Adobe Captivate vs. iSpring Suite vs. Maven Analytics

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

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 Personally, I think this is an outdated technology.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

• 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

• 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 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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

• 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

• 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