DebateCardAI vs haku.cards: Which Debate Tool Should You Use?
Prices and features checked July 28, 2026 and rechecked against haku.cards on July 30, 2026. We build DebateCardAI.
haku is a search engine over cards other debaters already cut, and it is a good one. Their index is 3.5 million cards from openCaselist, 2013 to 2026, across hspolicy, hsld, nfald, hspf, and ndtceda.
We have that too. Ours is called Logos, it holds about a million cards from the same wiki, and it is free on every account. The difference is that for haku the search is the product, and for us it is one tool of about a dozen.
Our position, plainly: the index size difference is mostly years, and we think years are the wrong thing to buy. Topics repeat, so the same card gets recut and redisclosed season after season, and a 2013-2026 index means more near-identical versions of the card you already found, not more coverage. Logos stays focused on the recent seasons where the live evidence is, re-ingests weekly, and is free and uncapped on every account, including block search, which they meter. And once you have the card, we think nothing else in this category comes close to what we do next with it.
So the real question is whether you need a better front end on openCaselist, or the cards that are not on openCaselist yet.
Feature by feature
| haku.cards | DebateCardAI | |
|---|---|---|
| Wiki card search | 3.5M indexed | 1M+, free |
| Filter by tournament and round | yes | no |
| Filter by year, event, school, side | yes | yes |
| Search by argument, not keyword | full-argument block search | Deep Search |
| Pull a whole A2 block at once | yes, 4/month free then $4.99 | yes, free and uncapped |
| Search from inside Claude | not advertised | MCP connector |
| Card cutter | paste, URL, or PDF; 2/month free | three modes |
| Finds new sources on the open web | not advertised | Evidence Finder |
| Condense cards for reading | not advertised | Rhetorify |
| Write a full speech | not advertised | Speechify |
| Build A2 blocks | not advertised | Block Builder |
| Judge prep | Judge Prefs, ranks a judge pool | no |
| Shared team libraries | yes, with live collab | no |
| Speech and prep timer | yes | no |
| Reformat an existing card | yes | no |
| Tournament math | not advertised | Bracket Math |
| Look up a debater | not advertised | Debater Search |
| Chrome extension | not advertised | yes |
| Free plan | unlimited search, 4 block searches and 2 cuts a month | unlimited search and blocks, 5 cuts a day |
| Paid plan | $4.99/mo | $8.99/mo |
"Not advertised" means we could not find it on their public pages on the date above, not that it does not exist. If we have missed something, tell us and we will fix the row.
What haku does better
Their filters. You can narrow by year, event, school, team, side, tournament, and round, and the last two are the ones we do not have. If the job is "find the neg card this specific team read in round 4 at this specific tournament," haku gets you there and we do not.
Their index is also larger, and they are honest about what it is. Both of our numbers describe openCaselist, the public wiki where teams disclose what they read, maintained by Aaron Hardy alongside Verbatim. Neither of us has a secret stash, and most of the big card counts in this category are the same wiki counted differently.
They also ship a Judge Prefs tool that saves judge preferences and automatically ranks any judge pool. We do not do judge prep at all. Our Bracket Math and Debater Search are tournament-day tools about the other team, not about the person voting, so they are not a substitute.
Their Pro plan also includes shared libraries with live collaboration, a card reformatter for cleaning up cards you already have, and a speech and prep timer. We have none of the three. If your team wants to prep in a shared file together, that is a straightforward reason to use haku.
And they are cheaper. Their Pro is $4.99 a month against our $8.99, so if the job is searching the wiki and cutting the occasional card, they will cost you less than we do. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
Where we go further
Block search without the meter. Both of us let you pull a whole answers-to file in one query instead of collecting cards one at a time. Theirs is 4 block searches a month on the free plan and unlimited on the $4.99 tier; ours is unlimited on every account including the free one. If block search is how you actually prep, that is the difference, and it is a difference in the bill rather than in the feature.
Searching by argument, card by card. Deep Search takes the argument as you would say it ("I need a card saying deterrence prevents war") and finds individual cards that make it regardless of how the tagline was worded, with a line on each result explaining the match. haku advertises full-argument search at the block level; we have not seen them describe the same thing for single-card retrieval, but we would rather you test both than take our word for it.
Cards nobody has cut. The wiki is a ceiling. Evidence Finder takes a claim with no source behind it, searches the web and academic databases, ranks results by how cuttable they are, and cuts the card. Those are also the cards your opponent has never seen.
Cutting. One card from a URL, a batch you approve as it lands, or a queue you start and review at the end, with style and highlight density as settings so the card comes out shaped for your panel. Cutting is the part we have built hardest, and if you want a card cut to your argument we think we are the best option in this category. Test it on one article and you will know.
After you find it. Rhetorify strips cards to what you say out loud, in your browser, no AI, nothing metered. Speechify writes the whole constructive or rebuttal from the stack. Block Builder walks from a strategy chat to a finished block. Search to card to speech in one place is the pipeline, and it is the strongest reason we would point a searcher our way.
In Claude. Our connector lets Claude search the card library mid-conversation and hand back real disclosed cards with source URLs.
Which one
Pick haku if your prep runs on the wiki, if you want the deepest tournament and round filters available, if your team wants a shared library to prep in together, or if $4.99 against $8.99 decides it.
Pick DebateCardAI if you need cards nobody has cut, if you want search that understands the argument rather than the wording, or if you want cutting, speech, and block prep connected to the search.
Both works fine. Search theirs for what exists, cut ours for what does not.
Switching
Nothing to migrate; cards are text. Paste them into our library or Rhetorify and they work.
The fastest test is to run the same argument through both searches and see which one hands you the card you were actually looking for. Takes five minutes and beats reading either of our marketing pages.
Try DebateCardAI free or read the 2026 tool guide.