Wayscript vs WriterDuet

The longer answer

Formatting and interchange: parity on the page

On the fundamentals the two apps are close to identical: automatic industry formatting, native Fountain, .fdx in and out with structure intact, print-ready PDF. A script moves between them — and onward to Final Draft — without drama. That parity is worth naming, because it means the real comparison isn't the page at all. It's everything around the page.

Collaboration: credit where it started

WriterDuet's name is its thesis — it built real-time co-writing in the browser before it was expected, and years of refinement show. Presence, typing side by side, the whole workflow of a writing partnership handled well. Wayscript's Author plan does live co-editing with presence and comments too, and its difference is context: co-writers share not just the script but the story bible behind it, so both of you resolve "wait, what colour were her eyes in episode two?" from the same canon. On pure co-writing, honours are close to even; Wayscript's edge is what the collaboration includes.

Planning: one screenplay vs the whole saga

WriterDuet covers the classic planning kit — index cards, outlining and automatic reports that track your script as it grows. Wayscript starts from the same cards, then widens the frame: narrative threads, a timeline and beat-sheet templates sit over the actual scenes as synchronised views of one structure, so a card moved is a scene moved. For a single screenplay, both plan capably. For a season, a saga, or a world that also exists in prose, that reach is what Wayscript's planning is for.

The story bible: auto reports vs a self-linking vault

WriterDuet generates useful automatic reports — who speaks, where scenes happen — but it has no story-bible module to hold the world itself. Wayscript keeps the world as structured data: each character, place and item is a typed entry with relationships, backlinks accumulate automatically from every mention in the script, and a live graph maps the cast. Bring a character in at scene ten and the vault has already noted it; rename a location and every reference follows. For writing partnerships especially, a shared bible is the difference between two people with one document and two people with one world.

Production: the revision gap, stated straight

WriterDuet ships revision tools today, and Wayscript doesn't yet match them. Wayscript now ships revision passes, margin marks and OMITTED scenes; locked pages and A-pages are still on the roadmap. If your script is heading to set and needs colour-coded revisions right away, WriterDuet (or Final Draft) is the safer choice — and .fdx gives you a graceful exit from Wayscript when that day comes.

Platforms and offline: cloud-first vs local-first

Both apps are genuinely cross-platform — desktop, web and mobile including Android, a spread few writing tools manage. The philosophical difference is the default. WriterDuet is cloud-first: your projects live in your account, and offline work runs through the native app, which needs that account. Wayscript is local-first: the free desktop app keeps your script in files on your own machine and writes offline without a connection, and encrypted cloud sync is included on every plan, free included, running automatically. Neither default is wrong — one optimises for anywhere-access, the other for ownership and offline certainty.

AI and authorship: a critic, not a co-writer

Wayscript's optional AI stays on the critique side of a hard line. Ask the Reviewer and it diagnoses pacing, structure and consistency; it will not write a line for you. Analysis reports — echoes, adverb sweeps, scene-length outliers — are computed from the script you actually wrote. None of it runs unless you switch it on, it lives on paid plans only, and your work never trains a model. Authorship certification closes the loop with a tamper-evident record, Bronze up to Onyx — Onyx meaning no machine wrote a word of it. For rooms and contests that now ask the question, that's evidence, not assertion.

Price: free tiers that match, paid tiers that differ

WriterDuet's free tier is genuinely generous — 3 full projects — with Plus at $9.99/month and Pro at $11.99/month. Wayscript's free plan matches that shape: three of your own projects at a time — sample novels and imported manuscripts don't count — with the screenplay editor, planning, the story bible, export and encrypted cloud sync free on desktop, mobile and the web. The Author plan at $8/month ($72/year) adds unlimited projects, co-writing, analysis, the interactive studio and certification, and Author + Reviewer at $14/month adds the full editorial reviewer. At the paid tiers Wayscript is slightly cheaper; at the free tiers the caps match — the question is what each ships around them.

Switching: two open formats, zero lock-in

Few moves in screenwriting software are this low-friction. WriterDuet exports Fountain and .fdx; Wayscript reads both natively, scene structure intact, and writes them back out just as readily, so the road runs in both directions. A writing team can trial Wayscript on a single project while everything else stays put — nothing about the move is final.