Storyline limitations in comparison to Captivate

Oct 22, 2019

Hi, I am a Storyline user, it´s a great tool, fun and powerful, but recently I had to create some courses using Captivate (Cp). Though in balance I prefer Storyline, mainly because it is more "visual", I´d like to mention some Cp features that I would like to see in SL.

  • Captivate has actions that trigger animation effects (for example: "when clicking this button, apply a wipe effect to that picture"). To my knowledge, SL doesn´t have this feature; a somewhat similar roundabout is to trigger a state change, where said state has an integrated effect, but it´s not as straightforward as Cp. 
  • Cp makes an effective difference between objects hidden in the edit timeline and objects hidden in the published or preview output; for example, in Cp, if you hide a circle in the timeline because it gets in the way of another object you need to manipulate, that circle will appear in the published output no matter if you forgot to click the show box in the timeline; it will be hidden in the output only if you mark another specific box. Instead, in SL the objects you hide in the edit timeline are also invisible in the output if you forget to activate the eye icon; this is often confusing and frustrating; the Cp option is preferable , or at least add a warning text before publishing or previewing: "One or more objects are hidden in the timeline and won´t be visible. Do you want to continue?"
  • In Cp you can delay actions very easily (e.g., "when clicking this button, show this text, wait three seconds, and show this picture"); while in SL you can create a motion path that serves as a delayer, this means more clicks and triggers.
  • In Cp you can substitute a picture by dragging thumbnails over it, but not in SL.
  • In Cp, the library keeps an item even when there are no instances of it in the project. In SL, instead, if you delete an item (a character, for example) it will be deleted from the library too, so if ultimately you decide that you want to use that character, you have to import it again to the project: more clicks.
  • In Cp you can update all the instances of a picture in one step (not sure that SL does the same).
  • Captivate has a ribbon to place and align objects (same as SL) but in Cp it includes some very useful buttons to make two or more selected objects the same lenght, width or both; this saves many clicks.
  • Another issue with SL is that after you create or paste a trigger, the list of triggers in the panel moves abruptly, and this forces you to do a visual search of your trigger. This is a little bothersome. The Cp interface for programming actions lacks thumbnails of the objects (that´s a great advantage of SL), but is more stable. The trigger logic is great, but please consider fixing this  interface annoyance. UPDATE: The new trigger panel solves this issue very well.
4 Replies
Lauren Connelly

Hi Daniel!

Many of us can agree that the best part about this community is the feedback and ideas members share! We rely on authors like you who use our tools day in and day out to help build our roadmap with the newest features and bug fixes.

I'm passing this information to our team! Thank you for taking the time to share this with us!

Melanie Sobie

"... can delay actions very easily (e.g., "when clicking this button, show this text, wait three seconds, and show this picture")..."

FYI - You can do this in Storyline easily by placing the picture you want to appear on a layer and set it the pic to appear 3 seconds in on the layer timeline. Then when you click on the button, have a trigger attached to it to show that layer. 

Leah Hemeon

Hi Daniel,

There are definitely a few on this I agree with (native SL for Mac, drag & drop to replace images, more triggerable animation effects). You might not be aware of a few things in Storyline though. 

Using the Media library you can import a series of images into your project (directly into the media library) and then you can use them throughout your project whether you delete them on a specific slide or not. 

You can also replace an image throughout your project via the same Media Library. Just replace that image in the Media Library and you update it everywhere. Very handy. 

You also might want to check out the new layout and interface for triggers that just launched yesterday (I received a prompt to update Storyline this morning). It's a fresh new design and has multiple ways of grouping, hiding, etc. for trigger sets.

Hope it helps!

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