Equipment and safety are two of the least glamorous problems on a shoot and two of the most expensive to get wrong. The best tools in 2026 split cleanly: the gear people have real software, and the safety people mostly have a PDF.
Quick answer
- Best gear check-in and check-out: Cheqroom
- Best general inventory: Sortly
- Best film-native ops: Setkeeper
- Best set safety record: StoryboardCanvas
- Kit, crew and hazards on one file: StoryboardCanvas
Cheqroom
Purpose-built for gear rooms. Barcodes, bookings, condition, who has what. If you own a lot of kit, buy it.
Sortly
Photo-first inventory, cheap and simple, used by plenty of art and camera departments.
Setkeeper
Film-native operations, with the on-set problems in mind rather than a warehouse.
Spreadsheets and a risk assessment PDF
The standard for safety, still. It is a document nobody reads until an insurer asks for it.
StoryboardCanvas
The Shoot app holds the kit list as an accountable inventory: units by category, daily rate burn, replacement value for the insurance schedule, utilisation and what is checked out. Beside it, the crew, with daily payroll normalised per shoot day and a count of who has an emergency contact on file. The kit and crew planner reads the kit each scene needs straight from the shot list, and cross-checks it against the gear you own. And the risk assessment is a real register: hazards scored on a likelihood-by-severity matrix, each with a category, a score, the person responsible and a status, printable, with an AI safety briefing. That is the due-diligence record your insurer will ask for.
FAQ
Do I need equipment software for a short film? If you own the gear, yes, the first time something comes back broken and nobody knows who had it.
Is an AI safety briefing a substitute for a risk assessment? No. It is an organisational aid. Compliance with the regulations where you shoot stays with your production.
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.