TillyGen vs Farmerswife

What Farmerswife is for

Resource and project management system for media facilities, covering bookings and equipment.

Facilities and rental operations managing shared resources across jobs.

Resource systems think in utilisation: who has which piece of kit when. For a facility that is the central question; for a single production it is a constraint — and that is exactly where the two tool classes diverge.

Where Farmerswife is strong

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

• Booking and utilisation across many parallel jobs
• Equipment and room scheduling in one ledger
• Built for facilities with shared resources

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:

• Optimised for the facility view, not the single production
• Creative planning is not its subject

Where TillyGen takes a different route

TillyGen plans a production; it does not run a facility's booking ledger.

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: Facilities and rental operations managing shared resources across jobs. 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

Different layer — usually kept alongside a production planning tool.

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.