Cadrage Studio and CineLog get compared because both start from a script, both split it into scenes, and both hang a shot list and storyboards off every scene. And both work with no signal at all, which is rare enough in this category that people notice. So the feature list tells you less than usual. What I usually like to do is pick on the shape of the production instead, because a director and a DP prepping a short on two iPads and a twelve-day feature with a crew of 25 lose things in completely different places, and these two tools are built around those two shapes. So if you got here by searching for a Cadrage Studio alternative, or for apps like Cadrage Studio, this is the long answer.
One thing before we start. Everything in here was checked on November 2, 2026. The CineLog side against the app itself, version 1.5.6. The Cadrage side against their App Store listing, their site and the launch coverage from July, because Cadrage Studio shipped on July 13, 2026, and it’s still young. Prices are from the US App Store on that day. Both tools ship changes every month, so read every number as correct on that date and check the pricing pages again before you decide.
Short summary
CineLog is the pick when the plan has to leave the director’s desk. When the script is still changing and somebody needs locked pages and pink revisions. When the AD needs a stripboard and the crew needs a call sheet every night. When half the crew is on Windows or Android. And when more than two people change the plan, because CineLog puts the whole crew on one project for one price, with every tool from the script to the call sheet in one chain, and it works offline too.
Cadrage Studio is a director’s prep kit. You drop a script PDF in, it finds the scenes and the characters, and every scene gets a shot list, a storyboard, a camera diagram on a floor plan you can scan with the phone, and notes. It runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac, it keeps the project in your own iCloud, and it works fully offline. That’s the job it does, and the people who built the viewfinder most of us already have on our phones built it.
Those two paragraphs are the article. Everything below is the reason for it.
Let’s put a real production on the table
So we’re not talking in the abstract, let’s invent one. Let’s call it Harbor. It’s a scripted feature, about 90 pages, twelve shooting days, a crew of 25. Four locations, and two of them are out of town where phones drop to one bar. Six people need to change things in the plan. That’s the director, the first AD, the DP, the producer, the script supervisor and the production designer. The other nineteen need to get a call sheet every night and open it in the morning. We’ll come back to Harbor in every section, because the numbers only mean something on a real crew.
When CineLog is the pick
| Production shape | Why CineLog |
|---|---|
| A scripted shoot of two to twenty days, like Harbor | Script, breakdown, strips, shot list and call sheets are one chain, and the whole crew is on it for one price. |
| A script that keeps changing after the lock | Locked scene numbers and pages, A-pages, OMITTED scenes, the standard revision colors and a revised-pages-only PDF. |
| A crew on mixed devices | Native apps on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android, plus the browser, with the project on every device. |
| An AD who needs the day on paper by tonight | A stripboard with day breaks, and a call sheet that starts from the schedule day with the weather and the hospital already on it. |
| Six people changing the plan, nineteen reading it | Roles with view or edit rights per tool, and nobody buys a seat. |
Head to head
Prices are in US dollars, checked November 2, 2026. CineLog is cheaper on an annual plan. Cadrage’s yearly price is already the discounted one.
| Cadrage Studio | CineLog | |
|---|---|---|
| Script editor | No, import only | Yes |
| Script import | PDF, scenes and characters detected | .fdx, Fountain, PDF, RTF, text, with a diff on re-import |
| New draft of the script | Re-import matches scenes, archives omitted ones | Scene-by-scene diff, breakdown and shot list survive |
| Locked pages and revision colors | No | Yes, scene and page lock, A-pages, omitted scenes, revised-pages-only export |
| Breakdown | Tags on a scene | Yes, tagged from the script text into twelve categories, cast numbered for you |
| Stripboard | No | Yes, with day breaks, a boneyard and a board PDF |
| Shot list | Yes, per scene, custom columns, linked to the diagram | Yes, in script order and per production day, seventeen columns plus your own |
| Camera diagrams and floor plans | Yes, to scale, from a LiDAR scan or by hand | No |
| Storyboards | Yes, one image per shot in the screenshots, no drawing tool stated | Yes, several frames per shot, no drawing tool |
| Mood boards and locations | Yes, images, video, links, LiDAR scans | No mood boards, locations with address, parking and hospital |
| Call sheets | No | Yes, by email, with delivered, opened, confirmed and bounced per person |
| Cast and crew directory | No, characters only | Yes, with roles and permissions |
| AV script | No | Yes, with a client review link |
| Works offline | Yes, syncs through your iCloud | Yes, up to seven days, syncs in the background |
| Platforms | iPhone, iPad, Mac, on OS 26 or later | macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, plus the browser |
| Collaboration | iCloud invite link, limits not stated | Free collaborators with view or edit rights per tool |
| Price | $19.99 a month or $99.99 a year | Free plan, then $15, $40 or $90 a month |
Six things I compare, in order
There are six things I compare when I look at tools like these, and those are the script and its revisions, the breakdown and the schedule, the shot list and the storyboards, the call sheet, where you can actually use the thing, and who pays. I go in that order because that’s the order a scripted production moves in. Everybody weighs these differently, so if the shot list is 80% of your job, skip to that section and come back.
The script and its revisions
The first thing is the script, because on a scripted production the script is where every other document starts.
Cadrage Studio takes the script as a PDF. It finds the scene headings and the characters on its own, and that’s what builds the scene list everything else hangs off. When a new draft comes in, you import it again, and the app matches the scenes it already knows, flags the new ones and archives the ones that went away, so your shot lists and diagrams stay attached to the right scenes. That’s a good piece of work, and it’s the part a director cares about most. What Cadrage doesn’t do is edit the script, and it doesn’t claim to. There’s no revision mode, no page colors, no locked numbers. The script is a reference you read inside the scene.
CineLog has a full editor, and it imports .fdx, Fountain, PDF, RTF and plain text. The second import is where it earns its keep, because CineLog shows the new draft as a diff against what you already have, scene by scene, and you accept what changed. Your breakdown and your shot list stay where they were. And once you lock the script, it does the real production thing. A new scene between 12 and 13 becomes 12A. A new page after 16 becomes 16A. A cut scene prints as OMITTED and keeps its number for good. Every revision round gets its color, the changed lines get their asterisks, and you can export only the revised pages on that color, because that’s what goes out to the crew on a Tuesday night.
So for Harbor, where the script gets locked about two weeks before day one and then revised every few days, Cadrage keeps the director’s shot lists attached to the right scenes. CineLog does that and hands the AD the pink pages with the page numbers still true.
The breakdown and the schedule
Now that the script is in, the next thing is the breakdown and the schedule, and this is where the two tools stop overlapping.
Cadrage Studio has tags on a scene. You can mark a scene with a word and filter the scene list, the mood boards and the locations by it, and that’s as far as it goes. There is no breakdown by element, no cast numbering, no stripboard and no shooting day. Cadrage is built for the creative prep, and the schedule lives somewhere else.
CineLog does the breakdown by selecting text in the script and picking one of twelve categories, and it marks the page with the underline, the circle, the asterisk and the box that people know from paper breakdowns. The thing I like most is what happens with cast. CineLog tags every character on every line they speak, gives each one a numbered talent slot, and that number sits on the strip and lands in the cast grid on the call sheet. You tag once. It shows up everywhere. The stripboard has day breaks, a boneyard for the scenes you haven’t placed yet, the standard strip colors for interior, exterior, day and night, and it lets you split a scene across two days, because that’s how real days go. A finished day flows straight into that day’s call sheet, and the board exports as a PDF. What CineLog doesn’t print yet is the day out of days report, so if you need one you’re building it in a spreadsheet from the strips.
For Harbor, twelve days and 25 people, the AD needs the board, and that’s CineLog. Cadrage never enters this part of the job.
Shot lists and storyboards
Now that the days are laid out, the next thing is the shot list, and this is where Cadrage is at home.
Cadrage Studio builds the shot list inside each scene, with the shots numbered by scene, 42.1, 42.2 and so on, a set of predefined columns and your own on top. Every shot links to the scene’s camera diagram, so you place the camera, the actors, the lights and the set pieces to scale on a floor plan, and the shot list and the diagram agree. The floor plan can be drawn by hand or scanned with the phone’s LiDAR, and that scan-to-diagram workflow is the thing the first reviews praised. The storyboard view shows an image per shot with an aspect ratio picker, and the scene exports as a PDF with the mood boards and locations attached, so each department gets a clean packet.
CineLog runs two shot lists off the same shots, a linear one in script order and one per production day, with seventeen default columns, your own columns on top, and your own dropdown values for shot type, angle, lens and movement. You can populate the first pass of the list from the script and then reorder by drag, whole scenes at a time. The Cast & Crew column shows the cast by the same numbers the schedule uses, so one look tells you who’s in the shot. Each shot holds several storyboard frames, and the shot list PDF prints the frames next to the rows. What CineLog doesn’t have is a camera diagram or a floor plan, and it has no drawing tool. You bring the frames in as images, from a sketch, a photo or a previs render.
So on this section, the two are honestly close, and they’re good at different halves. Cadrage draws the floor and places the camera. CineLog puts the shot list in day order and ties it to the cast, the schedule and the call sheet. For Harbor, the DP wants the shot list on an iPad at the location scout, and the scout has no signal. Both tools survive that. Only one of them also has the AD’s day on it.
Call sheets
The next thing is the call sheet, and this is the document the whole crew judges the tool by, because it’s the only part nineteen of our 25 people will ever see.
Cadrage Studio doesn’t make call sheets, and the site doesn’t say it does. The people outside your Apple devices get a scene PDF, which is the right thing for a department packet and not the thing that tells a grip what time to be where.
CineLog’s call sheet pulls the day from the stripboard and the shot list, so the schedule block is a live copy of the day and not a re-typed one. It fills the weather and the sunrise and sunset from the location and the date, it carries the nearest hospital on each location, and it autocompletes the addresses. It sends a personal PDF to each person by email, and for every person you see delivered, opened, confirmed or bounced. And the night before day five, the sheet for day five starts from what day four already knew, because most productions shoot the same place several days in a row, and re-typing the parking notes every night is the part that wears an AD down by week two.
For Harbor, that’s nineteen people who need a sheet every night. CineLog sends it. With Cadrage, the AD is in another tool.
Where you can actually use it
Now that we’ve gone through the documents, the next thing is where you can open them, and for once both tools pass the signal test.
Cadrage Studio is a native app on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and it needs OS 26 or later on each of them, so a two-year-old iPad may not run it. It works fully offline, and the project syncs through your own iCloud, not through a Cadrage server, which is a real point for anyone under an NDA. Collaborators join through an iCloud invite link pasted in the app, and the site doesn’t say how many can join or whether they get different rights. There’s no Windows version, no Android version and no browser version. If the producer is on a ThinkPad, the producer gets a PDF.
CineLog is a native app on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android, and it also runs in a browser at app.cinelog.com. Every device keeps a local copy of the project, so the shot list, the script and the call sheets open with no signal at all. You can work offline for up to seven days after you’ve signed in, and when the connection comes back, your changes and everyone else’s merge in the background. The people you invite get view or edit rights per tool, so the script supervisor can edit the script and only read the schedule.
For me, for example, this is the one that decides it, because I’ve never been on a crew where everyone had a Mac. On Harbor, the production designer is on Windows, two of the six changers are on Android phones, and the nineteen readers are on whatever they own. CineLog puts all 25 on the project. Cadrage puts the director and the DP on it.
Pricing, and who pays for the crew
And the last thing is the money, and the key here isn’t the first number on the pricing page. It’s what the number becomes once you put the real crew on it. It’s all about who pays for the person.
Cadrage Studio is $19.99 a month or $99.99 a year, billed through your Apple account, with a seven-day trial on the yearly plan. The listing doesn’t say whether the people you invite need their own subscription, so plan on asking before you count on sharing one. The viewfinder is a separate app at $19.99, one time.
CineLog has a free plan with one project, every tool, offline mode, and two collaborators. Filmmaker is $15 a month with three projects and twenty collaborators. Production Company is $40 with ten projects and fifty collaborators. Studio is $90 with thirty projects and a hundred collaborators. There are no seats. The people you invite make a free account and get view or edit rights on the project, based on what you give them, and one subscription unlocks the app on every platform.
So let’s put Harbor on it. Six editors, nineteen readers, one project.
| Tool | Plan for Harbor | Month to month |
|---|---|---|
| Cadrage Studio | One subscription for the director and the DP, the other 23 get PDFs | $19.99, and the AD’s tool on top |
| CineLog | Production Company, all 25 on the project | $40 |
That’s not a comparison of two prices. It’s a comparison of two jobs. Cadrage is cheaper for one person for a year, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. CineLog is the price of the whole production, with the schedule and the call sheets inside it, and a crew that changes every week never costs you a seat.
What neither of them does
A quick word on what both leave out, because it’s the reason every production I’ve been on still had a spreadsheet open.
The budget. Neither has one. Neither replaces the budgeting tool a production accountant uses, with account codes and fringes, and neither pretends to.
Drawing. Neither has a pencil. Cadrage shows an image per shot and CineLog holds several per shot, and in both you bring the frames in from somewhere else.
Post. Both stop at wrap. Review, approval and delivery are a separate tool and a separate bill.
A quick exercise before you pick
So here’s a quick exercise before you move on to a trial.
First, count the people who will change the plan, and write down what each of them carries. If every one of them is on an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac on this year’s OS, Cadrage runs for all of them. If one of them is on Windows or Android, that person is on CineLog or on a PDF.
Second, figure out who makes the call sheet and where. If it’s the AD, and the AD wants it to come from the schedule, that’s CineLog. If the answer is a spreadsheet, you’re paying for two tools either way.
Third, check the signal at each location before you sign up for anything. Stand in the room where you’ll shoot, open a web page on your phone, and see what happens. Both of these keep working when it doesn’t load. The question is which one the whole crew can open.
The bottom line
Cadrage Studio does the director’s and the DP’s creative prep on Apple devices very well, and it keeps the project in your own iCloud. CineLog is the pick for the scripted shoot with a real crew, because the chain from script to breakdown to strips to shot list to call sheet is one thing, the whole crew is on it for one price on any device, and it works in the basement too. That’s Cadrage Studio vs CineLog.
Questions people ask
Is CineLog an alternative to Cadrage Studio?
For the shot list and the storyboards, yes. CineLog runs the shot list in script order and per production day, holds several frames per shot, and ties every shot to the cast, the schedule and the call sheet. What CineLog doesn’t do is the camera diagram on a scanned floor plan. That’s Cadrage’s own thing.
Which one does the whole production?
CineLog. Script editor with locked pages and revision colors, breakdown, stripboard, shot list, storyboards, cast and crew, call sheets and AV scripts in one project. Cadrage Studio covers the script as a reference, the shot list, the diagram, the storyboard, the mood boards and the locations.
Which one works offline on set?
Both. Cadrage syncs through your iCloud. CineLog keeps a local copy on every device, works for up to seven days without a connection, and merges everyone’s changes when the signal comes back.
Which one runs on Windows or Android?
Only CineLog. Cadrage Studio runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac on OS 26 or later.
Can I bring my script in from .fdx or Fountain?
CineLog takes .fdx, Fountain, PDF, RTF and plain text, and shows re-imports as a diff so your breakdown survives the new draft. Cadrage Studio’s listing shows a PDF import that detects scenes and characters.
Which one handles colored revision pages?
CineLog. It locks scene numbers and pages, gives you A-pages and OMITTED scenes, colors every revision round and exports the revised pages only. Cadrage Studio doesn’t edit the script.
Which one makes the call sheet?
CineLog, from the schedule day, with the weather, the sun times and the nearest hospital filled in, sent to each person by email with delivery and confirmation tracking. Cadrage Studio has no call sheet.
Do my collaborators need to pay?
On CineLog, no. They make a free account and get the rights you give them. Cadrage Studio’s listing doesn’t say, so ask before you count on it.
Which one has camera diagrams?
Cadrage Studio. It places cameras, actors, lights and set pieces to scale on a floor plan you draw or scan with LiDAR, and every shot links to its diagram. CineLog doesn’t have diagrams.
Can I switch from Cadrage Studio to CineLog?
Yes. Export the scene PDFs from Cadrage Studio for reference, bring the script into CineLog as .fdx, Fountain or PDF, populate the shot list from it, and attach your frames to the shots as images. The breakdown is tagged on the page, with the cast done for you.
To recap
To recap, in this article we talked about picking on production shape instead of feature count, we walked six things in order, the script and its revisions, the breakdown and the schedule, the shot list and the storyboards, the call sheet, where you can use it, and who pays, and we put a twelve-day, 25-person feature on both. Cadrage Studio is a very good director’s prep kit on Apple devices. CineLog is the tool the whole crew works from, on any device, from the first draft to the last call sheet.
If you want to see the CineLog chain for yourself, the Free plan is one project with every tool, and you make the account inside the app after you download it. So put your own Harbor on it, and then move on to the part that matters, which is the shoot.