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WriterDuet is the writers’-room default — that adoption is real and we’re not going to argue with it. Arqo’s collab transport is Yjs CRDT through Liveblocks, and the whole surface is live today on Studio: named presence, in-editor multi-cursors, live co-typing, threaded comments, suggest mode, and side-by-side version diff. Theirs starts $14 cheaper, and we’d rather say so than let you find out at checkout. Theirs has years more production stress-testing than ours. The differences that remain are the phone editor, the free tier, and the buttons we will not ship.
We’d rather lose the click than lose the trust.
WriterDuet has been a writers’-room default for years. The muscle memory is real — if your room is already on it, switching tools mid-season is the wrong fight. We’d rather you stay on WriterDuet for that show and try Arqo on your next pilot than hand-wave the adoption gap.
Same-line collisions during a heated rewrite, six-collaborator merge under deadline, history-revert mid-pitch — WriterDuet has years of those scenarios surfaced and patched. Arqo’s collab transport is Yjs CRDT through Liveblocks and every one of those surfaces is live, but the stress-test history behind it is much shorter. WriterDuet wins on the maturity of those edge cases today.
Same Fountain editor on iOS and Android, three synced views at 390px, sub-2s offline open. WriterDuet’s phone surface is a companion view; Arqo’s is the editor. Solo writers travel; rooms don’t.
Arqo Free opens two scripts with full editor + full export. No assistant, no tokens, no quota. Co-writers start on Pro ($9, 2 per script) and Studio ($24, 5) — but writing together LIVE is Studio only, and we should be straight about what that costs you: WriterDuet puts real-time collab on their $9.99 tier, so if live co-writing is the job, theirs is the cheaper door. Ours is the cheaper door to finishing a script alone. Pick the one that matches how you work.
Pro includes the full Memory stack — continuity, project bible, voice-tuned suggestions, drift nudge, transparency pane. WriterDuet Pro doesn’t. At the same total price (Arqo Pro + BYOK add-on = $11.99, same as WriterDuet Pro) the Memory layer is what you get instead of nothing.
/no-list lists, by name, the buttons we will not ship. WriterDuet’s assistant surface is broader and looser by design — they’ll ship more, faster. We’re choosing the opposite trade.
Bone, ink, and lime; serif display + mono metadata; cursor-as-period. The category still defaults to 2007 SaaS blue. If your tool sets your taste, WriterDuet looks like every other web editor; Arqo doesn’t.
WriterDuet AI offers continuation. Arqo ships no inline completion at all — not a sentence of it, not a word. The manifesto says the tool does not autocomplete dialogue, and there is no route behind that sentence to change its mind. What Arqo Assist does instead is read what you have already written and answer questions about it. The tool’s job is to keep you writing, not to write.
When two collaborators write the same line at the same time, Arqo surfaces the conflict and asks. We will not silently auto-merge dialogue with a heuristic. The cost of getting the wrong word wrong is too high.
FDX is in Free, not gated to Pro — Account → Export everything gives you the file on any tier. If Arqo is wrong for you, you leave with the file. Vendor lock-in is the oldest screenwriting-software tax; we’re not charging it.
Full signed list at /no-list.
Free tier opens two scripts. No card. Bring your file, see how it lands.
Feature-for-feature, close — at Studio. Battle-tested, no. Both halves of that are the honest answer. Arqo’s collab transport is Yjs CRDT through Liveblocks and the surface is live today: named presence, in-editor multi-cursors with character-level caret, live co-typing, threaded comments, suggest mode / track changes, offline reconnect. Two caveats we’d rather you hear from us. One: that live room is Studio ($24). WriterDuet ships real-time collab at $9.99, so on price-for-live-collab they beat us and we’re not going to dress it up. Pro ($9) still carries 2 co-writers, but they take turns rather than typing together. Two: what WriterDuet has that we don’t is a decade of rooms hammering on it — the weird collisions, the six-way merge at 2am, the revert mid-pitch. If your room needs the most-proven transport in the category, that’s still theirs.
Yes. Export FDX from WriterDuet, drop it into Arqo. Locked scene numbers, dual dialogue, revisions preserved. The /switch-from-writerduet guide walks the four-step migration.
Yes — press-and-hold voice capture in the editor on iOS, Android, and desktop, transcribed by Whisper and dropped into the script as text. WriterDuet positions theirs as a live writers’-room transcription workflow; Arqo’s is dictation for the solo writer on the move. Same underlying capability, different framing.
WriterDuet Free caps at 3 projects; their real-time collab starts on the $9.99 tier. Arqo Free opens two scripts with full editor and full export — but no co-writers. Ours start at Pro (2 per script, taking turns) and Studio (5, live). If co-writing live is the thing you need, theirs is both cheaper and more proven. If writing and exporting a whole script without a card is, ours is.
WriterDuet AI is broad — continuation, brainstorming, line-rewrites, scene-generation surfaces. Arqo Assist is bounded on purpose: each route does one named job — Inspire, Scene Surgeon, Continuity and the rest — and none of them auto-generate or auto-apply. Bring your own key on Pro for +$2/mo, or get it bundled on Studio. We refuse one-click scene generation, by name, on /no-list.
Yes. Run the Arqo room for the daily writing; export FDX nightly to the showrunner. The round-trip is verified and locked-scene-number-stable.
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