Final Draft Active
The industry standard — the app your script gets sent back from.
At a glance
- Maker
- Final Draft, Inc. (Cast & Crew since 2016)
- First release
- 1991
- Status
- Active — still developed and sold
- Platforms
- Mac, Windows, iOS
- Pricing
- $249.99 one-time (often on sale); optional mobile/companion subscription
- Native format
- Final Draft (.fdx)
What it is
Final Draft is the professional default: the format productions expect, with the industry’s deepest revision-locking, tagging and report tooling. FD13 is the current generation, and its .fdx files are the closest thing screenwriting has to a lingua franca.
What people are saying
The good
It remains the file format the industry actually speaks: agents, managers and productions open Final Draft files without a second thought. The production toolset (revision colors, scene numbering, locked pages, the Beat Board, real-time collaboration) earns genuine respect, and long-time users call it dependable at its one job: correctly formatted pages.
The bad
The most common complaint is the price: about $250 once for what is fundamentally a text editor, in a world with $80 rivals. Crashes and licensing/activation headaches draw steady anger (its Trustpilot rating is poor), the iOS companion app is subscription-priced on top of the desktop license and widely called laggy, and the version 13 launch was considered buggy by many.
Paraphrased consensus from user reviews, forums and retrospective coverage across the web.
Where it came from
Co-founded in 1990 by Marc Madnick and Ben Cahan, shipping since 1991; owned by entertainment-payroll giant Cast & Crew since 2016. Version 8 (2009) moved the file format from binary to the FDX XML that every rival now reads and writes.
Worth knowing
Won a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award in 2013 — the only screenwriting app with one.
Getting scripts in and out
Imports: Final Draft (.fdx), Final Draft FDR (.fdr)
Exports: Final Draft (.fdx), PDF (.pdf)