What is Final Draft?
Final Draft is professional screenwriting software that has been used for decades by Hollywood screenwriters, directors, producers, students, and aspiring writers to write movie scripts, television episodics, stageplays, novels, outlines, treatments, querying letters, and more. It is considered the industry standard software for scriptwriting.
Final Draft makes the scriptwriting process easier by including a number of useful tools to format scripts to industry standards, organize research, track revisions from others, generate detailed reports, create alternate dialogue versions for comparison, turn a script into a customizable beat board to map out stories, breakdown scripts for scheduling and budgeting, import/export between popular word processing programs and formats, and allow secure online collaboration and cloud backups of your work.
It has over 100 production-ready script templates for screenplays, TV shows, stageplays, comic books, documentaries, letters, outlines, treatments, and more. It formats as you type by applying margins, spacing, scene numbering, character names, dialogue, action blocks, page breaks, etc. automatically to industry standards like screenplay format, TV format, or stage play format.
Final Draft also has dedicated writing views like Beat Board, Index Cards, Story Map, Alternate Dialogue, and Text to Speech to provide different approaches for brainstorming ideas, organizing them visually, and fleshing out full scripts step-by-step. It has hundreds of SmartType shortcuts for fast insertion of general, character, and transition elements into your script.
There are revision tracking tools comparing drafts from you or other collaborators with color coding and linked navigation between edits. It can generate reports summarizing script statistics like word counts by character, locations, scenes, tags, parentheticals, dialogue, and action. Final Draft allows securing your script for online collaboration with limited access to control who can review, comment on, and edit the hosted script.
Scrivener, Celtx, yWriter, Trelby, Hemingway Editor, Story Planner for Writers, Manuskript, Storyist, Story Plotter, Amazon Storywriter, Scriptware, Story Architect (STARC), Notion Story Wiki, CopyWrite, Bookwiz, Arc Studio Pro, Highland, Slugline, Fade In, Plotbot, Shaxpir, Mariner Persona, WriterDuet, Pagefour, SetKeeper, StoryMill, Adobe Story, Outline 4D, Page 2 Stage, Practical Scriptwriter, Script it!, Logline, Wordslingr, Chunks are some alternatives to Final Draft.