Articulate Studio

Articulate Studio is very much a leader in the e-learning space. It stacks up well against other tools designed to quickly and easily build and update CBTs by managers and super-users versus needing to invest time and effort in dedicated e-learning developers. Process improvement initiatives and cross-functional departments are empowered to develop their trainings themselves and identify areas for future development.

We look at Captivate first, which Adobe oddly leaves out of its Creative Cloud suite, and I can see why it seems to be completely foreign in term of UI vs other Adobe products. The familiar PPT structure Captivate leverages is completely absent and the tools are much more rigid. Exporting was also more difficult - it's pretty night and day different. Captivate is AWFUL, especially for an Adobe product.

Several Adobe products combine to do the work of just Articulate Storyline, which is part of Articulate Studio. The comparison is not really one that is easy to make but if you needed to do something with these Adobe products, all of them can be done with just Storyline. The beauty of Articulate Studio is that there are parts of the suite for which there is no match in Adobe such as Review 360 and Content Library 360.

Articulate Studio is the only Power Point extension that I have used, however, during the product evaluation phase (prior to purchase) we did look Adobe Presenter but it seemed to be a bit expensive and not very user friendly. I think we even looked at working straight from scratch with an evaluation of Moodle but that too seemed to be a bit more than what we wanted to tackle.

Articulate Studio still beats the competition by including all the necessary tools and utilities to create a course, add the content, videos, and quizes all from one user-friendly GUI. Other software works good, but you will need two or three combinations to do what Articulate Studio does all-in-one. It does not slow down your system nor does it cost you half your homes value to obtain. It will run smoothly and is very easy to learn and understand.

More in line with e-learning standards and an up-to-date design

Wondershare is the only other comparable piece of Learning authoring that I have used and it did not measure up in terms of the amount of options that are available for configuration. Wondershare had 2 or 3 things that it did very well, whereas Articulate Studio did all of those same things and more. In the powerpoint plugin eLearning space, Articulate Studio is King.

I actually use all 3 products, as they each have their strong points. For Release Training, Studio is our best choice because of the short turnaround times. That said, we use Camtasia to create the video demos needed, and insert the finished mp4 video into Studio. Studio has been great at supporting the included videos.

The main advantage of Articulate Studio, when compared to other tools (such as Lectora and Storyline), is the simplicity of use. There is no need of programming or advanced technical knowledge. Other tools are more flexible and advanced in terms of features but they also demand professionals with specific competencies, so the development process may become more complex and longer.

Adobe Captivate is the tool I prefer to deliver software tutorials. If a project requires interactive, or non-linear delivery, Articulate Studio has more tools, more options, and can deliver a better, more interesting project with less effort than Adobe Captivate.

I have used Captivate, Articulate Studio, Storyline 1 and StoryLine2 and participated in the beta tests for Articulate 360. Studio is the simplest of the items. I like any of the Articulate products more than Captivate. It has a steep learning curve and I don't think course change is nearly as easy if you need to do updates or changes.

I choose a tool based on my clients requirements, and what will best suite the content.

There was nothing against other products. Our customer was already using Articulate Studio; therefore, we had to use the same product to continue their projects, update existing courses, and create new ones. All the tools I have used so far have their own strengths.

Each tool I mentioned has its pluses and minuses. The other tools aren't as easy to use right out of the box, Articulate is. Articulate has its limits and if I had a more complex course I needed to build I would choose one of the other products. But again for the easier projects that don't require much I would use Articulate.

For a simple, quick course development and deployment, Studio is an excellent tool. Storyline creates more sophisticated results, and Captivate allows for excellent simulation-based courses, but for a typical, quick turnaround that doesn't require sims or sophistication, Studio is a great option. iSPring is a decent alternate, but I prefer Studio because of the eLearning Heroes community - you cant beat that!