Storyboard That alternatives

Why look beyond Storyboard That at all?

Storyboard That has clear strengths — anyone switching should know what they are giving up:

• Large library of customisable characters and scenes, no drawing needed
• Exports to PDF, PowerPoint, GIF and images
• Well-developed education edition with class management

Where teams hit limits

The search for an alternative almost always starts at one of these points:

• No shot list, shooting schedule or call sheet module on its home and pricing pages
• The free plan allows 2 storyboards a week, and they are public

1. TillyBoard — brief to shoot-ready plan

Storyboard That lays out panels from a clip-art library; TillyBoard plans a real shoot with shot list, AI preview frames, schedule and call sheet.

A fit for commercials, brand films, corporate and social work — anywhere a brief lands and has to become a plan a crew can actually shoot from, quickly.

Panels can be exported as images and placed on the TillyBoard concept canvas as a starting point.

Other alternatives

Storyboarding tools are approval tools. They shine when the client decides from images, and say nothing about whether the drawn shots can actually be shot in a day.

Depending on your bottleneck, these are worth a look — each with a different centre of gravity:

• Boords: Animation and commercial teams whose approval process runs on boards.
• Storyboarder: Directors and story artists who want to sketch boards for free on a desktop computer.
• Krock.io: Agencies and production companies that review videos, images and PDFs with clients and storyboard in the same tool.
• Previs Pro: Directors and cinematographers who want to block shots in 3D with real camera and lens parameters.
• Studiovity: Script-led productions that want writing, AI breakdown and scheduling in one suite with mobile apps.
• Miro: Teams that already work in Miro and want a free-form board for early storyboards and moodboards.

What the choice actually turns on

The useful question is not which tool has more features but where your process stalls today: writing the plan, distributing the paperwork, or getting sign-off. A tool that solves the wrong problem well stops being opened after three weeks.

Just as important is who is meant to work in it. A tool only the production office uses, while the director and DoP stay in spreadsheets, moves the problem rather than solving it — the paperwork then drifts between tool and spreadsheet instead of between two spreadsheets.

Before you migrate

Three things you can settle in half an hour beforehand, and that cost weeks if skipped:

• Export formats: does what comes out match what post, accounting and the client expect — PDF for the crew, CSV for downstream systems, API for anything automated?
• Existing data: do live projects have to move with you, or is a clean break between two jobs enough? The clean break is almost always the cheaper answer.
• Access: who on the crew needs read access, who needs write? Per-seat pricing gets expensive fast as the crew grows.