price matters more than the plumbing. Roughly $6.50 a month for the tier with Manuscripts, or a one-time lifetime membership, against $39 a month here. Over a decade that argument is very hard to answer.
You want the community and its calendar. Summer Camp and WorldEmber are seasonal events with real deadlines, and they produce real accountability and real word counts.
You are technical enough to run your own bridge. At Grandmaster rank you can get an API key and point one of the community MCP servers at your world yourself, which gets you a large share of what we sell for a fraction of what we charge, as long as you are willing to maintain it.

Go and look at World Anvil →

Choose New Quest if

You draft in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Cursor and you are tired of pasting your world in every session. The connection is a hosted URL with nothing installed anywhere, so it works from a phone as readily as from a laptop.
The series is long enough that entity counts matter. No caps on characters, locations, scenes or events, and no tier to climb because book four has a bigger cast than book one.
The numbers have to hold. Levels, XP, skills and inventory are structured data rather than prose, so you can ask what was true in chapter four and get the recorded value, or an honest admission that it was never recorded.
You want it private. Nothing is published, nothing is trained on, and your prose reaches a model only when you connect one, on your own account.
The book should live with the bible. Import from Word or Scrivener, keep the prose in the scenes, compile the whole thing to one Markdown file, export EPUB, and hand your narrator a pronunciation guide.
You want the memory layer, not another place to build a world. If you already have a wiki you love, this is the part it cannot do.

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

Five glass floorplans of a dungeon stacked one above another, a single gold pawn glowing on the middle layer, its light running down through every floor.

Questions

What people ask before switching.

World Anvil costs a fraction of what you do. Why is the gap worth it?

It is only worth it for one reason: your model can read a New Quest bible directly, and it cannot read a World Anvil one without you either pasting from it or running a community MCP server yourself. If you draft without an LLM, or you are happy pasting, World Anvil is more world for less money and you should take it. What the extra buys is never doing that pasting, plus LitRPG state that is tracked rather than typed into a field.

Can I move a world across?

Not in one click, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. There is no World Anvil importer. Getting a world out of World Anvil means an API token and a Google email address, or one of the community scraper tools like WorldAnvil-to-MD, and then you are pasting articles and chapters into New Quest by hand. For a large world that is real work. Start with the entities that appear in the next ten chapters and let the rest arrive when you need it.

Can I keep both?

Plenty of people should. They do different jobs: World Anvil is the world your readers visit, New Quest is the record your model consults while you draft. The cost is that you are maintaining two copies of the same facts, so decide which one is canonical before you start rather than after they disagree.

I already run one of the community MCP servers against the Boromir API. Do I need you?

Probably not yet. You have solved the main thing we sell. What you are carrying is a Grandmaster-tier requirement for the API key, a server nobody supports, and the risk that an API change breaks it mid-book. If that trade is fine with you, stay where you are. Come back if it stops being fine.

Will you publish my world to readers eventually?

There is nothing to announce, and it is not what the product is for. New Quest is private by default and points inward, at drafting. If a public world site is the thing you actually want, World Anvil already does it better than a roadmap promise from us ever would.