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Tony Tao

Articulate vs. Captivate Part 4:  And the winner is. . .

from Tony Tao, Instructional Designer and eLearning Developer
on February 03, 2012
3 comments

Author’s Note: This blog entry is part of a series I started to explore two of today’s most popular eLearning rapid development tools: Articulate Studio and Adobe Captivate. Here is a link to an article that contains the whole Articulate vs. Captivate series.

In the previous blog entries, we have explored the major features of Articulate and Captivate, and discussed the strengths and limitations of each tool. Of course, there really isn't a winner. As I wrote at the beginning of this series, the only answer to the question “Which is better?” is “It depends.” The tools have different strengths and the best fit depends on your needs.

And for larger organizations or those with more complex or varied learning needs, the answer to the question “Which should I buy?” is often “Both.”

I've created a summary chart that I think clearly highlights the strengths of the two tools. Of course, some of these items can’t be reduced to a simple yes-or-no answer, so in some cases this chart simply reflects my opinion.

In 2012, we will see new players joining the rapid eLearning tool game. For example, Articulate Storyline and ZebraZapps are already attracting a lot of attention. There is also the possibility of new releases of Articulate Studio, Adobe Captivate, and SmartBuilder.

One of the interesting trends that we have noticed is the rise of mobile learning, and how the rapid eLearning tools are quickly incorporating functionality that gives them the potential to create mLearning content. For example, most of the new tools can publish your project as HTML 5 or in the mp4 video format. This gives eLearning developers an easier path to get a course running on Apple mobile devices such as the iPad.

I expect to see more projects developed with these new tools in 2012 and I will be using them myself for Fredrickson's Learning business. As always, I'm glad to share my thoughts and findings with you and I appreciate your comments on these blog entries.

Comments

Hey, four years and three vrseions later, Captivate still sucks. Aliasing of fonts is awful, buttons always resume slides when clicked (even if they should not), Flash performance is terrible, and Captivate still maintains its awful single-track one-direction mentality. Awful, awful.

by trapstar
on February 16, 2012 - 7:50

To address a few of the issues trapstar posted:

Aliasing fonts is an known issue since CP3, especially when using in the transparent caption box.  It can be addressed by adding gray or white highlighting over the text. 

CS5 and 5.5 offers the possibility of externalizing full motion animations and the skin, which could make the project loads faster.  However, the majority of the assets, including the audio files, still stay in the main single SWF file.  It would take long time to preload a course with a lot of audio in it.  Hopefully this can be fixed with the later upgrades of Captivate.

by Tony
on February 20, 2012 - 2:18

So acheiving Captivate success is dependent upon a nuanced understnading only gained through experience.  Articulate still trumps Captivate from a process perspective.  Managing rapid content development in today’s environment is best done with tools that can be scaled and can be mastered by non programmers.  While this chart is useful, it can be even more so with additional categories addressing today’srealities, i.e., process-workflow and moble ffiendly.

by Rick Koskinen
on February 24, 2012 - 11:29

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