For the part before
page one.

Because structure is spatial and a script editor is linear. Index cards attached to a document behave like a document: you scroll through them one after another, and seeing act two beside act three, or noticing that four beats in the middle are doing the same job, requires holding the whole thing in your head. On a canvas the proportions are visible. An act two that occupies half the board with four cards in it is a sagging middle you can see, not one a reader has to tell you about. The second reason is everything that is not the script: research, reference images, character work, timelines, and the version of act three you abandoned. That material has nowhere to live inside a screenplay file.

It depends on whether you want the words written or the story structured, and those are different tools. If you want a model to draft prose and dialogue, Sudowrite is built for fiction and screenwriting specifically, and the general assistants will produce pages from a prompt. Be aware of what you get: a screenplay drafted by a model reads like one, and the common experience is that rewriting generated dialogue takes longer than writing it. If what is actually blocking you is structure, which it usually is when a script will not come, the useful AI is one that lays out beats, shows you where act two sags, and tells you which character has no beat in the middle third. That is what Storyflow does, and it deliberately does not write your scenes. The honest split is that generation tools help you produce pages and structural tools help you know which pages to write.

WriterDuet has added AI features over time and you should check their current feature list rather than trust a summary here, since this area changes quickly across every tool in the category. What is worth understanding is the difference in what AI is being asked to do. Most AI in screenwriting software is aimed at generation and revision inside the document, meaning drafting or rewriting text. Storyflow's AI is aimed at structure: it lays out a beat board from a premise, and once the board exists it answers questions about the whole board, such as which character has no beat in act two or what act one promises that never pays off. It deliberately does not write your scenes, because a screenplay drafted by a model reads like one.

For formatting and production, they are close, and the honest answer is that it depends on how you work rather than on features. Final Draft is the longer-established industry standard and is what most production offices assume, which matters if you are handing drafts to people who will open them in something. WriterDuet is browser-first with strong real-time collaboration and a more flexible pricing model, which matters more if you co-write regularly or move between machines. Both format correctly and both handle revisions. Neither is a planning tool, which is the reason this page exists: whichever you choose, the structural work still has to happen somewhere, and for many writers that somewhere is index cards on a table or a canvas.

A beat sheet is a list of the story's essential moments in order, written before the script so you can see the shape without reading a hundred pages. Each beat is a sentence or two naming what changes: the moment the ordinary world breaks, the point of no return, the midpoint reversal, the low point, the climax. Some writers work to a named structure like Save the Cat, which specifies roughly where each beat should fall, and others just list their own turns. The purpose is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. Laid out as cards you can move, a beat sheet shows you proportion, which is the thing a draft hides: fourteen beats crammed into act one and four spread across act two is the sagging middle, visible in a minute and invisible while you are writing.

Not during early access. Storyflow is paid-only right now, with plans from $7.99 a month billed annually, and a Free plan launches before the end of 2026. Anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, so a co-writer or a producer can view and contribute without paying. If you want free screenwriting software specifically, WriterDuet has a free tier with a project limit and there are other free formatters worth looking at. If you want free planning, physical index cards on a table remain the tool this is modelled on, and they are excellent right up until you need two people in different cities looking at the same arrangement.

Manually, and that is less of a problem than it sounds. The board holds beats, structure, character arcs, and research; the script holds scenes and dialogue. Writers typically work with the board open beside the script editor and write the scenes in order, using the beat as the brief for what that scene has to accomplish. There is no export that turns a beat board into a formatted screenplay, and any tool claiming to do that is either producing an outline document or producing pages you will rewrite entirely. What you can do is export the board as a high-quality image or PDF, which is the usual format for a beat sheet or a treatment sent to a producer, and share a view-only link for anyone who wants to see the whole structure.

Yes, and it is where a canvas has the largest advantage over a document. A season is two-dimensional by nature: episodes run along one axis and character or plot arcs run across them on another, and the question that matters is whether an arc has enough beats in the right episodes. In a document you can represent one axis and have to reconstruct the other every time. On a canvas, give each episode a section, run the series arcs as rows beneath, and the shape of the season is immediately legible: the arc that vanishes for four episodes, the episode carrying three arcs while its neighbours carry none. A writers' room can build the same board together and comment on individual beats.

The board holds any structure, and templates exist for the common ones: three act with the breaks and midpoint marked, the Save the Cat beat sheet, the hero's journey, the story circle, and a plain sequence approach for writers who prefer eight sequences to three acts. They are worth using diagnostically rather than prescriptively. The value of laying your story against a framework is not conformity, it is noticing where you depart from it, since a deliberate departure is a choice and an accidental one is usually the reason the middle is not working. Cyclical and parallel structures are worth mentioning specifically, because they are painful to represent in a linear document and natural on a canvas.

Yes, and structural notes given against a board are much more useful than structural notes given against a draft. Send a view-only link and a producer, a development executive, or a script editor opens the whole board in a browser with no account, which lets them see the shape rather than infer it from a hundred and ten pages. Comments attach to the beat they concern, so a note about the midpoint sits on the midpoint. This is also a cheaper stage to take notes: restructuring a board takes an afternoon and restructuring a draft takes a month, which is the entire argument for showing the structure first.

Yes, and it is one of the main reasons to work this way. Character profiles, relationship maps, backstory, and the timeline of events preceding page one all sit on the same canvas as the beats, so a scene can be worked on with the character material one scroll away rather than in a separate file. Reference images matter too: face casting, location photographs, and frames pulled from films you are borrowing from, pinned beside the beat they inform. For a writer-director this compounds, because the moodboard, the shot thinking, and the structure end up on one surface rather than being assembled separately and reconciled later.