TillyGen vs Cast & Crew

What Cast & Crew is for

Production payroll and financial services group with an associated software portfolio.

Productions needing payroll, accounting and compliance services.

Payroll platforms solve a legal and accounting problem, not a planning one. They sit alongside a planning tool rather than against it — the question is whether both know the same crew and day data.

Where Cast & Crew is strong

A comparison that only lists your own upsides is not one. This is what speaks for Cast & Crew:

• Established payroll and accounting services at scale
• Compliance handled by specialists
• Broad service portfolio around production finance

Where the limits are

And these are the points where teams run into limits in practice — not as a flaw, but as a consequence of the design:

• Services rather than planning software
• Engagement model suits larger productions

Where TillyGen takes a different route

Adjacent, not competing — planning software and payroll services solve different problems in the same production.

TillyGen turns a brief into a shoot-ready package: shot list, storyboard, schedule and call sheet that stay connected. Change the creative direction and the affected shots are flagged rather than quietly left behind.

Which tool when

In short: Productions needing payroll, accounting and compliance services. If your bottleneck is instead getting from a brief to a plan that holds, that is where TillyGen starts.

The useful question before switching is not which tool does more, but where the process stalls today. Three bottlenecks come up again and again in production teams, and they call for different tools:

• The plan comes together too slowly: days pass between the brief and a shoot-ready shot list, with the client already chasing.
• The paperwork drifts apart: shot list, schedule and call sheet live in three files, and after the second change none of them agrees with the others.
• Distribution eats the time: the plan is done, but every version has to be sent to twenty people by hand and chased up.

What to check before switching

Not a planning decision at all — the two rarely compete.

Switching tools mid-production almost always costs more than it saves on that job. The sensible moment is between two projects, with a pilot small enough to run twice if it comes to that. Check first whether the export formats match what post and accounting expect — migrations fail there more often than on features.