Why I keep using Adobe Captivate
November 28, 2018
Why I keep using Adobe Captivate
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Captivate
We utilize Adobe Captivate to produce training modules for our proprietary system for new customers to learn how to use it. Captivate helps by providing a quick and easy utility that can create amazing videos with no frustration. I love that there are deployment options to host the produced video on different platforms and includes incorporating LMS such as SCORM with a full scoring quiz at the end. Captivate also makes it very easy to address the sounds in the videos and mouse clicks as well as the audio you want the audience to hear.
- Easy learning curve. Captivate makes it easy for a new user to pick it up and understand where to begin. Adobe, in general, does this very well and Captivate is no exception. When you begin using Captivate, many of the tasks to create a video come naturally as things are laid out in a way that makes sense.
- Embedding with LMS (Learning Management Systems). Adobe has made it very easy to deploy your produced video to any of the popular LMS's available. Captivate also gives you a very easy way of including a SCORM score for any quizzes that must be passed at the end of the video in order to proceed to the next video.
- Capturing Audio has never been easier. With Captivate you can easily add voice-over audio that you can record directly inside of Captivate, or import a pre-recorded audio clip. You can import sounds from other sources for effects in the video and Captivate already includes all of the commonly used sounds for mouse-clicks, error sounds, etc.
- While Captivate does an amazing job at recording movement of mouse and keystrokes on the screen, it would be great to have the ability to capture the same items via a plugin to 3rd party software (Outlook, Firefox, or other Adobe applications). The results would be that while working in another application and realizing that someone might want a quick tutorial on something, rather than launching Captivate, one could use the plugin to quickly capture the screen and mouse movement.
- Configuring the LMS to have quizzes at the end and have a passing score could use an enhancement. While it works great, it is not the most straight-forward setup there is. One finds themselves searching online for solutions and answers how to accomplish certain setup steps for LMS or SCORM.
- It would be nice to be able to have the control of Captivate on a 2nd or 3rd monitor that is not being captured, to be able to see more of the real estate of your screen that you are capturing.
- While using Captivate, our organization has decreased training times from 6 days when done face-to-face, down to 4 days when done via Captivate training modules. The ROI thereby has been established at a yearly rate of ~2 months. In just a 2 month period each year, we are averaging a new employee, which is trained in 4 days rather than 6 days, causing the difference in overhead for 2 days to easily pay for the yearly cost of Captivate.
- Another positive impact Captivate has had on our company is that it provided us the ability (and idea) to create help videos, where normally in a software you have a question mark (?) to click on for help, a text document would open to the FAQ's or User Manual. In our case, it set us ahead of any competition by creating short videos when the user clicks on the question mark and a few-second-long video would play explaining the item they were clicking on.
I also used AnalogX Capture, but this survey would not allow me to enter it as a competitive software as they do not have it in their list.
Captivate is the best. Simply put, no one stands up to them. The amount of thought put in to Captivate is beyond that of any other application. Adobe has spent much time making it sync with other Adobe apps and makes it very easy to use together. The ability to include your quizzes right from the software and control the LMS is great. All the capturing tools built in to Captivate make it so much easier to use when you are just starting to learn the product and when you are an advanced professional.
Captivate is the best. Simply put, no one stands up to them. The amount of thought put in to Captivate is beyond that of any other application. Adobe has spent much time making it sync with other Adobe apps and makes it very easy to use together. The ability to include your quizzes right from the software and control the LMS is great. All the capturing tools built in to Captivate make it so much easier to use when you are just starting to learn the product and when you are an advanced professional.
Adobe Captivate Feature Ratings
Adobe Captivate Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Quick Initial Response | None |
No - I have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription on top of the Adobe Captivate subscription. This allowed me to contact the support team directly with Creative Cloud, they then have a direct line to Captivate to get me a tech immediately. This provides the same support as their Premium Helpdesk Support, but without having to pay extra for it. Is it worth it to pay? Well...I am 50/50 on that because the support you get is not the best. So when you pay for something, you expect the best support. Being what it is, I view it as more of an included support and should not be an additional charge.
Yes - There was an issue with a SCORM score being returned as false when the timeout threshhold was reached for the amount of time a person had to answer a question on the quiz. Adobe was able to identify the issue...but failed to resolve it. It was naturally resolved in the next version of Captivate, offering no solution to the actual bug. It may have been ignored or discarded as not able to be resolved...but I never heard back after that.
Yes. When I first started out using Articulate Studio and was publishing to a proprietary LMS, we had major issues getting everything talking together. Adobe was willing to get an engineer online with us, whom spent a lot of time with us to learn how our system worked in order to make a couple changes in the SCORM system in Captivate in order to get it all working. This caused Adobe to publish a hot-fix update that was an optional download. When we installed it, everything was fixed and worked perfectly. I've never known another company to involve an engineer at this level to work with a single customer (my company). Awesome job!