Transport is the most under-served department in film software. Fleetio is real fleet management for logistics companies. StoryboardCanvas is the only tool on this list that plans driver runs against the shoot day and counts the ones nobody has confirmed.
Quick answer
- Real fleet maintenance and compliance: Fleetio
- General inventory: Sortly
- Picture and unit vehicles, driver runs, condition reports: StoryboardCanvas
The most under-served department in the business
Transport moves the entire unit and is usually run out of a WhatsApp group and a whiteboard. The tools that exist are either generic fleet software or a tab inside something bigger.
Fleetio
Real fleet management: maintenance, fuel, compliance, drivers. Built for logistics companies, not for a production that needs the honeywagon at the Sumerian hut by 06:30. Excellent at what it is for.
Sortly
Inventory again, and some productions use it for the fleet. It does not do runs.
Setkeeper and Yamdu
Both carry transport as part of a production system. Yamdu goes deepest here.
Spreadsheets and WhatsApp
The default. It works until a driver does not see a message.
StoryboardCanvas
The Vehicles app treats picture vehicles and unit vehicles as one fleet on one spine: the period ox cart built for camera and the five-ton camera truck both carry their insurance, their day rate, their agreement and their condition-out report (the paper trail that decides who pays for the scratch). The driver schedule plans every run against the shoot day, with vehicle, driver, pickup, dropoff and time, confirmable with the driver and markable complete on the day. It counts, in plain sight, how many runs nobody has agreed to yet and how many have no driver number to ring, because those are the two numbers that ruin a 06:00.
How to choose
- A real vehicle fleet with maintenance and compliance? Fleetio.
- Picture and unit vehicles that need to be on tomorrow's call sheet? StoryboardCanvas.
FAQ
What is a picture vehicle? Any vehicle that appears on camera, as opposed to a unit vehicle that moves the crew.
What is a condition report? The photographic record of a vehicle's state when it went out and came back. It decides who pays for the scratch.
The honest summary
No single tool wins every column, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. What we built StoryboardCanvas to answer is a different question: what if the script, the breakdown, the schedule, the budget, the boards and the call sheet were the same file instead of six exports that drift apart by week two?
Every app is on every tier, there is a free tier that is not a trial, and you can open the whole suite on a finished short film right now, read-only, with no sign-up: try the demo. Pricing is on the pricing page.