Adobe Captivate vs. Articulate 360 vs. iSpring Suite

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.

Incentivized

Articulate 360 is great for online courses, courses for an LMS, courses that use media, text to speech audio, interactive items. Courses can be translated into other languages quickly. You can bring in outside media into the course pretty easily. The layouts are professional looking and blocks can be copied easily and repeated as needed.

iSpring Suite gives me a platform to easily create training courses for any number of subjects, custom-designed to fit my workplace. I can include quizzes that allow me to track both the completion rate of the course and the success rate of the training. Its user-friendliness stands out and makes my role as Training Director much easier on a day-to-day basis.

• 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 Personally, I think this is an outdated technology.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.

Incentivized

• Unrivaled Power and Customization. After 15 years in the training industry, Storyline 360 remains my favorite tool because it is, simply put, the most powerful authoring tool I have ever used, giving me complete creative control.
• Advanced Interactivity. I love being able to 'overengineer' content using Triggers, Variables, States, and Layers, which allows me to build the most sophisticated and deep functionality.
• Superior to Basic Tools. Storyline's capability to build detailed branching scenarios and realistic simulations sets it leaps and bounds apart from basic tools like PowerPoint, which is essential for high-impact training.

Incentivized

• Great range of images to use to show real people in the slides across the slideset because of the number of different actions they are doing
• Support is easy to access and always helpful with easy to understand advice as well as links to further knowledge
• Recording narration and editing within the iSpring Suite presentation makes it easy to use this function as a novice.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Feature suggestions take a long time to be added to the software
• Would like to see deeper options for some of the learner engagement activities (Drag and drop, sliders, etc. )
• Occasionally will not save as expected, and you have to create a copy to keep working on a project

Incentivized

• More facial expressions of the characters.
• Update independent of my prompting/box checking.
• Add details on what the customized play includes when the mouse hovers over the icon. It took a bit of time to realize that this was where we could select different layouts.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I haven't seen any other platform for developing learning materials that is as comprehensive or as reliable as Articulate has proven to be for our use. Because our group has a number of PowerPoint power users, the PowerPoint integration with Articulate is particularly beneficial.

Incentivized

I would give it 10 but I also like to try new solutions.

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.

Incentivized

Usability is where Articulate shines. Anyone who has ever built a PowerPoint can open the tool and quickly understand how to use it. The more complex aspects of the tool are also very user-friendly, but you can build great content without ever going into advanced variables or JavaScript.

Incentivized

iSpring Suite is a perfect tool overall to create contents in collaboration with colleagues. There are some difficulties though in usability but the usability is OK in total. We are fully satisfied with the customer support. There are simple online tutorials and a team of competent support colleagues. The support content is sometimes not simply accessible, you need to search for them longer.

Incentivized

I love how when there is any downtime that the user can still access the tool

Incentivized

Pages load fast, the videos play normally, and I haven't seen any delays in the system

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I rate the overall support for Articulate 360 ​​with a 9. On the one hand because of the smooth and accurate support from Articulate's support team (usually within 24 hours) and on the other because of the commitment / use of a community (e-learning Heroes) where I have all kinds of insights from other helpful users.

Great software is only exceeded by their fantastic support. Prompt responses, complete with clearly outlined steps to follow, are just the beginning. There are tremendous resources and continual webinars to challenge what we think we know about the iSpring Suite. I often use PowerPoint to lay out marketing slides, add music and narration, then publish them as an MP4 video. I can count on iSpring support to assist me when I need help.

The instructors don't know how to use it.

Incentivized

The online training options given by the online tutorials, forums, and "E-Learning Heroes" community are simply awesome. Examples galore, easy to understand descriptions including step-by-step guides, images, occasionally videos, and the "Articulate Insiders" sub-community give you more materials to learn about Storyline than you are likely to be able to read.

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.

Incentivized

Outside of having to dedicate a powerful enough PC for the installation and having to update Flash in our browsers there really isn't much pain involved in using Articulate. For the most part this is an easy to implement and roll-out product. The installation occurs quickly and smoothly with no additional steps needed.

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.

Incentivized

I have not used any other elearning development software other than Articulate 360. Though, I have seen demos of other products and while they are great, they still don’t seem to be as great as Articulate 360. This opinion also shows up in other places like product reviews and instructional design groups on Facebook.

Incentivized

Ultimately, I selected iSpring Suite because of the ease of use and small learning curve. I needed to be able to start creating content immediately, and after doing trial periods with iSpring as well as some of the other options, it was clear that I could be up and running the quickest with iSpring. I don't see any features that are missing for what I need, and it was also the cheapest option.

Incentivized

Easy to use. Cheap. It has a lot of features.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Has been at the training process so we can release new content swiftly and introduced. Introduced it to new member.
• Storyline has helped build prototypes and wire frames. Provide feedback and allowed many different situations to be viewed for brains. Brainstorming.

Incentivized

• The ROI on this product has been great
• It has enhance my reputation personally within the organization. This has led to other departments requesting me by name to head up eLearning development projects, even delaying their own deadlines to ensure that I am involved.
• Other than a few duds (I let some inexperienced vocal talent slip thru in the heat of multiple conflicting deadlines), learner feedback has skyrocketed over that developed before I became involved and standardized the effort on iSpring