Final Draft alternatives for the Mac
Final Draft costs $199.99 once. Fade In costs $79.95 once. What else to weigh before you buy, including whether you want software for pages or for plans.
Final Draft 13 sits at the top of this market because the industry settled on its file format. .fdx is what studios exchange, and the company's own page says it is used by 95% of film and TV professionals. At the time I checked, Final Draft lists the desktop licence at $199.99, reduced from $249.99, as a one-time purchase. The cloud-collaboration version, Final Draft Suite, is a subscription from $8.33 a month billed yearly.
Fade In costs $79.95 one-time, reduced from $99.95. Its page states plainly that it opens, edits and saves .fdx documents, and that it reads Fountain, Scrivener, Celtx, Word and Rich Text Format. For a writer who needs to hand a properly formatted file to a producer, that covers the exchange problem for less than half the price.
Celtx runs in the browser and has a free tier that stays free. The paid tiers are subscriptions; check the current numbers on their site, because they change. Highland Pro, from John August's team, grew out of Fountain, the plain-text screenwriting format, and stays close to that way of working.
Those four answers the question people usually mean: which app writes the pages. There is a second question that decides which app you will still be using in a year, and it is the one the price tags hide.
Pages come out of a plan. A story that holds together has acts, sequences, scenes and beats arranged so that what happens in act three was being set up in act one. Final Draft, Fade In and Highland Pro all give you somewhere to store notes about that plan. None of them makes the plan the working surface. The plan lives in a corkboard app, a spreadsheet, or a stack of index cards, and the moment a draft moves, the two documents drift apart.
That drift is not an editing problem. It is why a second act sags, and it is the problem this blog keeps coming back to.
I make Beatstack, so weigh this accordingly. It is a Mac app that treats the plan as the surface: acts, sequences, scenes and beats on a board, with page targets and tension you can read at a glance. When the plan is ready it exports the screenplay as .fdx or Fountain, so the file you hand out is standard. It costs $39.95 one-time, with a 15-day free trial, and projects are single files on your own disk.
If you only want to type pages, Final Draft or Fade In will serve you for years. If the part you struggle with is what the pages are for, that is a different purchase, and it is the one worth making first.