Final Draft still has a lot more features (revision tracking comes to mind as a big one) that Celtx still lacks. If your in a workflow with a collaborator who is using FD, you’re probably going to have an easier time that way.

But, as detailed above, Celtx offers a lot of features FD does not, like the ability to coordinate production.

And, on the Mac at least, Celtx is totally superior in terms of program stability and the quality of text rendering. I know that sounds minor, but if you’re spending hours and hours poring over a script on screen, you want clean, legible text. Celtx’s text on OS X is just gorgeous — you have to see it to understand. Final Draft, on the other hand, displays thin, unevenly spaced copy that actually squirms around a little as you edit it. Even for it’s hefty price, still looks and feels like a bad port of the PC version. If you don’t believe FD for Mac has problems, go now and look it up on Amazon and read people’s comments.

A feature you might find compelling from a purely screen writing standpoint is Index Cards. Every scene you write in your screenplay is indexed as a card within the Index Cards sub-tab. The cards are all titled with your scene header and display the contents of the scene, while on the flip side can display notes, which you are free to make about the scene, its purposes, possible ideas for changes, etc.

Any edits you make to the scene headers on the cards will occur in your script. You can also rearrange the cards and this actually rearranges the order of your scenes in your script. Cards can be tagged as one of seven colour-coded plots, too.

Something that can also be pretty handy is the fact that cards can be created on the fly, replete with scene headers – a great way to quickly lay down the order of the scenes you want to have before you sit down to write them. You can then move over to the script and start writing in the contents of each scene afterwards.

Your scenes are also always represented in a list within the Scenes box under the Project box, both of which are always to the left side of your work area. You can rearrange the order of the scenes in the Scenes box as well and the changes will occur in the script.

Celtx tries in every way possible to effectively break you outside of the constraints of a typical script editor, giving you all the same features they do while at the same time offering more ways to get your best work onto the page.