Soldum vs Filmustage

Filmustage popularised AI screenplay breakdown in a modern cloud interface, at a time when the rest of the market still expected you to tag every element by hand. It reads a screenplay in PDF or Final Draft, extracts elements scene by scene, produces breakdown sheets, and feeds a shooting schedule and a budget. It is built for international teams working in English, with the export formats those teams expect. If your need stops at the breakdown, schedule and budget trio, it is a proven solution and there is nothing to hold against it.

This is what most comparisons miss, ours included two years ago. Automatic breakdown is no longer a differentiator: it has become the shared baseline of any serious tool. What separates two solutions now is what happens next — how far the database produced by the breakdown feeds the other documents, and which of those documents exist only in one of the two tools. Soldum runs from the screenplay through to the financing plan, by way of the budget, the shooting schedule, call sheets, casting and crew contracts. Filmustage covers the preparation core and stops before contractual management and funding.

The table below sticks to functions whose presence or absence can be checked in each vendor's public documentation. Shared functions are listed too: they matter to the decision even when they do not separate the two.

This is the test that separates two tools in daily use, far more than the accuracy of the first extraction. A scene moves from interior to exterior, a location falls through three weeks before the shoot, an actor shifts their dates. In Soldum the breakdown, the budget, the schedule and the affected call sheets are linked: the change propagates, travel costs and accommodation nights follow, and you approve what you keep — no AI proposal is applied without your consent. A breakdown that is accurate but isolated still forces you to carry every revision by hand into three other files, and that is where preparation actually gets lost, not on the first pass.

It reads like a local detail and it is in fact the clearest functional gap, so it is worth half a sentence of explanation. A budget submitted to a French financier follows standardised categories set by the CNC, the national film agency, with pay based on collective-agreement rates and specific lines for employer contributions and overheads. An international tool produces a budget that is correct in its own logic but has to be reformatted for the dossier — an evening of work per version, and there is always another version. Soldum produces that format straight from the breakdown and recalculates it as the project changes. If you never file in France, this argument is worth nothing to you, and you should discount it accordingly.

The question is not the headline price but what the subscription counts. Filmustage is billed per seat, per its publisher's public pricing: the cost tracks the size of your team, which pushes you to restrict access — the opposite of what a shared tool is for. Soldum bills the account: €149/month excl. VAT on Solo for one film at a time, €479/month excl. VAT on Studio for unlimited projects with the whole team invited at no extra cost per member, and 25% off with an annual commitment. The first project is free, which is enough to break down a real screenplay before deciding. Check the current pricing on both sides — it changes.

Better said before you open an account. Soldum does not write screenplays and offers neither a text editor nor a storyboard: the script is imported, not drafted here. We do not cover editorial post-production. And if your team works entirely in English on a project with no French connection, the French budget formats and pay grids bring you nothing — that is precisely the case where Filmustage keeps the advantage, with an interface and exports aligned on your habits.

The only conclusive trial is the one run on a real project rather than a demo screenplay. Take a film you are currently preparing, upload the same script into both tools, and compare three things: how fine-grained the resulting breakdown is, how many manual steps it takes to reach a budget you could show a financier, and what happens when you move two shooting days. Soldum's first project is free and Filmustage offers a trial tier, so the comparison costs you an afternoon — and it beats any table, including the one on this page.