Articulate vs Captivate

I'm an Intermediate to Advance Flash developer that has gotten into e-learning the last 4-5 years. From my experience of using Captivate 7 & 8 for a little over a year and then using SL2 for the past 4 months, there are positives and negatives to both. However, the frustration factor of working in Captivate 7 & 8 was much higher for me!

Some of the things I like about SL2 over Captivate:

1. Resetting an interaction on a slide is much easier
2. Animation effects are cleaner and a lot less messy
3. Animations don't do crazy things when you change the length of time an object will be on the timeline
4. Multiple timelines for slides makes for more animation possibilities
5. HTML5 output is a lot less buggy (especially when it comes to drag & drops)
6. Much better support team (and community) for when you have questions
7. Objects don't loose the names you give them when you copy a slide
8. Duplicating things like buttons and state changes of objects is so much easier

Some of the things I like about Captivate over SL2:

1. Library of all the items in the course that you can edit pictures from in Photoshop
2. More video capturing related options
3. Mobile development views in the main interface are nice for those kinds of projects
4. Can't think of any more right now

In summary, if you plan on doing your courses mostly as video explanations, I would say you could use Captivate. But Storyline does a pretty good job with video as well. Otherwise I'd say SL2 is your best bet.

Hi Shalaka,

I use both Captivate and Storyline extensively and agree with Daniel's points above and his summary that SL2 is the better tool. The only exception is if you are wanting to develop software simulations which include text entry field in which case Captivate is a much better option due to some big limitations in SL2.

Louise

Hi Daniel,

Thanks a lot for quick reply and giving valid reasons for selecting right
tool based on requirement. It will surely help me.

Regards,
Shalaka.

Hi Louise,

Thanks a lot for guiding me on selecting right tool and quick reply as well.

Regards,
Shalaka.

Glad that you were able to get the assistance that you needed here Shalaka :)

Hi Leslie,

I really like this community. Though I have not worked on Articulate yet I like reading the solutions which experts give. I am very excited to work on Articulate. Thanks :)

Yes, the community is amazing. Glad that you can be a part of it and we are here when you start your Articulate journey as well Shalaka :)