TillyBoard vs Storyboarder

What Storyboarder is for

Free, open-source desktop app by Wonder Unit for drawing and arranging storyboards quickly, with a 3D shot generator.

Directors and story artists who want to sketch boards for free on a desktop computer.

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.

Where Storyboarder is strong

A comparison that only lists your own upsides is not one. This is what speaks for Storyboarder:

• Completely free and open source
• Exports to Premiere, Final Cut and Avid as well as PDF and GIF
• 3D shot generator for reference poses, plus a Photoshop round trip

Where the limits are

And these are the points where teams run into limits in practice — not as a flaw, but as a consequence of the design:

• Desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux without schedule, call sheet or team cloud
• The last stable release on its official GitHub repository is v2.1.0 from 3 September 2020

Where TillyBoard takes a different route

Storyboarder draws the boards; TillyBoard gives every shot an AI preview frame and carries it into schedule and call sheet.

TillyBoard turns a brief into a shoot-ready package: shot list, storyboard, schedule and call sheet that stay connected. Change the creative direction and the affected shots are flagged rather than quietly left behind.

Which tool when

In short: Directors and story artists who want to sketch boards for free on a desktop computer. If your bottleneck is instead getting from a brief to a plan that holds, that is where TillyBoard starts.

The useful question before switching is not which tool does more, but where the process stalls today. Three bottlenecks come up again and again in production teams, and they call for different tools:

• The plan comes together too slowly: days pass between the brief and a shoot-ready shot list, with the client already chasing.
• The paperwork drifts apart: shot list, schedule and call sheet live in three files, and after the second change none of them agrees with the others.
• Distribution eats the time: the plan is done, but every version has to be sent to twenty people by hand and chased up.

What to check before switching

Export the boards as PDF and use them as references on the TillyBoard concept canvas.

Switching tools mid-production almost always costs more than it saves on that job. The sensible moment is between two projects, with a pilot small enough to run twice if it comes to that. Check first whether the export formats match what post and accounting expect — migrations fail there more often than on features.