Adobe Captivate is an elearning authoring and course design tool (or LCMS). It supports mobile HTML5 content. Captivate’s users are commonly midsized businesses to enterprises. Adobe Captivate includes some prebuilt assets as well as customizable workflows.
$33.99
per month
Adobe Learning Manager
Score 8.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Adobe Learning Manager is a Learning Management System developed by Adobe Inc. that offers personalized learning at scale to employees, partners and customers alike. Compliant with GDPR guidelines, SOC2 TYPE 2 and FedRAMP Certifications, Adobe Learning Manager integrates with Adobe Experience Manager Sites, Adobe Commerce, Marketo Engage with out-of-the-box components and any other application through Open APIs, offering hybrid learning programs and detailed analytics.…
N/A
Skilljar by Gainsight
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Skilljar’s Customer Education LMS Platform is a solution to educate, engage, and retain everyone a business interacts with. An external LMS for customer and partner education, it is a Gainsight solution since the 2025 acquisition.
Captivate is SIGNIFICANTLY more user-friendly than Storyline or Flash. We found Storyline challenging and not as integrated as Captivate and Flash made it much harder to make edits to older content. While Storyline is viable we just don't feel it has the same capability or …
We evaluated several platforms for cost, reliability, ease of use and features. For our needs, Adobe Captivate Prime offered the optimal balance of reasonable cost and high-end features. Aside from ease-of-use for ourselves as we platform and manage courses, we wanted to ensure …
There is absolutely an ecosystem of products and solutions required to support and enable end users - one can think of them as an orchestra. Each part does a specific job or task and each has a varying degree of ease of use and compatibility. Skilljar is the container that …
Skilljar was an easy choice because of its web-based format, ease of integration with our current website and built-in e-commerce platform and Stripe integration. The others were also significantly more expensive and did not offer the same level of customer support. Skilljar …
Captivate is well suited for instruction designers who want to build attractive, personalized, interactive, energetic lessons. It's also a good choice for someone who wants to build something innovative because Captivate gives the developer so much control over so many aspects.
But if someone wanted something built quickly, generically and didn't care about holding the viewer's attention, then Captivate might be an expensive tool. That person might be more satisfied with a cheaper and easier to learn authoring tool.
It's good if you have a good use case for that feed. I do know that you have to incorporate it in a process in isolation. It's not you don't realize the full value, so you have to incorporate it into an overall improvement process. I would say the pro cases are marketing optimization with respect to campaigns. And I would say that the areas it's not well suited is in distilling attribution. So if you were to take all of the improvements that it suggested, the numbers exceed revenue, which isn't real, but that's a hard problem to solve. Nobody's really solved that problem well. So distilling the attribution piece would be good. And it is well suited for marketing campaigns in the ideation phase of so
Skilljar is fantastic for structured onboarding processes. If you're looking to streamline and standardize the onboarding experience for your customers, especially for software or complex products, this platform is a gem. It allows you to create step-by-step courses guiding users through functionalities, reducing confusion and accelerating their learning curve.When you need versatility in content delivery, Skilljar is spot-on. Whether it's video tutorials, interactive quizzes, downloadable resources, or live webinars, the platform accommodates various formats. It's perfect for accommodating different learning styles and ensuring engagement.
For scenarios that demand highly complex simulations or immersive learning experiences, Skilljar's capabilities might fall short. While it supports interactive elements, extremely sophisticated simulations might require additional specialized software or platforms.
Quickly adding in graphics, text, and interactive buttons.
Has extensive variables and branching for additional customization, beyond the competition.
Has 360 degree capability which competitors don't offer (I have not used this feature).
High degree of customization and personalization.
True responsive screen display on all devices, viewable as you are creating the training. This is different than some competitors - some just shrink the screen, but Adobe Captivate allows actually removing or moving or changing items at different screen sizes.
If you like Flash, it has Flash output, although it's going away in 2020. Personally, I think this is an outdated technology.
Many advanced capabilities. I chose this product due to the capabilities.
Comes with assets, templates, people, head shots, and full body—excellent.
Adobe Captivate is the authoring tool. It integrates with Adobe Captivate Prime - which I highly recommend if you want to truly take advantage of all of its features in reporting, administration, compliance, and social learning. (I didn't use Prime because you essentially need 100+ students to affordably use Prime.) If you look at my chart of what Captivate is capable of, I can't say that Captivate has a lot of the reporting features because they are part of Prime/SCORM, although, with Captivate's customization, you might be able to do most of them if you are up to it, but I did not.
Rich and engaging learning experiences that capture employees' attention.
Is multi-device capable so our teams can take classes where it's most convenient for them during the day, especially if they don't have an assigned static workstation?
Allows us to personalize compliance training based on where our employees are at in the organizational chart, competencies, and requirements.
Unlimited courses, learning paths, quizzes, pages, plans, and certifications
Ease of use for students, administrators, and content creators
Customer Success and Service are top notch. The CSMs are genuinely committed to helping you achieve your metrics and goals
Asking for and listening to customer feedback for enhancements
Developer Center where people with little to no coding experience can learn how to use and apply HTML templates and code snippets to customize your site
Clunky interface, it takes a lot of extra clicks to get places compared to other Adobe apps and competitor's eLearning software.
Would be nice if it was part of creative cloud, or at least in the group of apps you can add through Creative Cloud.
More regular and meaningful updates. Compared to flagship apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. Captivate is like the read headed step child. Competitors excel at providing regular updates with clear change documentation. How are we still using Captivate 2019 in 2022?
The interface feels like it is still stuck in the 90s, would be nice if it was more modern and better in-line with flagship adobe offerings.
Variables and associated menus are a nuisance to work with vs some of the clever drop down and content-sensitive options in Articulate Storyline.
Would love to see parent/child courses so that when something is updated in the parent course that change is automatically reflected in the clones of that course.
Features that allow for the translation of content to allow access to content across languages.
Re-onboarding process when the usage of Skilljar changes hands within out company in order to address knowledge gaps.
We have hundreds of courses that were created in Adobe Captivate. It will take us a while to convert to Articulate. We'll need a license for another year and/or until Adobe comes out with a true update to the software.
Currently, our company uses this program and another competitor for our learning management software. We like the adaptability of this program and appreciate the customer service that Adobe provides, however the other program is starting to turn out to be a better value for our company as they improve their compatibility.
Adobe Captivate does take some getting used to. There are features that are much more convoluted than they need to be, but overall it is a great product with a some excellent features. Being in a pretty small market, Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline dominate the space. They are not the same software, but allow for eLearning authoring. Each has their benefit and their downside, but, for me, Adobe Captivate edges out Storyline.
In general, the user experience in Adobe Learning Manager is very satisfactory. The layout of the interface, the structure and the order of the available functionalities make it very intuitive and usable. The adaptation to mobile devices is very convenient since most of the participants connect through these electronic devices.
The learning curve for Skilljar is not too steep, and I've renewed our contract twice now. I've been able to add additional administrators and get them up to speed on platform functionality within a day. Plus, Skilljar provides awesome resources to help you learn how to use is. The Help Center has articles for almost everything, and when in doubt, their amazing CSMs (like ours, ...) provide exemplary support/advice.
On a few occasions, I've logged in to issue a test to a staff member and my course would just spin. I've had to reschedule several test attempts due to this. In my opinion, the issue was not resolved by Adobe
The performance of Adobe Captivate Prime is also extremely good. The user interface is fast and easy to load. The complexity is not nearly as bad as some of the other programs on the market. Speed was not impacted.
It is difficult to get in touch with Adobe Captivate support. With a seemingly limited number of resources, mostly outsourced, getting in contact with someone to help troubleshoot an issue is challenging. Typically wait times are long, and the desired path to resolution is to use an existing knowledge base or a self-help guide. It is certainly not a user-friendly experience.
I think they have a competent, friendly and "resolving" team. I have only ever been met with a willingness to assist any and every query I have come across. Roy who is one of the technical people is amazing, and so is my Customer Success Manager, Hema! I do not know what I would do without them.
I have opened several support cases in the past and at times felt like little was being done to resolve the issues I was having. For example, when searching the use against a training credit, Skilljar said the code was fully used, yet only 1 had been used. The support team seemed to not have interest in learning why this was happening and ensuring it does not happen again. The issue was resolved with this particular case, but I have no idea if it was the only training credit having this issue. At times I feel like the issues we encounter do not seem as important to the support team
I'm only aware of the problems Adobe Captivate had with SumTotal LMS and Upside LMS, requiring extensive contact with both internal and external support staff to fix the problems. We had no problems at all with Articulate.
Trial period was great, and It let me plenty of time to try the different feature of the platform. However, when we decided to move forward, the ADOBE team was slow and not reactive at all. Actually after 2 years, I am still waiting for answers which is quite unacceptable.
I think that Articulate360 is more user-friendly and has a cleaner, more updated look. If you can edit a PDF, then you can use Articulate 360. Adobe Captivate may be more challenging for the designer, but it has more features. We chose Adobe Captivate because we want the option to create interactive learning environments. Adobe Captivate plays well with the other Adobe design products including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier. Additionally, Adoe Captivate is highly compatible with Cornerstone, our preferred Learning Management Systems.
360 keeps up the Adobe learning manager. It even outclasses it in certain parts, but with a huge stalwart tech giant like Adobe, it is hard to keep up. Many of the features are present, but there's always that final touch missing. And it is always trying to play catchup.
Skilljar provides stronger customization features, more code snippet options, more styling tools, and more effective integrations. These include Credly, Salesforce, and SCORM. Additionally, the catalog is all part of the same system, making it easy to manage. The analytics tools are also more robust, and the customer service is much more helpful and responsive
The product's overall scalability and flexibility is extremely good. I wish that the other products our company uses were this flexible! The product is easy to deploy across multiple departments and teams as needed.
Adobe Captivate has allowed our instructors to engage students in ways we never have before.
Instructors who have used Adobe Captivate in our organization have reported higher levels of engagement with their courses and their students, theoretically leading to improved assessment of student performance.
Our customers seem to be getting onboarded efficiently. Giving our customers a good experience helps us retain them longer.
So far, we are still not able to come up with solid metrics that it provides evidence of ROI. If Skilljar could somehow come up with clear, actionable metrics about customer success and how that relates to ROI then I think it would be vastly better. To be fair, we roll the cost of using Skilljar in the overall price, otherwise, we would charge customers and have a revenue stream to measure.
