Storyboarder and CineLog get compared because both open a Fountain or Final Draft script, both split it into scenes, and both hang storyboard frames off the shots. And Storyboarder is free, which puts it on every list a film student reads. So a director who learned to board in it looks at CineLog and asks why they’d pay. What I usually like to do is pick on the shape of the job instead of the feature list, because a filmmaker drawing boards alone on a laptop and a crew of 25 shooting twelve days lose things in completely different places. With this one there’s a second question underneath, which is whether the free tool is still a tool, and I’ll answer it with dates. So if you got here by searching for a Storyboarder alternative, or for apps like Storyboarder, 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 Storyboarder side against Wonder Unit’s site, which is dated 2019, the GitHub repository with its releases, commits and issues, and the maintainer’s own statements there. The name is shared with two other things, an AI product at storyboarder.ai and a comics platform that now owns storyboarder.com, so this article is about Storyboarder by Wonder Unit, the desktop app.
Short summary
CineLog is the pick when the boards belong to a shoot that’s going to happen on a date. When the frames hang off a shot list in script order and shooting order, with the cast numbers from the breakdown on every row. When the script locks and revises in the same project. When the day on the board becomes a call sheet with a status on every name. When the crew needs the plan on phones and tablets, which Storyboarder never shipped. And when somebody answers the support email, because Wonder Unit’s last reply on its own issue tracker is from 2024.
Storyboarder is a free desktop drawing app for boards. You open a Fountain or Final Draft script, or start blank, draw frames with a pencil, a pen or a brush on a Wacom tablet with onion skin and guides, pose 3D characters and cameras in its Shot Generator, time the boards with audio into an animatic, and export a PDF, a GIF, a video or a timeline for Premiere and Final Cut. Wonder Unit put the source on GitHub, and the app was downloaded well over a million times. And since February 2024, by the maintainer’s own words on the repository, it is no longer being maintained, with no further binary release coming. The last stable build is from September 2020.
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. Storyboarder draws the boards and exports them. |
| A script that keeps changing after the lock | A full editor with locked pages, A-pages, OMITTED scenes and colored revisions. Storyboarder reads the script file and reloads it when you edit it somewhere else. |
| Shots in shooting order, per day | A shot list per production day with cast numbers on the rows. Storyboarder has boards per scene with a shot number, dialogue, action, notes and a duration, and no shot list view. |
| A crew on phones and tablets, with or without signal | Native apps on iOS and Android with the whole project on the device. Storyboarder is a Mac, Windows and Linux desktop app, and its iOS version was “in development” in 2019 and never shipped. |
| A tool that will still open next year | A product with releases every month and a support line. Storyboarder’s last stable release is from 2020, its Mac build is Intel-only, and its maintainer says there won’t be another. |
Head to head
Prices are in US dollars, checked November 2, 2026.
| Storyboarder | CineLog | |
|---|---|---|
| Script | Opens Fountain and .fdx, shows the script while you board, reloads it when the file changes, no editor | Editor with locked pages and revision colors, imports .fdx, Fountain, PDF, RTF, text with a diff on re-import |
| Breakdown and stripboard | No | Yes, tagged from the script text, cast numbered, stripboard with day breaks and scene splits |
| Shot list | No, boards carry a shot number, dialogue, action, notes and a duration | In script order and per production day, seventeen columns plus your own, populated from the script |
| Storyboards | Yes, drawn with four brushes, an eraser, onion skin and guides, Wacom, Photoshop round trip, printed worksheets that scan back in, several boards per shot | Several image frames per shot, no drawing |
| 3D | Shot Generator: pose characters, place objects and cameras, VR mode | No |
| Animatic | Yes, with audio, to video, GIF and Premiere or Final Cut timelines, video export reported broken by users on current systems | No |
| Call sheets and AV script | No | Yes, with per-person tracking and a client review link |
| Collaboration | Files, GitHub, and multi-user VR, no real-time editing | Real-time, with roles per tool |
| Works offline | Yes, projects are local files | Yes, every tool, every device, up to seven days |
| Native apps | Mac (Intel build on the official site), Windows, Linux, no iOS, Android or browser | macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, plus the browser |
| Price | Free, source public on GitHub without a licence file, watermark on exports by default, no account | Free plan, then $15, $40 or $90 a month, collaborators free |
| Maintenance | Last stable release September 2020, a pre-release in February 2021, last commit June 2022, “no longer being maintained” per the maintainer in February 2024 | Releases through 2026, the latest in October |
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. With Storyboarder, the third and fifth sections are the comparison.
The script and its revisions
The first thing is the script, because on a scripted production the script is where every other document starts.
Storyboarder opens a Fountain or a Final Draft script and makes a scene for every scene heading, and it shows the script next to the boards while you draw. When you change the script in your writing app, Storyboarder reloads it, and it writes scene IDs into your script file so the boards stay matched, which is a clever trick and also means the script is edited somewhere else. There’s no editor, no revision mode, no colors and no locks, and a user reports the Final Draft import breaking on straight quotes with nobody answering.
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.
So for Harbor, where the script gets locked about two weeks before day one and then revised every few days, both keep the boards attached to the scenes. CineLog also makes the pink pages.
The breakdown and the schedule
Now that the script is in, the next thing is the breakdown and the schedule, and this one is short.
Storyboarder has no breakdown, no cast numbering and no schedule. The only trace of one is a line on a 2020 roadmap, “export preproduction pipeline”, never checked off.
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, in the shot list’s cast column and 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, and it lets you split a scene across two days. 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.
For Harbor, twelve days and 25 people, the AD builds the board in CineLog and the shot list follows it into day order. Storyboarder never enters this part of the job.
Shot lists and storyboards
Now that the days are laid out, the next thing is the boards, and this is Storyboarder’s home ground, so let’s give it its due.
Storyboarder draws the way a storyboard artist draws. A light pencil, a hard pencil, a pen and a brush, each in three sizes, an eraser, a note pen, onion skin to see the last board under this one, and guides, on a Wacom tablet or a mouse. You can print blank worksheets, draw on paper, photograph them with a phone and the boards come in on their own. A board goes out to Photoshop or any editor that reads PSD and comes back with its layers. The Shot Generator poses 3D characters with inverse kinematics and pose presets, places objects and cameras, and drops the view in as a board, and it has a VR mode where several headsets can enter the same scene. Boards sit per scene, several boards can make one shot, and each carries a shot number, dialogue, action, notes and a duration. The timeline takes recorded or imported audio and exports a video, a GIF, a PDF in custom layouts, and an XML timeline for Premiere and Final Cut. What Storyboarder doesn’t have is a shot list. There’s no table, no camera or lens columns, and a 2020 plan to add shot type and camera metadata was never done. Users on current Windows and Mac systems report the video export failing silently, with no reply.
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 pencil, a Shot Generator or an animatic. You bring the frames in as images, and a frame drawn in Storyboarder is a good one to bring.
So on this section the two are good at different halves, honestly. Storyboarder draws the frames. CineLog runs the shots. For Harbor, the DP wants tomorrow’s shots on an iPad at the location scout with the cast numbers on them. That’s CineLog, and the frames on them can come from anywhere, including a free drawing app.
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.
Storyboarder has no call sheet and no AV script. Sharing is a file: a PDF, a GIF, a video, a project ZIP or a timeline. Its Export to Web uploaded to a site that returned nothing when I checked, and a user reported its sign-in dead in 2023.
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.
For Harbor, that’s nineteen people who need a sheet every night, from the same project the shot list lives in.
Where you can actually use it
Now that we’ve gone through the documents, the next thing is where you can open them, and with Storyboarder the honest question is whether you can open it at all.
Storyboarder is a desktop app built on Electron for Mac, Windows and Linux, with no account and no connection needed, and your projects are local files. There’s no phone or tablet app, the iOS version the FAQ promised in 2019 never shipped, and there’s no browser version. Collaboration is sharing files, or GitHub, or several people in one VR scene. Then there’s the state of it. The official site’s download button serves version 2.1.0 from September 2020, which on a Mac is an Intel build that runs through Rosetta, and Apple has said macOS 27 is the last version to carry Rosetta. The 3.0.0 pre-release from February 2021 has an Apple silicon build that several users report failing to launch. On Windows 11 it runs, with the video export and the pose library reported broken this year. The last commit to the code is from June 2022. In February 2024, Wonder Unit’s engineer wrote on the repository that Storyboarder for desktop is officially no longer being maintained and that there will never be another official binary release, and no one from the team has replied there since. Over a thousand issues are open.
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, and the app has shipped a release every month this year.
For me, for example, this is the one that decides it, because a tool a production relies on has to open on the laptop the AD buys next spring, and somebody has to answer when it doesn’t. On Harbor, the AD changes tomorrow’s order on a phone in the stone-walled house and the DP sees it on the iPad. Storyboarder was never built for that, and nobody is building it now.
Pricing, and who pays for the crew
And the last thing is the money, and here Storyboarder wins the only way it can.
Storyboarder is free. You download it without an account, you draw, and you pay nothing. Wonder Unit put the source on GitHub and called it open source, though the repository has no licence file and the company’s own page says it was never licensed under any agreement, and the free exports carry a watermark by default, which users have complained about since 2018. There’s no paid version to upgrade to, no support plan and no company behind it that answers. Free is the whole price list.
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 | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Storyboarder | The director draws the boards on a laptop | $0, with a watermark, no support and no release since 2021 |
| CineLog | Production Company, all 25 on the project | $40 a month, for the chain from script to call sheet |
That’s not a comparison of two prices. It’s a comparison of a drawing app with no one behind it and a production tool with a team behind it. Draw the boards wherever you like. Run the shoot on something that’s maintained.
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.
A shot list in Storyboarder, and a pencil in CineLog. Each one has the thing the other doesn’t, and I’ve said where.
Post. Both stop before the edit, and Storyboarder at least hands the animatic to it when the export works. 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, download Storyboarder on the machine you’ll use and open it. If it runs and the video export works, you have a free drawing app, and that’s worth having next to anything. If it doesn’t, you have your answer about the free tool.
Second, figure out where the boards go after they’re drawn. If they go to a crew in an order with cast on them, that’s CineLog, and the drawn frames drop into it as images.
Third, count the people who will change the plan and the phones they carry. Storyboarder has one user per file on a desktop. CineLog has the crew.
The bottom line
Storyboarder was a very good free drawing app for boards, and its last stable build is six years old with its maintainer saying there won’t be another. CineLog is the pick for the scripted shoot with a real crew, because the shot list comes off the script, runs in day order with the cast numbers on it, feeds the call sheet, runs on every device the crew owns, and has someone building it this month. That’s Storyboarder vs CineLog.
Questions people ask
Is CineLog an alternative to Storyboarder?
For the boards on a production, yes. CineLog holds several frames per shot, runs the shot list in script order and per shooting day, and ties it to the schedule and the call sheet. What CineLog doesn’t do is draw. If you draw in Storyboarder, or in anything else, the frames drop into a CineLog shot as images.
Is Storyboarder still maintained?
Not according to Wonder Unit. In February 2024 its engineer wrote on the GitHub repository that Storyboarder for desktop is no longer being maintained and there will be no further official release. The last stable release is 2.1.0 from September 2020, the last pre-release is 3.0.0 from February 2021, and the last commit is from June 2022.
Does Storyboarder run on a new Mac?
The build on the official site is Intel-only and runs through Rosetta, which Apple has said ends after macOS 27. The Apple silicon pre-release has several open reports of failing to launch. Try it on your machine before you plan around it.
Which one is cheaper?
Storyboarder is free. CineLog is $40 a month on Production Company for 25 people and every tool from the script to the call sheet, with a free plan for one project.
Does Storyboarder have a shot list?
No. Boards carry a shot number, dialogue, action, notes and a duration, and there’s no shot list view or export. CineLog’s shot list runs in script order and per production day with seventeen columns.
Which one works offline on set?
Both. Storyboarder’s projects are local files on a desktop. CineLog works offline on every device, including phones and tablets, for every tool, up to seven days, and merges everyone’s changes after.
Which one runs on a phone or tablet?
Only CineLog. Storyboarder’s iOS version was listed as in development in 2019 and never shipped, and there’s no Android or browser version.
Can I use Storyboarder frames in CineLog?
Yes. Export the boards as images from Storyboarder and add them to the shots in CineLog, which holds several frames per shot.
Which one makes the call sheet?
CineLog, from the schedule day, with the weather, the sun times and the nearest hospital, sent per person with delivery and confirmation tracking. Storyboarder has no call sheet.
Can I switch from Storyboarder to CineLog?
Yes. Export the boards from Storyboarder as images, or take the PNGs from the project folder, and attach them to the shots in CineLog. Bring the Fountain or .fdx script in, populate the shot list from it, and the frames sit on the rows.
To recap
To recap, in this article we talked about picking on the shape of the job 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. Storyboarder draws boards for free and its maintainer has moved on. CineLog runs the boards through the shoot, with the whole crew on it, on any device, with a team behind it.
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.