TillyGen vs Google Sheets

What Google Sheets is for

The default tool most productions actually start in — shot lists, schedules and budgets as shared spreadsheets.

Getting started immediately at zero cost.

Spreadsheets are the most honest starting point: instantly available, usable by everyone, no onboarding cost. Their limit is not features but silence — a spreadsheet does not notice when a change makes the day impossible.

Where Google Sheets is strong

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

• Available immediately at no cost
• Everyone on the crew can already use it
• Infinitely adaptable to an unusual job

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:

• No validation: a broken day looks exactly like a working one
• Version confusion grows with every shared copy

Where TillyGen takes a different route

A spreadsheet has no idea the schedule broke when you moved a scene. It stays green while the day stops working.

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: Getting started immediately at zero cost. 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

The honest baseline every alternative should be measured against.

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.