Articulate Storyline is a learning content creation platform. It provides prebuilt and customizable content, along with gamification capabilities. Articulate emphasizes user-friendliness, including mobile accessibility. It is offered on a perpetual license.
$1,398
Litmos
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Litmos is a cloud-based Corporate LMS. Core features include a course builder, assessments and quizzes, surveys and feedback, eCommerce, virtual classrooms, certifications, course library, SCORM and TIN CAN support, reporting, and gamification tools.
Enabled us to customise more and came in cheaper, despite having very similar functionality. Having used 2 of the LMS above, Litmos has a richer feature set and also iterates their system more regularly. In a competitive market, Litmos has managed to become one of the leaders …
Litmos is pretty comparable to these other LMSs. The only LMS that does a little more with creating embedded courses and options for creating courses right within the LMS that are very interactive is Thought Industries. Litmos is pretty great at just straightforward offerings …
I chose Litmos because of its advertised seamless integration with ADP. It turned out to not be so seamless... Hopefully, that will change.
The interface is still great, though.
In an office where you're planning to do a large amount of module-based training, Articulate Storyline will prove useful. A consideration to make, however, is whether your team members focused on training design will have the capacity to learn the software enough to create interesting and effective training modules. The basic functions can be simple, but the more advanced capabilities of the software take considerable effort to master and employ to create the more visually appealing presentations/modules you see in much of the promotional materials. If you have a small training team (or even without anyone dedicated specifically to training and development), Storyline is not a wise choice as the cost and effort required to fully make use of the software would be far too much of a commitment to make it worthwhile.
I am currently using Litmos for customer training, but have also used Litmos with a previous organization to manage internal training. It's so diverse and multi-functional, it is well-suited for both purposes. And it's by far the most user-friendly LMS platform I have ever worked with in my 15 years in corporate Learning & Development. Simple to stand up, fairly easy to administer, with a number of options available to organize data, users, and coursework to best fit your business needs. If you are managing the challenges that come with a lean and mean L&D team, this is absolutely the best platform in the market. The ease of administration combined with the Content Author Tool allows someone with very little LMS or online content development background to successfully create, house and deliver online training to practically any number of learners. The Content Author Tool is, in my mind, likely what truly sets Litmos apart from its competitors. To be able to create engaging and interactive online content without the need for a third-party authoring tool license or training is a game changer.
Storyline integrates with the Canvas LMS fairly seamlessly. There have been a few glitches, but for the most part, the interactions we have created will play directly in the Canvas LMS.
Storyline is great for creating short drag and drop interactions for self-reviews or even graded assignments. Its many options for quizzes such as "answer reveal" or using tabs help the student get a different perspective on the content rather than just an "A, B, or C" answer.
Storyline is great for tutorials or training sessions. There are many options to help guide the learner (or employee) through a process. it is not just linear, but you can branch the slides based on the answers. A great way to engage the learner or employee.
I wish that you could customize the UI ribbons to bring features you use frequently to the front and to hide options you rarely use.
It would be great if there was a way for non-technical collaborators (SMEs, management, etc) to be able to open a *.story file directly and provide comments. You currently have to publish the course, load it to the LMS, update the LMS, and then hope that users can find it in the LMS. A Storyline Viewer/Previewer standalone application would be awesome.
The price is too high for freelancers to purchase and use. I no longer contract and work exclusively for the firm, but even with our resources, the high price limits the number of licenses available to use.
We are moving away from the standalone eCourse model, so depending upon when that shift happens, we might choose not to renew since we won't be supporting eCourses built in Articulate Storyline anymore. As long as we are still selling and supporting those eCourses, we will continue to renew the licenses we have.
For what we need in the very near future, Litmos does not offer us the required capability. Ideally, we are looking for an integrated LMS, coaching, mobile support and content creation platform. Litmos may have the LMS part covered but there are other platforms that do this better along with providing an integrated all-in-one service or at the very least support API integration with other vendors to meet our requirements.
The basics are easy to learn but you won't get really robust activities from using just the basics. However, if you can invest the time in learning how to use all of Storyline's features, you'll have tremendous learning development power at your fingertips. I do have to say, though, that there is a beautiful logic to how everything in Storyline works. Once you learn a few of the advanced features, you can learn them all because there's a similar underlying logic. The interface is also very appealing and friendly.
Litmos has been quite direct, easy to use, simple to interact, has offered a ton of courses and has implemented video/web conferencing features that have been vital in our organization. Team creation and gamification has birthed positive competion that was much needed. Course creation has also been made easy for our instructors.
They are support-superstars and the software they use for support is excellent too (I don't know what it is). The model they use for support should be followed by all companies. It is a conversation/discussion forum model that shows everyone's questions in a knowledge base capacity so you can get the help you need in a speedy way.
If I could give it a negative rating I would. Worst support from any program I have had. Everything is back and forth in the support ticket. The one time I tried to chat they could not support the question. Their support page is so full of sections and products I can never find anything I need, even with a customized home page. I was hopeful that once they left SAP support might improve but it has not. I don't even know who my account executive is. Nobody has ever reached out to me. I need someone to guide me through best practices for our company and there is nobody to do that.
I love the fact that both a demonstration AND text version of the tutorials are available. Our firewall was blocking the demos until I requested my company allow them! Having the text version available still enabled me to learn from the tutorials. They are very well done and informative, and there is a tutorial for just about anything you need to learn to do with Storyline. I have always been more than satisfied with the support and training available to us for all Articulate products and I love the community!
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.
We have done two implementations. The first wasn't completed by me, but the second was. I had to do a lot of data migration across from the first system into the new instance. This was really time-consuming, and it would have been great to have had an option for someone else to have completed this for us. Learning about the tool has also been up to us, and whilst the content was good, it was also high level and broad, and then getting into the specifics of our setup was really just left to us to complete on our own and have a go. We got there, but probably could have been faster with some additional support from a consultant.
Articulate Storyline is the only authoring tool we have used with our LMS to date. We are seeing different platforms now, as opposed to LMS platforms. And, many of those have their own content. However, we will always need to create/author our own because of the nature of what we do and how we do it. I'm a big fan!
Litmos overwhelms Khan Academy for two main reasons. First, the platform allows more much more customization and integration. This includes the ability to track employee progress and offer employees rewards for completion of tasks. Second, it has more functionality than Khan Academy. Part of this is likely due to the cost of implementation and the excellent development team of Litmos.
It is easy to train new users and manage content. Being able to import older projects and PPT files makes it very easy to use for a lot of "moonlighters" in our department.
Allows for on-demand training that is accessible to anyone in the organization instantaneously.
Heavily reduces travel expenses by eliminating the need for in-person training classes.
Gives my department creative liberties in designing content that can be customized to each and every subject/business group in the organization. No two courses are ever the same.
