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Overview of Captivate
February 27, 2018

Overview of Captivate

Carly Germann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Captivate

Our organization uses Adobe Captivate in the RAD (Rapid Authoring Development) team. This team develops storyboards that are written by instructional designers for eLearning courses for our corporate clients. The business problem it addresses is that we need an authoring tool that allows for responsive and mobile design and works on tablets, PCs, mobile devices, etc. Many of our clients own Captivate licenses themselves, so they ask us to develop in Captivate so that they can open them and make edits once we have handed them off if they need to.
  • Adding interactivity: It is possible to create drag and drops, click to reveals that are already formatted, and custom click to reveals. It is fairly intuitive to use to design.
  • Knowledge check questions: there are standard knowledge check questions that you can use, such as multiple choice and multiple answer, drag and drop, matching, etc.
  • Speed of development: it is fairly quick to learn Captivate for most people and once familiar, they can create a course quickly.
  • Screen recording! It is SO good at grabbing screenshots and you can even have it add some of the interactive and instructional elements for you.
  • It is cumbersome to add a custom UI to the course. It is much easier to just use the stock one, but it doesn't always look the best.
  • Adding variables can be confusing and take a long time, and it's very easy to make a little mistake that throws off the whole thing.
  • Some of the stock options are outdated looking.
  • It has enabled us to tailor our courses to the authoring tool that our client wants to use.
  • It lets us work with more clients.
  • It gives us more options in terms of authoring.
I have used Lectora and Storyline. All of these authoring tools have their pros and cons.

Lectora: great for adding custom UI to a course, or branching. Can be complicated to learn though.
Storyline: probably the easiest tool of the three to use. Can be limited.
Captivate: excellent at screen recording and grabbing screenshots and making simulations/demos. Difficult to do a custom UI.
Captivate is really good for screenshots. If we are making a systems training course and the client doesn't have a preference for authoring tool, we almost always choose Captivate. It is so easy to take the screenshots and add the interactivity in. You can make the mouse move, make voiceover, or make an interactive demo where the user clicks around the screen to get through the training. It's really good.