TillyGen vs Croogloo

Production office platform for distribution, call sheets and document control. This page sets out what Croogloo is built for and what TillyGen is built for, without claiming anything about features we cannot evidence.

What Croogloo is for

Production office platform for distribution, call sheets and document control.

Production offices on longer-form projects.

Production management systems aim to be the single source of truth for the whole crew. That works as long as every department actually works inside it — and breaks the moment the director and DoP keep a spreadsheet on the side. So the question worth asking first is who opens the system daily and who only receives a PDF out of it.

Where Croogloo is strong

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

  • Document control tuned to production office reality
  • Distribution with tracking across large crews
  • Reduces the manual chase for confirmations

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:

  • Centre of gravity is the office, not the creative plan
  • Little value before the paperwork exists

Where TillyGen takes a different route

TillyGen's centre of gravity is the creative-to-plan step, not office document control.

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: Production offices on longer-form projects. 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

Worth pairing with whatever produces the documents in the first place.

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.

Frequently asked

Is TillyGen a replacement for Croogloo?

That depends on what you use Croogloo for. TillyGen's centre of gravity is the creative-to-plan step, not office document control.

Can both be used together?

Usually yes. TillyGen exports shot lists and schedules as PDF, CSV and through the API, so downstream systems can carry on.