Slate vs Final Draft: an honest comparison.
Final Draft has been the industry standard for decades, and it earned that. Slate is the drafts-first newcomer at a third of the price. Here's what each one actually does better.
Written by the people who make Slate — bias disclosed, claims checked against public pages as of July 2026, corrections welcome at support@slatescript.app.
The short version: if you're on a production that requires Final Draft — colored revision sets, revision marks, a studio pipeline built on .fdx — stay on Final Draft. If you're writing — first drafts, rewrites, specs, a co-writer trading passes — Slate's draft-compare-merge workflow does something Final Draft has no equivalent for, at $79/year with a 30-day free trial.
Side by side
| Slate | Final Draft 13 | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $79/year, 30-day free trial (no card) | $199–250 one-time, paid version upgrades (historically ~$99–130) |
| Try a rewrite without risking the draft | Drafts: branch, compare word-by-word, merge — built in | "Save As" copies, Alternate Dialogue |
| Co-writing | Proposed revisions you review line-by-line and merge; reviewing is free for your partner | Real-time collaboration session (both need Final Draft) |
| Story planning | Beats pinned to actual script lines; board where dragging a card moves the scenes | Beat Board & Outline Editor (separate from pages) |
| Production features | Locked scene numbers (12A, OMITTED), locked pages and A-pages, dual dialogue, Characters/Locations/Scenes reports · no colored revision sets or revision marks yet | All of that plus revision colors and marks — the full industry pipeline |
| Platforms | Mac only — a native app for macOS 14 Sonoma or later (Apple Silicon & Intel) | Windows, Intel + Apple Silicon Macs, iPad/iPhone app |
| Where your script lives | On your disk as plain .fountain text — readable in any editor, forever | On your disk (.fdx XML) |
| Accounts & tracking | No account, no analytics, no telemetry, no AI | Activation required; see their privacy policy |
| File exchange | Opens and saves .fdx · imports Fountain, plain text · exports Fountain, PDF, teleprompter PDF | Imports/exports .fdx, Fountain, PDF and more |
| Automatic local backups | Timestamped snapshots, browse & restore built in | Backup on save (configurable) |
Final Draft details summarized from finaldraft.com as of July 2026 — check their pages for current pricing and features.
What Final Draft does better
- Production. Colored revision sets, revision marks, and the breakdown workflow every AD and script coordinator already knows. Slate 3 locks scene numbers and pages, but it doesn't do colored revisions yet. If your script is headed to set this season, this matters more than anything below.
- Ubiquity. "Send me the .fdx" is a sentence you'll hear in every writers' room. Final Draft is the default the industry assumes.
- Platforms. Windows and an iPad app. Slate runs on Macs only (Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 14 or later).
- Maturity. Twenty-plus years of edge cases handled.
What Slate does better
- Rewrites are the whole design. Start a draft, write the brave version, compare it word-by-word against the original, merge what sings. Final Draft's answer to "I want to try something" is Save As — and then you have NIGHTSHIFT_v7_FINAL_final2.fdx.
- Co-writing without surprises. Your partner works on their own draft and sends a proposed revision; you read the whole change, comment in the margins, and merge — or decline. They don't need to buy anything to review yours.
- The outline can't drift from the pages. Beats cover actual script lines; move a beat, the scenes move with it.
- A small, fast Mac app. Slate 3 is built with Apple's own frameworks: about a 13 MB download, and a 128-page script opens in a fraction of a second.
- Your files could leave with you tomorrow. Plain-text .fountain on your disk, no account, and — deliberately — no AI anywhere: nothing you write is sent to, read by, or used to train any model.
- Price. $79/year, every feature, no upgrade fees. Five years of Slate (~$395) costs about what Final Draft 13 + one paid upgrade does — and the trial needs no card.
Can I bring my Final Draft scripts over?
Yes. Slate opens .fdx directly — scene headings, action, character cues, parentheticals, dialogue, shots, transitions, and acts all map onto Slate's elements, along with scene numbers, dual dialogue, bold and italic, and the title page. And it saves .fdx, so you can send the script back. What doesn't carry over: Final Draft's revision colors and marks, locked pages, and embedded ScriptNotes. For specs and drafts-in-progress the import is clean; we wrote an honest step-by-step at Switching from Final Draft.
The fair test: import your current script and rewrite one scene as a new draft. If the compare-and-merge doesn't change how you revise, delete Slate and keep your $79.
Download Slate — free for 30 days, no cardAlso: Screenwriting software for Mac — every option · Slate vs Fade In