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
Thought Industries
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
The Thought Industries platform enables enterprise organizations to create,
manage, distribute, monetize, and analyze their end-to-end customer education and external training initiatives. The solution addresses the
unique needs of customer education, and aims to make it easy to handle complex learning
operations at scale to empower growth. Its administrative capabilities include native tools and thirdparty integrations, businesses boost learner engagement, operationalize
processes, and…
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.
Thought Industries is perfect if you are trying to scale your customer education business for a growing customer base. It is more expensive than their competitors, but the price is worth it based on the product and experience. Thought Industries is likely great for smaller customers, although we are an enterprise-level customer. If you are not offering multiple modalities for your training program, Thought Industries (or any LMS for that matter) might not be the best investment.
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 Personally, I think this is an outdated technology.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.
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.
Cannot pull a report for a course(s) to show who has not started the course
Cannot reset gamification or run specific gamification campaigns
Although SCORM compliant, SCORM courses often break or do not show as complete on the learner side even when the module is marked as complete on the back end
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.
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.
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.
The customer support and customer success teams are really great. BUT, it is their product team that sends them into a super high rating. The product team has worked with me on several occasions to try to solve the business challenges that I have.
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.
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.
Thought Industries is better on the financial side and as far as ease of use. It is more affordable than Docebo and is more aligned to an external customer use case. Docebo and Tovuti seemed to be more for internal training. Tovuti was less expensive, but it was a little harder to use although it had more quiz 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.
