The DM’s ARK vs DM Scribe: speaker tags against a free tier

The numbers, with sources

How we sourced this: The DM’s ARK has no dedicated pricing page — thedmsark.com/pricing returns 404 — so every figure above was re-read from its homepage on 2026-09-07, which is where its plan table lives. No annual pricing is quoted because none is shown. Hour or session allowances are not quoted either: the plans are described by active-campaign count and features, with no usage cap stated, and inventing one to make a tidier comparison table would be exactly the thing these pages exist to avoid. The speaker-tagging row records what the site advertises; we have not independently tested its accuracy and do not claim to have.

They tag speakers. We do not.

The DM’s ARK advertises speaker-tagged transcripts. We do not do speaker labelling at all — our transcript is the words, in order, without attribution — and we say so on every page where it could matter rather than leaving you to find out.

How much this is worth depends on what you do with the transcript. For a recap, attribution barely matters: what happened is what matters, and who narrated it rarely changes the summary. For an actual-play show pulling quotes, for settling who agreed to what, or for a table where one player’s arc is the point, it matters a great deal.

There is also a free way to get attribution with either tool, which is worth knowing before paying for it: record per-speaker tracks at source. Craig does this on Discord by default and Zoom will do it with one setting turned on.

The price shapes are genuinely different

The DM’s ARK runs $6 a month for one active campaign, $10 for three plus document uploads, and $15 for unlimited campaigns and the full Compendium. Every plan starts with a 30-day free trial, and their site states there is no free tier after it. Players get access free; only the DM pays. Our posture is close but not identical: players browse a shared wiki link without accounts or payment, and publishing that link needs our $7.99 tier.

We are $7.99 for 10 hours a month and $14.99 for 30, with campaigns uncapped on both, plus a free plan of 2.5 hours a month that does not expire and 3 bonus hours at signup.

So their entry point is cheaper than ours by $1.99, while the top tiers land within a cent of each other ($15 against $14.99). What the difference buys on our side is the permanent free tier and a stated hour allowance; what it buys on theirs is a $6 way in for a one-campaign table. Their plans state no usage cap — campaign count is the axis — but we have not found a published limit either way, so we will not guess one for them. If $6 for one campaign is the shape of your table, that is a real advantage and we would rather tell you here than have you find it out after signing up.

What the two products actually overlap on

Almost everything else, at least at the level of description. Both record from Discord or an uploaded file (their site lists MP3, WAV, M4A and FLAC; we also take video containers like MP4, MOV and MKV and pull the audio track out), both produce automatic recaps, both track NPCs, locations and items into a browsable reference, and both let you ask questions of your own campaign history — their "Ask Scribe" against our Ask Your Campaign (every plan has it; the daily question allowance is 5 free, 50 on Dungeon Master, 200 on Guild Master).

Where a genuine difference exists in that overlap, it is in what we do to transcription before it runs: we build a prompt from your campaign’s own glossary, character names and nicknames so invented proper nouns stay consistent between sessions. The DM’s ARK describes its transcription as tuned for D&D vocabulary, monster names and spell names — which is a real and similar idea, but a general D&D vocabulary and your specific campaign’s vocabulary are not the same thing, and only one of them knows your NPC is called Thordak.

We have not tested either product’s output against the other and are not going to claim ours is more accurate. That is exactly the sort of comparative capability claim this site does not make without evidence.