Is your storyboarding process slowing you down?
Aligning your team with static drawings and scattered notes causes frustrating delays. It’s a common and costly pre-production bottleneck.
Worse, endless software options create information overload. The pressure to justify the investment in the right tool is absolutely immense.
These manual processes don’t just waste valuable time; they can compromise your entire creative vision. A brilliant idea often gets lost in a clunky, inefficient workflow.
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But the right software completely fixes this problem. This guide helps you choose a tool for streamlined workflows.
In this post, I’ll share my breakdown of the best storyboard software available for 2025. I’ve focused on tools that truly accelerate storytelling for creative teams like yours.
You’ll discover solutions that improve team collaboration and help you plan scenes far more effectively, saving you crucial time and money.
Let’s get started.
Quick Summary:
| # | Software | Rating | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Boords → | Filmmakers and Game Developers | |
| 2 | Wonder Unit → | Filmmakers and Animators | |
| 3 | FrameForge → | Growing Production Teams | |
| 4 | Canva → | Creative Teams of All Sizes | |
| 5 | Toon Boom → | Professional Animation Studios |
1. Boords
Is your pre-production process a chaotic mess?
Boords simplifies your entire pre-production workflow by centralizing everything into one purpose-built online tool. This means you can finally bid farewell to juggling multiple applications and endless email threads, streamlining your efforts.
The result is a streamlined experience where storyboarding becomes a joy, not a job, allowing you to focus on creativity rather than tedious tasks.
Let’s make storyboarding a joy.
Boords simplifies storyboarding with intuitive drag-and-drop tools and an extensive image library, ensuring you create professional storyboards quickly. You can craft client-ready storyboards significantly faster, reducing time spent on menial tasks.
Its AI tools enhance your creative process, letting you handle more projects and produce your best work. For instance, you can generate custom AI characters for consistency or create expressive, character-driven images from scene descriptions. Additionally, Boords offers unlimited variations of each scene, subtly altering expressions, poses, and composition, drastically increasing your storyboarding capacity and enabling rapid iterations.
This means you can accelerate visual storytelling iterations and achieve improved cross-departmental alignment.
Key features:
- AI Storyboard Generator: Create images for your storyboards using AI, eliminating the need for drawing skills and speeding up visual development.
- Seamless Collaboration: Streamline communication with real-time updates, commenting, and approvals to ensure your entire team stays in sync.
- Flexible Exports: Move ideas into production faster with multiple export formats like presentation links, customizable PDFs, and MP4 animatics for easy handoff.
Learn more about Boords features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Boords unifies pre-production, integrates AI tools for faster creation, and offers seamless collaboration, making it an ideal choice for filmmakers, animators, and game developers seeking the best storyboard software to accelerate visual storytelling and improve efficiency.
2. Wonder Unit
Struggling to visualize your story effectively?
Wonder Unit offers Storyboarder, a dedicated software designed to help you quickly bring your narrative ideas to life.
This means you can accelerate storytelling from concept to production, ensuring your creative vision is understood and executed with precision.
Here’s your solution.
Wonder Unit’s Storyboarder provides the essential tools to visualize your story, moving your ideas into fully realized films.
This enables you to effortlessly translate abstract concepts into tangible visual sequences, improving your pre-production planning and visual storytelling efficiency.
Additionally, Wonder Unit’s focus on creative technology and tools aims to unlock ideas and ease collaborations, streamlining workflows for filmmakers, animators, and game developers, allowing for faster visual storytelling iterations and improved cross-departmental alignment.
The result is truly compelling stories.
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Key features:
- Storyboarder software: Visualizes your story, enabling efficient scene planning and faster iteration for filmmakers and animators.
- Characterizer tool: Helps you develop character values and generate conflicts for deeper, more engaging narratives in your projects.
- Production-focused R&D: Develops innovative tools and processes specifically to make film creation more collaborative and easier for your team.
Learn more about Wonder Unit features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Wonder Unit’s Storyboarder is explicitly designed to make visualizing your narrative easier and more collaborative. Its intuitive tools, like Storyboarder and Characterizer, provide filmmakers and animators with efficient pre-production workflows, making it a strong contender for the best storyboard software to accelerate your visual storytelling iterations.
3. FrameForge
Struggling with pre-production planning and visual storytelling?
FrameForge Studio offers a better solution for creating storyboards, helping you achieve efficiency. This means you can elevate your storyboarding process for all projects.
The software is specifically designed to “fix it in prep™” for your entire team, ensuring you get the most out of your time and capture shots that make your project sing.
Time to raise your expectations.
FrameForge Studio transforms your professional life by being more than just a better program for storyboarding. This means you can create storyboards and also optimize your on-set time.
It’s a revolutionary solution, offering a unique toolset that empowers you to innovate. You can gain significant efficiency and accelerate your storytelling, ensuring your project absolutely sings. This allows directors, cinematographers, and VFX supervisors to achieve optimal outcomes.
Additionally, FrameForge provides an affordable pricing structure with a risk-free guarantee, making it a pragmatic choice for growing companies balancing budget and feature requirements. You can explore its unique toolset to discover how it will benefit your specific production needs.
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Achieve faster visual storytelling iterations.
Key features:
- Optimal pre-production planning: Designed to “fix it in prep™,” ensuring you maximize time on set and capture the shots that make your project absolutely sing.
- Revolutionary unique toolset: Offers a comprehensive suite of tools that go beyond basic storyboarding, transforming your professional life and accelerating your storytelling.
- Affordable and risk-free investment: Provides competitive pricing with a risk-free guarantee, making it a smart choice for your team’s budget considerations.
Learn more about FrameForge features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: FrameForge Studio stands out as the best storyboard software for your team by focusing on pre-production efficiency and visual storytelling acceleration. Its unique toolset ensures you get the most out of your time on set, leading to better shots and improved project outcomes.
4. Canva
Struggling with visual storytelling efficiency and team collaboration?
Canva offers intuitive design tools to tackle your pre-production challenges head-on.
This means you can easily create stunning storyboards, making complex scene planning simpler, and eliminating the pain points of disjointed workflows.
Here’s how to simplify your creative process.
Canva brings your visual ideas to life with user-friendly features, transforming how you plan and execute projects.
It provides a comprehensive design platform, allowing you to visualize every scene with diverse templates and elements, crucial for realistic scene planning and accelerated iterations.
Additionally, you can invite your entire team to collaborate in real-time, fostering improved cross-departmental alignment and measurable efficiency gains. Plus, you can upload your own photos and videos, or use their extensive library, ensuring your visual narrative is precisely as you imagine it.
Achieve your creative vision with ease.
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Key features:
- Intuitive design interface: Quickly create detailed storyboards and visual plans without needing extensive design experience, reducing learning curves and boosting productivity.
- Real-time team collaboration: Share and edit designs simultaneously with your entire team, ensuring seamless communication and faster approval cycles for your projects.
- Extensive template library: Access a wide range of pre-designed layouts and elements, enabling you to rapidly prototype and refine your visual stories for diverse project needs.
Learn more about Canva features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Canva’s blend of ease of use, collaborative features, and extensive design assets makes it an ideal choice if you’re seeking the best storyboard software. It’s designed to streamline your pre-production planning, offering scalable layouts and improved cross-departmental alignment for your visual storytelling projects.
5. Toon Boom
Ready to accelerate your visual storytelling iterations?
Toon Boom Storyboard Pro offers a dedicated starting point where every great story truly begins. This means you can streamline your pre-production planning right from the outset.
It’s designed to help professional teams work with fewer interruptions and iterate faster, letting you focus entirely on the creative process.
Here’s how you can create without limits.
Toon Boom’s Storyboard Pro directly addresses your need for streamlined workflows in pre-production. Its purpose is to assist artists and animators, not replace their creative input.
You’ll find specialized tools that enable you to produce movies, TV shows, games, and even advertisements. Plus, Toon Boom Ember, an opt-in AI tool, allows professional teams to iterate faster and focus on creativity. This combination of dedicated software and assistive AI ensures measurable efficiency gains.
You can truly bring your visions to life more quickly.
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Key features:
- Integrated Storyboarding Environment provides a dedicated space where every great story begins, streamlining your pre-production planning and visual storytelling.
- AI-Powered Assistance with Ember offers opt-in AI tools for Storyboard Pro users, allowing professional teams to work with fewer interruptions and iterate faster on creative concepts.
- Optimized for Diverse Productions supports creating everything from movies and TV shows to games and explainer videos, proving flexible for various project scales and scopes.
Learn more about Toon Boom features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Toon Boom’s Storyboard Pro, with its integrated AI tools like Ember, directly addresses the need for streamlined workflows and faster iterations in pre-production. Its focus on assisting creativity and supporting diverse project types makes it an excellent choice for those seeking the best storyboard software to enhance efficiency and accelerate visual storytelling.
6. StudioBinder
Struggling with complex pre-production workflows and visual storytelling?
StudioBinder offers a comprehensive suite of features to streamline your entire production process.
This platform helps you tackle information overload and fragmented workflows for enhanced efficiency.
Here’s how you get organized.
StudioBinder simplifies visual storytelling, helping you share your vision from start to finish. This means you can easily create and customize mood boards to guide your team to new creative heights.
You can also design and coordinate optimal shot lists with pre-set specs, ensuring you capture your vision and make your day. Additionally, the platform brings your scenes to life, shot by shot, with creative tools for annotating and customizing imagery before cameras roll. Plus, it includes an element tagger for organized inventory, shooting schedules, and script sides.
The result is faster visual storytelling iterations, improved cross-departmental alignment, and measurable efficiency gains in your pre-production.
Key features:
- Visual Storytelling Tools: Design and coordinate optimal shot lists and storyboards with creative annotation tools for pre-production planning.
- Collaborative Planning Suite: Manage contacts, production calendars, and task boards, facilitating seamless teamwork and maximum productivity for your crew.
- Streamlined Script to Shoot: Write industry-formatted scripts, break them down with an element tagger, and generate auto-filled call sheets to save time.
Learn more about StudioBinder features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: StudioBinder’s all-in-one platform provides filmmakers, animators, and game developers with robust visualization and collaboration tools, making it an excellent choice for the best storyboard software. Its comprehensive features for scriptwriting, breakdowns, and call sheets significantly boost pre-production efficiency and team alignment.
7. MakeStoryboard
Struggling with complex pre-production and visual storytelling?
MakeStoryboard offers specialized tools for video, drawing, and animatics, directly addressing your diverse creative needs. This means you can easily bring your ideas to life frame-by-frame, without unnecessary hurdles.
You can customize frames, manage versions, and utilize various aspect ratios, ensuring your projects are exactly aligned with your vision and team requirements. This flexibility helps eliminate confusion and saves valuable production time.
Here’s how to simplify your creative workflows.
MakeStoryboard allows you to create animated storyboards online, offering a quick setup and an easy-to-use solution for all your needs. You can choose from popular aspect ratios like 16:9 or 1:1, ensuring compatibility with your team’s preferred formats. The platform also features automatic frame and version numbering, saving you time and avoiding project confusion. Additionally, you can add subtitles and descriptions, with the app calculating automatic frame durations based on text and reading speed, which helps refine your animatics and improve overall efficiency. The ability to securely share animated storyboards in MP4 format with built-in passphrase protection streamlines team feedback and client approvals.
Imagine faster iterations and improved cross-departmental alignment.
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Key features:
- Customizable frames: Set up your frames to match project and team needs, with options to add, delete, re-arrange, merge, or duplicate frames, plus automatic numbering.
- Collaboration tools: Securely share storyboards with team members and clients using built-in passphrase protection, while communicating effectively through commenting and annotation features.
- Animation and Drawing tools: Utilize frame duration calculations based on subtitles, add text fields, and access a vast image library with brushes, pencils, shapes, and stock assets for your creative work.
Learn more about MakeStoryboard features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: MakeStoryboard offers robust storyboarding, animation, and collaboration tools, making it an excellent choice for filmmakers, animators, and game developers. The platform’s customizable frames, secure sharing, and intuitive interface address key pain points, allowing you to save up to 80% of your client’s time, making it truly the best storyboard software for efficient visual storytelling and pre-production planning.
8. Milanote
Struggling to visualize your next big story?
Milanote helps you organize your ideas and projects into visual boards, making it simple to collect everything in one place. This means you can easily bring your creative visions to life.
You can upload various file types, save inspiration from the web with a single click, and add notes and photos from your phone. The result? A centralized hub for all your pre-production planning.
Ready to streamline your workflow?
Milanote acts as your online whiteboard, allowing you to brainstorm and collaborate with your team, no matter their location. This enables you to refine ideas together.
You can write notes and to-do lists with simple text editing, ensuring every detail is captured. This flexibility supports a wide range of creative processes, including storyboarding, brainstorming, and mind-mapping, offering a comprehensive tool for visual storytelling.
Additionally, Milanote’s flexible drag-and-drop interface lets you arrange content in any way that makes sense for your project. This supports diverse needs, from filmmaking and animation to game development, enhancing efficiency.
Achieve faster iterations and better alignment.
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Key features:
- Visual Boards & Organization: Organize your ideas and projects into visual boards with a flexible drag-and-drop interface, ideal for creative professionals.
- Comprehensive Content Collection: Easily upload images, files, notes, and save text, images, and links from the web using the Milanote Web Clipper.
- Real-time Team Collaboration: Utilize Milanote as an online whiteboard for brainstorming and real-time collaboration with your team, wherever they are located.
Learn more about Milanote features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Milanote offers an intuitive, visually-driven workspace for creative professionals, making it an excellent contender for best storyboard software. Its robust content collection and collaborative features support streamlined workflows for filmmakers and game developers, enhancing efficiency in pre-production planning and visual storytelling.
9. Power Production
Struggling to visualize your creative concepts?
Your pre-production planning becomes clear and efficient with Power Production, which offers an intuitive approach.
This software helps you transform complex ideas into tangible visual stories, streamlining your workflow significantly.
Ready to accelerate your storytelling?
Power Production brings your vision to life by simplifying shot creation, scene planning, and sequence management.
You can craft detailed storyboards, animatics, and even 3D visualizations with remarkable ease and precision.
This capability integrates seamlessly with your existing tools, allowing for real-time collaboration with your team, accelerating feedback cycles, and ensuring everyone is aligned, from indie projects to large-scale productions.
The result is faster iterations.
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Key features:
- Intuitive Storyboard Creation: Easily design and organize shots and scenes, ensuring a clear visual narrative for any project size.
- Advanced Animatics & 3D Integration: Produce dynamic animatics and integrate 3D visualizations for realistic scene planning and enhanced pre-production.
- Real-time Team Collaboration: Facilitate seamless, simultaneous teamwork on projects, enabling quick feedback and improved cross-departmental alignment.
Learn more about Power Production features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Power Production stands out as the best storyboard software for visual storytellers, empowering you to achieve faster iterations and measurable efficiency gains. Its intuitive interface and robust features for scene planning and real-time collaboration significantly accelerate your pre-production workflows.
10. Previs Pro
Struggling to visualize your cinematic narrative?
Previs Pro empowers you to create production-ready shotlists and storyboards fast. This means you can quickly turn your vision into a cinematic story.
It’s an invaluable tool for plotting out your scenes and stage layouts, helping you communicate your vision to all collaborators.
Here’s how you can accelerate your storytelling.
Previs Pro provides a fully customizable pre-production playground. You can easily build scenes with props by selecting from a library, creating new ones with AI, or importing your own.
Additionally, you can create and pose characters with precise details, showcasing their interactions to shape your narrative’s flow, and import your Final Draft screenplay directly. Plus, you can fine-tune lighting for enhanced atmosphere, set up cameras to align with your creative vision, and leverage innovative features like Virtual Camera with AR to drop characters into real-world locations. The result is unparalleled precision and creativity.
You can also use AI for style grading to turn storyboards into mood boards, and even import LiDAR scans for perfect backdrops, making it ideal for filmmakers, animators, and game developers needing streamlined workflows.
The future of storyboarding is here.
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Key features:
- Production-ready outputs: Generate shotlists, storyboards, and MP4s for sharing with your cast and crew or exporting to professional scheduling software.
- AI and AR integration: Utilize AI for prop creation and style grading, and augmented reality for placing characters in real-world environments.
- Comprehensive scene control: Build detailed scenes with customizable props and characters, fine-tune lighting, and set up various camera types.
Learn more about Previs Pro features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Previs Pro excels in enabling realistic scene planning and rapid visual storytelling iterations. Its AI features for prop creation and style grading, coupled with AR capabilities, make it the best storyboard software for enhancing creative efficiency and cross-departmental alignment in pre-production workflows.
Conclusion
Struggling to bring your vision to life?
Choosing the right tool feels overwhelming. A wrong pick can easily derail your entire creative workflow, causing frustrating and expensive production delays.
Industry analysis shows companies using integrated tools see 45% faster production timelines. This efficiency gain means you can avoid costly budget overruns and spend significantly more time perfecting the creative aspects of your story.
Here is my top recommendation.
From my evaluation, Boords clearly stands out. It simplifies pre-production by centralizing storyboarding, animatics, and real-time feedback into one intuitive, purpose-built platform.
With powerful AI tools and seamless collaboration, it is the best storyboard software for turning chaotic notes into polished, client-ready visuals with incredible speed.
I highly recommend you see the difference yourself. Start a free trial of Boords to experience a far smoother workflow.
Unlock your team’s true creative potential.
