Comparison
Best D&D session recorders in 2026
Ten tools that record a tabletop session and turn it into something you can read afterwards — transcripts, notes, recaps, artwork. Some are Discord bots, one is a phone app, one only takes uploads, and one does no AI at all and is still the best answer for a lot of tables.
See everything Daria does →1. DariaNot yet released
- Best for:
- Discord tables who want the campaign searchable, not just summarised
- Free tier:
- Trial only
- From:
- No public pricing yet
Daria treats the recording as the beginning rather than the deliverable. She joins your Discord voice channel and records every speaker on their own track, then turns the evening into a transcript, summaries, a scene-by-scene breakdown and artwork of the moments that mattered, in the campaign’s choice of art style. What she is built around is what happens afterwards: ask her anything about the campaign and every answer arrives with its sources — the session, the scene, the document — as links you can open. She also reads a Craig share link and ordinary audio files, so a campaign that started before her still gets the same treatment, and her Foundry VTT module writes your dice rolls into the transcript at the second they happened — which is a different job from the entity sync Archivist’s Foundry module does. Like Archivist and CharGen, she exposes an MCP server, so Claude can read the campaign directly.
2. Craig
- Best for:
- Anyone who just wants clean audio, free, forever
- Free tier:
- Yes
- From:
- $1/mo
Craig is a recorder and nothing else — no transcription, no summaries, no notes — and it is the best one here by a distance. It captures each speaker to a separate track with no limit on how many people are in the channel, exports to FLAC, AAC or an Audacity project, and lets you start downloading before the session has even finished. The catch is the one thing to remember about it: recordings are kept for seven days and then they are gone, so somebody has to actually download them. If what you want is the raw audio to edit into a podcast, or to feed into one of the tools below, start here and stop here.
3. Goblin Scribe
- Best for:
- Discord groups who want a recap with art before the next game
- Free tier:
- Yes
- From:
- $8/mo
The closest thing on this list to what Daria does. Goblin Scribe joins your voice channel, records the session, and drops an AI-written recap with generated scene art back into Discord — and the art is on every tier, including the free one. It notices NPCs, locations and quests as they come up and stages them for the DM to approve into a campaign wiki, so the world builds itself out of what you actually played. The wiki and the ask-it-anything lore recall are one bundled feature in the vendor’s own pricing, and that bundle sits above the entry plan; below it you still get the recap and the picture.
4. The DM's ARK
- Best for:
- Transcripts and recaps on the smallest budget
- Free tier:
- Trial only
- From:
- $6/mo
The cheapest way here to get a real transcript out of a Discord game. The ARK bot listens in your voice channel and transcribes as you play, tagging each speaker to their Discord name, then writes a summary with editable highlights and files everything into a searchable compendium you can ask questions of. It takes uploaded audio too, if your table records some other way. Players never pay — one DM subscription covers everybody at the table — and the entry plan covers a single campaign, with document uploads and further campaigns above it.
5. Crit Scribbler
- Best for:
- Tables that never want to leave Discord
- Free tier:
- Yes
- From:
- $10/mo
Crit Scribbler is built on the principle that nobody should have to alt-tab: it listens in Discord, and the notes come back in Discord. Its free tier is the most generous among the AI note-takers here — session titles, summarised recaps, memorable quotes, full notes and transcript downloads, without paying anything — which makes it the easiest of them to simply try on your next game. Paid tiers add DM-only notes and character images, and it works with Pathfinder, Daggerheart and Call of Cthulhu as readily as with D&D.
6. Archivist AI
- Best for:
- Long campaigns that want a whole platform around them
- Free tier:
- Trial only
- From:
- $10/mo
The most feature-complete product here, and the one that behaves least like a bot and most like a service. Archivist takes a live Discord recording, an uploaded file, or notes you paste in, and turns them into recaps, a campaign wiki, a timeline and per-character arcs, with an analytics layer on top that will tell you things about your own campaign you had not noticed. Every plan carries unlimited player seats, so the whole table reads it for what the GM pays. It also connects outward further than most: an official MCP server, an official Foundry VTT module that syncs characters, items and locations both ways, Obsidian, Notion and a REST API. Of the tools here with a stated session cap, it is the steepest entry point in what you pay per session — the honest trade for the breadth.
7. CharGen
- Best for:
- Groups who want one Discord bot to do absolutely everything
- Free tier:
- Yes
- From:
- £8/mo
Recording is one feature inside a very large Discord toolkit — CharGen also rolls dice, tracks initiative, and generates NPCs, monsters, taverns, shops and art from a long list of models. It transcribes live with speaker diarization and handles a great many languages. Two things to understand before comparing it on cost: it bills in credits rather than in sessions, with transcription charged by the hour at a quality level you pick, and it prices in pounds. That makes a like-for-like monthly figure genuinely hard to state, so check its pricing page against your own table’s hours rather than trusting any single number. It also runs an MCP server of its own, which reads your campaign free on every account including the free tier.
8. Saga20
- Best for:
- Campaigns that want the same voices recognised session after session
- Free tier:
- Yes
- From:
- $12.99/mo
Saga20’s distinguishing trick is voice recognition that carries across sessions, so the same players are identified game after game instead of being re-labelled every time. Around that sits a campaign wiki, character sheets, player claiming and shareable campaign pages that you can hand to the table. Unlimited campaigns and unlimited text-only sessions come with every plan including the free one, so a GM running several games is not paying per world — the metering is on the sessions you have summarised.
9. Tabletop Arc
- Best for:
- Tables that already record somewhere else and want the memory layer
- Free tier:
- Yes
- From:
- $9/mo
Tabletop Arc takes uploads — that is how it describes itself, and there is no bot to invite. What you get for handing it a file is a transcript, an episode recap, continuity notes written for the GM, and a "Lore Wall" that keeps the campaign’s canon in sync as sessions accumulate. It is deliberately system-agnostic and does not try to read your rules. A feature worth calling out: outputs are marked GM-private or player-safe, so you can publish the campaign to your players without publishing the parts they should not see yet.
10. SessionKeeper
- Best for:
- In-person tables recording from a phone in the middle of the table
- Free tier:
- Yes
- From:
- $3.99/mo
Mobile-first, and the product most clearly built around a game where everybody is in the same room: SessionKeeper records through the device’s own microphone, so the recorder is the phone sitting between the dice trays. It writes summaries, generates character portraits, tracks achievements and builds a campaign wiki, with DM tools on the upper plans. There is a Discord bot as well for the weeks when somebody dials in, though that arrives on a higher tier rather than the entry one.
Daria isn’t out yet
She records your Discord voice channel, keeps every session searchable, and answers questions about your campaign with the sources attached. Join the community server and we’ll tell you the moment she’s ready.
Get Pinged at LaunchAll product names, logos and brands are the property of their respective owners, and are named here to compare them. Daria is an independent service, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for any of the products on this page.