Camtasia is a video editor and screen recorder. Camtasia offers a range of plans designed to meet varying video creation needs, and enables users to produce professional-looking videos. Its features include Camtasia Rev, script generation, text-to-speech, translations, and avatar videos, to streamline the video creation process. The editions available are Free, Essentials, Create, or the Pro plan.
$179.88
per year per user
Storylane
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Storylane, headquartered in Santa Clara, helps companies build interactive product demos in minutes with their eponymous no-code tool. Marketing users can embed guided product tours on their websites, landing pages , blogs or share them in email campaigns. Sales users can replicate the product and build custom demos tailor made for conversation. Storylane's no code editor enables users to personalize anything in the demo.
$50
per month per seat
Pricing
Camtasia
Storylane
Editions & Modules
Camtasia Business
$198
per year per seat
Starter
$50
per month per seat
Growth
$625
per month 5 seats included + $125 per additional seat
Premium
$1500
per month custom seats
Solo (1 Demo)
free forever
Enterprise
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Camtasia
Storylane
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
*Discounts available for purchases supporting a large volume of users.
Camtasia is so easy to use that I recommend it over Adobe Premiere, Captivate, Storyline, and other tools. The only problem is the price. Due to the fact that I purchased this for education purposes, and educational prices have gone up exponentially, it has been difficult even at $179 to upgrade, as an educator and the organization is not always willing to reimburse the purchase, it would have been more economical. It was less than $100 (Black Friday) when I bought our updated version in 2019. Camtasia profile accounts aren't the best setup, however. My profile account does not reflect when I was a user or show past invoices, and I wanted to see how long ago I was a user.
If you are looking to make simple, guided demos to easily demonstrate product UI and workflows, Storylane is a great choice. You need to be ready to invest a lot more heavily if you'd like to provide a sandbox experience that will allow users to navigate around the whole UI with full linking and interactive onscreen elements.
USB Microphones can sometimes cause a problem if they become accidentally unplugged during a recording session. This can corrupt some of the files that the Camtasia Recorder application uses to capture directly to .avi mode.
You'll sometimes get a message when you next try to record that .avi mode isn't available and the only way to fix this is by completely uninstalling and reinstalling Camtasia (with a reboot in the middle of these two actions).
This bug only manifested after Camtasia 8 was released, but still seems to cause an issue right up to and including Camtasia 2021.
I'd like to see more standard Annotation options. The existing ones are pretty good, but variety is a little lacking.
More 'Behaviours' would also be really welcome as these are a great feature and make Callouts a bit more interesting and lively. I've not seen any new Behaviours over the past few versions (since Camtasia 2018).
Each release of Camtasia has added just enough functionality to justify the upgrade to the new version. I like that Camtasia is not a subscription-based product as we have more flexibility and control over our spend on the product. We can also purchase support packages that include the next version when released.
I haven't used another video recording and editing tools that is as comprehensive and straight-forward as Camtasia. Typically, if you want a user-friendly video editing tools for novice users, you have to compromise on features. Camtasia solves this problem by offering extensive editing features in a simplistic, user-friendly environment. Highly recommend
Storylane functions as expected, and the learning curve is fairly easy to navigate. If you are accustomed to using drag-and-drop interfaces, Storylane will be very easy to use. The Chrome extension makes it easy to capture screens from your browser, and it's easy to both create new Storylanes or append to existing templates you've already created.
With the latest version (Camtasia 2020), I actually had problems with an Imac with HighSierra, but from the first moment they answered and guided me to solve the problem, even before making the purchase (with some doubts I had). And they have support in English and Spanish, I really liked that.
I've tried several freeware recorders, too. If all you want to do is literally record your screen, and nothing else, you don't need Camtasia. There are literally dozens of apps that will do that. If you want an app that will record your screen while capturing mouse clicks, follow you, record your voice while you capture, and annotate when you're done, Camtasia has no equal. Plus, it doesn't stop there. You can add professional intros and outros (many already created to choose from), lower thirds, etc., leading to videos with very high production value. This is THE program to buy if you want to produce training videos of very high quality.
They are both good products and pretty similar. Navattic definitely had some strong features, but with Storylane, they were incredibly responsive to requests for help and feature requests and it just "looked" better. Storylane also "felt" better in terms of working with it. There were some design flow decisions made with Navattic that I found to be a bit counterintuitive.
