Dramatify and CineLog both start from a script and end at a call sheet, and both put a stripboard in between, so people put them side by side. But Dramatify grew up in television, with live rundowns, five units on one schedule and a production office behind it, and CineLog grew up on scripted shoots where the director, the AD and the DP carry the plan around on their phones. So the feature list tells you less than the shape of your production does. What I usually like to do is pick on that shape, because a broadcast season with a studio floor and a twelve-day feature with a crew of 25 lose things in completely different places. So if you got here by searching for a Dramatify alternative, or for apps like Dramatify, 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 Dramatify side against their own site and knowledge base, all 399 pages of it, and the prices against their plan pages, which show US dollars to a visitor in the US and euros to everyone else. 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 for the scripted shoot where the plan leaves the office. When the DP needs a shot list and storyboards next to the schedule, because Dramatify has neither for film. When the script gets locked and the revisions need A-pages, OMITTED scenes and colored revised pages. When the crew is on phones and tablets with no signal, and they need to change the plan there, not just read it. And when six people edit and you’d rather pay for the production than for each of them, because on CineLog nobody buys a seat.
Dramatify is a production office in a browser, built for television. It writes the script scene by scene, breaks it down by department, schedules up to five units on one board, prints the day out of days, cuts the sides for each day, and builds the call sheet from the schedule. On the broadcast side it runs the rundown, the cue cards and the prompter for live shows, which is a job CineLog doesn’t do at all. It’s priced per seat, with a minimum of three or five seats, and the crew who only read are free.
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 DP who wants the shot list next to the schedule | A shot list in script order and per production day, with storyboard frames on every shot. Dramatify has no shot list for film. |
| A script that keeps changing after the lock | Locked scene numbers and pages, A-pages, OMITTED scenes, asterisks and a revised-pages-only PDF, instead of lettering scenes by hand. |
| A crew that edits on set, not just reads | Native apps on iOS and Android with the whole project on the device, editable for up to seven days offline. |
| Six editors on one production | No seats. On Dramatify, every editor is a paid seat and the smallest fiction plan with call sheets starts at five. |
Head to head
Prices are per month in US dollars as shown to a US visitor, billed yearly, checked November 2, 2026. Dramatify’s monthly billing is higher, and the euro prices differ.
| Dramatify | CineLog | |
|---|---|---|
| Script editor | Yes, scene by scene | Yes |
| Script import | .fdx only | .fdx, Fountain, PDF, RTF, text, with a diff on re-import |
| New draft of the script | Re-import replaces scenes and flags the changed ones | Scene-by-scene diff, breakdown and shot list survive |
| Locked pages and revision colors | Revision colors per scene, scene letters and OMITTED typed by hand, no page lock | Yes, scene and page lock, A-pages, omitted scenes, revised-pages-only export |
| Breakdown | Yes, per-scene sheets, department permissions, AI assist | Yes, tagged from the script text, cast numbered for you |
| Stripboard | Yes, up to five units, scenarios, scene splits, day out of days | Yes, with day breaks, a boneyard, scene splits and a board PDF, no day out of days report yet |
| Sides | Yes, per day and unit | No |
| Shot list | No, only for multi-camera rundowns | Yes, in script order and per production day, seventeen columns plus your own |
| Storyboards | One image per AV scene | Yes, several frames per shot, no drawing tool |
| Call sheets | Yes, from the schedule, one per unit per day, weather and sun times | Yes, from the schedule day, weather and sun times |
| Sending | Publish, then an announcement to the team’s email | A personal PDF per person by email, with delivered, opened, confirmed and bounced |
| AV script | Yes, image-based | Yes, with a client review link |
| Live rundowns and prompter | Yes | No |
| Works offline | Read only, cached documents | Yes, editing, up to seven days |
| Native apps | Browser only | macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, plus the browser |
| Who pays | Per seat, minimum three or five, read-only crew free | One subscription, collaborators are free |
| Entry price | $30 a month for three Fiction Starter seats, call sheets from Fiction Standard at $65 for five | Free plan, then $15 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 schedule 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.
Dramatify writes the script scene by scene. Every scene is its own little container, and two co-writers can work on different scenes at the same time. It imports .fdx, and only .fdx. A PDF, a Word file or a Celtx file has to go through another app first, and their own help page says so. When a new draft comes in, you import it again and replace one scene, a few, or all of them, and the changed scenes get a flag in the breakdown so the departments know to look. It keeps the revision colors, and a checkbox in the scene editor starts a new revision at pink. What it doesn’t do is lock. A lettered scene like 36B and a SCENE OMITTED heading are things you type in by hand, there’s no page lock and no A-pages, and there’s no revised-pages-only print. Printing goes through the browser with a watermark on every page, and the sides for each day cut themselves from the schedule, which is a real time saver on a long show.
CineLog has a full editor, and it imports .fdx, Fountain, PDF, RTF and plain text. The part I lean on is what happens on the second import, because a scripted production gets new pages every week. CineLog shows the new draft as a diff against what you already have, scene by scene, and you accept what changed. It doesn’t wipe your breakdown and your shot list to make room for the new file. And once the script is locked, it does the real production thing. A new scene between 12 and 13 becomes 12A, a new page after 16 becomes 16A, and a cut scene prints as OMITTED and keeps its number for good. Every revision round gets its color, the changed lines get their asterisks in the margin, and you can export only the revised pages on that color, because that’s what goes out to the crew on a Tuesday night. What CineLog doesn’t cut yet is sides.
So for Harbor, where the script gets locked about two weeks before day one and then revised every few days, both tools keep the breakdown attached through a new draft. CineLog hands the AD the pink pages with the page numbers still true, and nobody types 36B.
The breakdown and the schedule
Now that the script is in, the next thing is the breakdown and the schedule, and this is Dramatify’s strong section, so let’s give it its due.
Dramatify gives every scene a breakdown sheet, with the set, the time of day, the script day, the page count in sixteenths, the characters, the extras and the scene items, and each department can be given its own part of the sheet. The speaking characters come in from the .fdx on their own, and since June 2025 an assistant can take a first pass at the props, the wardrobe and the vehicles for you. The schedule has a column view and a stripboard view, you drag scenes into day and unit columns, up to five units on one board, and the strips carry the standard colors plus dawn, dusk and evening. You can split a scene across days, keep several schedule scenarios, and the cast day out of days and the scene-items day out of days print from the same data. That’s a serious scheduler, built for a show that runs for months.
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, and it doesn’t run five units on one board.
For Harbor, one unit and twelve days, both boards do the job. Dramatify’s board does more than Harbor needs. CineLog’s board is tied to a shot list, which is the next section.
Shot lists and storyboards
Now that the days are laid out, the next thing is the shot list, and this is the section where the two tools stop overlapping.
Dramatify has no shot list for a film or a drama. The word appears on their site only for the shots in a multi-camera rundown, where a camera number sits on a line of a live show. For storyboards, the AV script holds one image per scene, uploaded or taken with the phone’s camera. That’s the right thing for a commercial or a studio show, and it isn’t a storyboard per shot.
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 drawing tool. You bring the frames in as images, from a sketch, a photo or a previs render.
For Harbor, the DP wants the shot list on an iPad at the location scout, and the scout has no signal. That’s CineLog, and I’ll get to why in a minute.
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.
Dramatify builds the sheet from the schedule, one sheet per unit per day, with the scenes and their script text, the cast calls, the unit base, the medical location you linked to the shooting location, and a ten-day forecast from the location’s GPS with the sunrise and the sunset. Then you publish it and send an announcement, which lands in the inbox of everyone on the team list, and everyone can subscribe to a calendar feed of their published days. It prints in two templates, Modern and Compact, through the browser. What it doesn’t do is send each person their own sheet, and it doesn’t tell you who opened it or who confirmed. The only “confirmed” on their site is a booking status on a cast member.
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, and the cast grid carries the numbers the breakdown gave the cast. It fills the weather and the sunrise and sunset from the location and the date, it carries the nearest hospital and the parking you saved 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.
So both build the sheet from the schedule, and both fill the weather. For Harbor, the difference is the morning after. On CineLog the AD knows by seven which three people haven’t opened their sheet. On Dramatify the AD knows the announcement went out.
Where you can actually use it
Now that we’ve gone through the documents, the next thing is where you can open them, and this is the one people skip until day three.
Dramatify runs in a browser, on a laptop or a phone, with nothing to install. Their help page tells you to put an icon on your home screen, and that’s fair. It caches the script, the team list and the published call sheets so you can read them with no signal, and that’s a real feature on set. But reading is all it does offline. To post or edit anything, you need a connection, and their own words say so. There’s no app on either store.
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, and you can change them. 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.
For me, for example, this is the one that decides it, because I’ve never been on a location where the signal was good in every room. On Harbor, two of the four locations are out of town. The DP scouts them with the shot list open. The AD walks the stone-walled house with the schedule open and moves tomorrow’s first scene to the afternoon, right there. On a read-only cache, that’s a note on paper until the AD gets back to the car.
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.
Dramatify prices per seat per month, billed yearly, and the monthly rate is higher. To a visitor in the US, Fiction Starter is $10 a seat with a minimum of three, so $30 a month, and it holds the script, the import and the watermarking. Fiction Standard is $13 a seat with a minimum of five, so $65 a month, and that’s the plan with the scheduling, the sides, the budgeting and the call sheets. Professional is $27 a seat, minimum five, and adds the broadcast side. In euros the same plans are €9 and €12 a seat. There’s no free plan, there’s a 30-day trial, and schools get it free. The people who only read, the crew and the cast, are free on every plan. The people who edit each take a paid seat, and if there’s no seat free when you add one, one is added to your bill.
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 | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| Dramatify | Fiction Standard, six seats at $13, billed yearly | $78, or $108 billed monthly |
| CineLog | Production Company, all 25 on the project | $40 |
That’s not a small difference, and it’s not because CineLog is cheap. It’s because Dramatify charges for the editor, and CineLog charges for the production. A crew changes every week. A production doesn’t. This may sound like I’m stacking the deck, but the per-seat model is the honest reason people end up sharing one login on set, and one shared login is how a schedule gets overwritten at six in the morning.
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.
A drawing tool. Dramatify takes one image per AV scene and CineLog takes several per shot, and in both you bring the frames in from somewhere else.
Text delivery. Neither sends the call sheet by SMS. Dramatify announces by email, CineLog sends a personal PDF by email.
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, figure out whether the DP needs a shot list in the same tool as the schedule. If yes, that’s CineLog, because Dramatify doesn’t have one for film. If the shot list lives in a spreadsheet anyway, read on.
Second, count the people who will change the plan, and leave out the people who only read it. Multiply that number by $13, and if it’s under five, use five anyway. That’s your real Dramatify number. Then look at the CineLog plan with enough projects, which has no number to multiply.
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. If it doesn’t load, ask yourself whether reading the plan is enough that day, or whether somebody will need to change it.
The bottom line
Dramatify is a real production office for television, with rundowns, five units, sides and a day out of days that CineLog doesn’t have. CineLog is the pick for the scripted shoot with a real crew, because it carries the shot list and the storyboards next to the schedule, it locks the script properly, the whole crew edits on any device for one price, and it works in the basement too. That’s Dramatify vs CineLog.
Questions people ask
Is CineLog an alternative to Dramatify?
For a scripted film or series shoot, yes. The chain from script to breakdown to strips to call sheet is the same job, and CineLog adds the shot list, the storyboards per shot, locked pages, native apps and offline editing. For a live studio show with a rundown and a prompter, Dramatify does a job CineLog doesn’t do.
Which one is cheaper for a crew of 25?
CineLog, at $40 a month on Production Company with everyone on the project. Dramatify with six editors on Fiction Standard is $78 a month billed yearly or $108 billed monthly, because each editor is a seat, and the readers are free on both.
Which one works offline on set?
CineLog, for editing. Dramatify caches the script, the team list and the published call sheets so you can read them without a connection, but you need a connection to change anything.
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. Dramatify takes .fdx only, and its help page says PDF, Word and Celtx files have to be converted first.
Which one handles colored revision pages?
Both keep the revision colors. CineLog also locks scene numbers and pages, gives you A-pages and OMITTED scenes, puts asterisks on the changed lines and exports the revised pages only. On Dramatify, scene letters and omitted headings are typed by hand, and there’s no page lock.
Does Dramatify have a shot list?
Not for film. Shots exist only in its multi-camera rundowns. CineLog runs a shot list in script order and per production day, with several storyboard frames per shot.
Which one prints a day out of days?
Dramatify, both a cast one and a scene-items one. CineLog doesn’t print the report yet.
Do my collaborators need to pay?
On CineLog, no. They make a free account and get the rights you give them. On Dramatify, read-only cast and crew are free and every editor is a paid seat, with a minimum of three or five seats on the plan.
Which one runs as a real app on a phone or tablet?
CineLog is native on iOS and Android with the whole project on the device. Dramatify runs in the phone’s browser with a home-screen icon.
Can I switch from Dramatify to CineLog?
Yes. Bring the script into CineLog as the .fdx it was written in, or as a PDF, and import your contacts from a spreadsheet with the column mapping. The breakdown is re-tagged on the page, with the cast done for you, and the board is rebuilt by drag.
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 price lists. Dramatify is the production office for a television season. CineLog is the tool for the scripted shoot, with the shot list next to the schedule, the whole crew on it for one price, and the plan editable where the signal isn’t.
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.