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Final Draft Review

Professional screenwriting software at a premium price

editors choice horizontal
4.5
Outstanding
By Jill Duffy

The Bottom Line

Final Draft is the best writing software for anyone in the screenwriting business. It has all the tools you need to get the script right, from both a story and technical perspective.

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Pros

  • Well-tailored for screenwriters
  • Powerful tools for both writing scenes and crafting the larger story
  • Plenty of view options
  • Offers a variety of industry-standard templates
  • Good collaboration features

Cons

  • Best autosave option is once every three minutes
  • Expensive

Professional screenwriters use Final Draft, and you should too, if that's your field. The app has smart auto-suggestions for formatting your work to industry standards. It compiles lists of characters and scene locations automatically. A Beat Board feature replicates the old notecard approach to arranging scenes, and a Story Map helps keep the story on target for pacing and script length. Among writing apps, Final Draft is one of the most expensive products you can buy, but it's worth the price and sells for a one-time fee rather than as a recurring subscription. Final Draft is a PCMag Editors' Choice winner for screenwriting software and one of the best apps for writers in general.

If you're not primarily a screenwriter, other apps are worth investigating because they have some advantages for novelists and book authors. Our favorites among them are Scrivener, which is available for both Windows and macOS and the Mac-only Ulysses. They're also Editors' Choice winners. Beyond those, there are wonderful, inexpensive writing apps that are perfectly suitable for shorter and less structured content, such as articles and marketing copy. When you need help organizing and formatting large amounts of content, however, Final Draft, Scrivener, and Ulysses are the best writing apps on the market.

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What's New in Final Draft 12?

As of version 12, Final Draft has a few new and noteworthy features, as well as significant improvements to the Beat Board, ScriptNotes, and the Outline Editor.

Three features worth highlighting are 1) Focus Mode, 2) Track Changes, and 3) a PDF import tool. Focus Mode lets you minimize distractions while working on your script. Track Changes primarily makes the collaboration options in Final Draft better. It works much like other apps that offer Track Changes, with different colors tracking changes of different collaborators, the ability to accept and reject changes individually or globally, and so forth. The PDF import tool lets you upload a PDF and convert it to editable text. When you upload PDFs of screenplays and other scripts, Final Draft interprets the formatting, too. I tested this feature and it worked very well, with only minimal cleanup needed. 

As mentioned, the Beat Board, ScriptNotes, and Outline Editor all received updates as well. They range from the practical, such as a spellcheck in the Beat Board, to more stylistic, such as having ScriptNotes appear as flags on the page which open when you click them.

Final Draft primary

How Much Does Final Draft Cost?

Final Draft is available for macOS and Windows ($249), with a version called Final Draft Mobile available as an iPad app and an iPhone app (both for $9.99). There's no Android app. The desktop software is not cheap, but the good news is that with a purchase, you can install Final Draft on two machines. Additionally, there are discounts for students, and sometimes the app goes on sale for around $199. Mind you, these are one-time fees and not recurring subscription costs. You buy the software once and own it for life, though you will have to pay for upgrades once every few years if you want them.

You can install Final Draft and try it for 30 days without providing a credit card. If you buy the app, you get a license code via email that you enter the next time you launch it.

The iPad and iPhone apps sell separately, and you can access your scripts through it when you save them to Dropbox or iCloud (you can also get them via email, which is a less elegant solution). It's worth adding the mobile app if you're the type of writer who prefers to jot down ideas and notes directly into your scripts rather than in a separate note-taking app

How Does Final Draft's Price Compare?

Final Draft's $249 sticker price might induce sticker shock for some. Frankly, it's more expensive than any other writing app I've reviewed.

Fade In, for example, costs only $79.95, and it's available for all major platforms and Linux. The mobile apps cost $4.99. Similar to Final Draft, Fade In focuses on screenplay writing. It has many of the same tools as Final Draft, including index cards, collaboration, and the ability to upload PDFs of scripts and have them converted to an editable script form.

Most other writing apps charge less for their desktop editions, but more for their mobile apps. Scrivener, for example, costs $49 for the Windows or macOS app and $19.99 for the iPhone and iPad apps. Those are one-time fees. 

Ulysses' price has gone up in recent years and now costs $49.99 per year or $5.99 per month (which works out to about $72 per year). The iPhone and iPad apps are included. 

There are less expensive writing apps, but they aren't nearly as sophisticated as any of the ones mentioned so far. iA Writer, for instance, is much cheaper at $29.99 (macOS, Windows), although its apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android cost an additional $29.99 each. That said, iA Writer is positioned as a distraction-free writing tool, and it doesn't have much to it. There are no libraries, beat boards, storyboards, character sheets, or other tools for organizing your writing. It's more of a typing app, really, with a few neat features and export capabilities.

WriteRoom is an extremely inexpensive app at just $9.99, and—like IA Writer—it aims to eliminate distractions. It lets you type to your heart's content in a minimalist editor, though it's only available for macOS.

Final Draft dark mode script notes

Final Draft Basics

Final Draft's strength is that it helps screenwriters format their scripts to industry standards. In the film and television industries, everyone on the production needs to be able to look at a script and immediately know what's a line of dialogue, versus action, versus a description of a shot, and so forth. It's all done through formatting. 

For example, before a line of dialogue is the name of the speaking character in all caps and centered. Scene settings are written using standard abbreviations, like INT. for interior and EXT. for exterior. Final Draft makes it dead simple to get this formatting right.

As you type, Final Draft intuits what type of line you're writing and offers appropriate suggestions for both formatting and auto-fill. For example, let's say two characters, Liz and Jack, have both spoken one line to each other. Final Draft might guess that there will be another line of dialogue back because it's Liz's turn to respond. The app will automatically center your next line and use all caps to suggest "LIZ." If that's right, you can hit enter to accept it and move along. If the suggestion is incorrect, you can keep typing the correct information and format it appropriately using a selector that's always available at the bottom of the screen.

As you type character names and format them, Final Draft knows they are characters and then compiles them into a list, which appears in a separate window. This window, called the Navigator, contains other metadata the app compiles automatically, too, such as a list of scene settings. You can add non-speaking characters to the list of people who appear in the scene since those roles aren't added automatically. 

Additionally, you can customize the Navigator to give more detailed information, such as the pages on which different characters have dialogue. You can also write notes about each scene and have them appear there. 

Final Draft outline scene descriptions

More Features for Screenwriters

Another selling point of Final Draft for professional screenwriters is that it has specific templates to help you get started. Do you need to format your script in the traditional Cole and Haag style, or do you want to use the Warner Brothers format? If you're working in the genre of musical theater, you'll have different needs, and those can be met with the Dramatists Guild Musical template. There are templates for a half-hour sitcom, a one-hour TV drama, a novel, and even a few types of graphic novels.

Final Draft has areas within the app for crafting the work structurally, too. The Story Map and Beat Board features give you room to play around with structure, scene order, and pace.

The Story Map shows up as a timeline in the toolbar, just above the standard ruler you might see in any word processing application. The Story Map shows the length of your script in pages, as well as your current position among those pages. The Beat Board replicates what screenwriters sometimes do with note cards on a corkboard. You jot out scene summaries on cards (in Final Draft, they're auto-generated from what you've already typed), and you move them around until you lock down their order.

We like how the Beat Board and Story Map can work together. Let's say you need to make sure that the first twist in your plot occurs by the seventh page. From the Beat Board, you can drag a scene card up to page seven in the Story Map timeline to mark that goal.

Another neat feature, created with comedy writers in mind, lets you add alternative dialogue for any line. You can save multiple options that you want to try out when editing, during a table read, or when shooting. When you save more than one option for a line in Final Draft, you see a small number noted next to the line. Arrows let you read the options. Plus and Minus icons let you add more options or delete existing ones.

Final Draft offers plenty of options for how you can view your script. As mentioned, the Story Map timeline appears in the toolbar; you also have the option to hide it. Split screen views, which let you write in one window while referring to other parts of your script in a second window, can be either vertical or horizontal. There are also other views that let you see the pages with or without page numbers, page breaks, and other components.

Final Draft Navigator

Collaboration With Final Cut

Very few writing apps support collaboration, but Final Draft does. If you work with a writer partner or even as part of a writing team, collaboration features are not only desirable; they're necessary. 

Final Draft's support for collaboration has improved considerably in recent releases. It's now much more similar to what you find in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or any other office app that offers real-time co-writing and editing.

To collaborate, everyone must own a copy of Final Draft. One person starts a session by opening a script (or starting a new one) and generating a session ID. That lead author then has to share the session ID with the other collaborators for them to join. When more than one person has joined the session, a chat box appears for communication, with a unique color next to each person's name. That color will then correspond to their cursor as they edit. If you want to review everyone's edits before accepting or rejecting them, the lead author must enable Track Changes, as it isn't on by default.

The chatbox lets everyone communicate while editing and reading together. A refresh button lets the lead author (and only the lead author) force a sync to all collaborators' screens, which is a fail-safe if changes don't appear for someone.

You can collaborate on Script Notes and in the Beat Board, although not quite in real-time. When one collaborator creates a new note in either area, that note is locked until they finish and close it out. Then, other collaborators can read and edit it.

Compared to how the collaboration tools worked in past editions of Final Draft, version 12 represents a remarkable improvement. 

Autosave and Revision History

The way Final Draft handles saves and autosaves is one of the areas where it most needs to improve. 

An auto-save function is on by default, but it saves only every 15 minutes. The best you can do with the auto-save function, which is in Preferences, is configure it to back up your work every three minutes. That's still weak compared with other business apps for writing, including plain old word processors, that sync or backup your work with every keystroke.

If you want to retrieve revision histories, make sure the auto-backup feature is enabled. It saves a copy of your work to a local folder on your computer every few minutes, and you can adjust the number of backups it creates (1,000 is the default). If you want to restore one, you have to open that file separately. 

Ulysses and iA Writer both have better version history features that let you easily see and restore previous copies of your work without leaving the app interface.

The Best Writing App for Screenwriters

You should own a copy of Final Draft if you are actively working (or seeking work) as a creator in the world of film and television. You could look into lower-cost alternatives such as Fade In or Scrivener, which also has templates for screenplays, if you're writing but not making any money from it yet. Final Draft is the best app we've tested for screenwriting due to its smart tools for formatting your work to professional specifications. It also offers spaces to help you craft stories, like the Story Map and Beat Board. It's not a perfect app, but it's definitely in the top three among software for writers and a clear Editors' Choice winner for screenwriting.

If screenwriting isn't your primary gig, Scrivener and Ulysses, our other Editors' Choice-winning writing apps, may be more palatable options because they cost one-fifth of the price and have all the right tools for writing novels, short stories, and other genres.

Final Draft
4.5
Editors' Choice
Pros
  • Well-tailored for screenwriters
  • Powerful tools for both writing scenes and crafting the larger story
  • Plenty of view options
  • Offers a variety of industry-standard templates
  • Good collaboration features
View More
Cons
  • Best autosave option is once every three minutes
  • Expensive
The Bottom Line

Final Draft is the best writing software for anyone in the screenwriting business. It has all the tools you need to get the script right, from both a story and technical perspective.

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About Jill Duffy

Columnist and Deputy Managing Editor, Software

I've been contributing to PCMag since 2011 and am currently the deputy managing editor for the software team. My column, Get Organized, has been running on PCMag since 2012. It gives advice on how to manage all the devices, apps, digital photos, email, and other technology that can make you feel like you're going to have a panic attack.

My latest book is The Everything Guide to Remote Work, which goes into great detail about a subject that I've been covering as a writer and participating in personally since well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

I specialize in apps for productivity and collaboration, including project management software. I also test and analyze online learning services, particularly for learning languages.

Prior to working for PCMag, I was the managing editor of Game Developer magazine. I've also worked at the Association for Computing Machinery, The Examiner newspaper in San Francisco, and The American Institute of Physics. I was once profiled in an article in Vogue India alongside Marie Kondo.

Follow me on Mastodon.

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