Final Draft remains the de facto standard for studio screenwriters. I'm one of them and I have never ever encountered anyone using anything else. I have used this app daily for five years and in that time I have grown to loathe it. It is not a professional standard application. It quits unexpectedly, sometimes when you are saving a document, overwriting a valid document with an empty stub. It doesn't preserve your auto-save settings reliably. The various outlining and character tools are useless. It corrupts screenplays, moving scene numbers and formatting around randomly. I have reported all these bugs to FD for years. Their best suggestion has been to export it as text and re-import, then add the scene numbers. I think you can imagine what that would be like in page-locked production hell.

One day someone will produce a screenwriting app which will treat a script as an XML document and allow you to switch between a genuine (hierarchical) outline view, script view and a proper 3x5 card manipulation view, which will not crash, and which will be $60 shareware. On that day Final Draft will be over and no-one will shed a tear. If anyone is interested in developing such an app, please contact me @ and I can send you a full specification.

The only reason to buy this application is if you have to. If you do not HAVE to, please don't.

UPDATE: Final Draft today yet again corrupted a production script. This script was authored only in Final Draft. The second time this has happened in less than a week. I have given up reporting the bug to Final Draft since no action is ever taken on it. It has persisted through total clean reinstalls on clean machines.