New to Articulate

Aug 23, 2013

Our company is relatively new to using e-learning.  What is the best or difference between Studio and Storyline?  Which one would be better to grow into?

5 Replies
Richard S

I think it all depends on your company's goals.  Both are great tools but it truly depends on your needs.  I have worked with both and to me, I feel that Studio is an accelerated-streamlined version of taking a Power Point, voice it over and add a quiz approach... a relatively linear approach.  Storyline allows for a lot of different functionalities and the ability to create scenarios and non-linear approach to learning.  I personally prefer Storyline provides the best opportunity to grow into more because of its ability to do so many different things as well as it's ease of use.  But, again... it all falls back to the goals of your company.

Gina Heumann

Hands down, Storyline is the best one to grow into! My company has both, so I frequently have to go back and forth. The modules I create from scratch are all in SL, but I often have to update older ones done in Studio. I find Articulate Studio very cumbersome. When you want to create or alter an interactive Engage file, it's opened as a separate file. Same with a Quizmaker file. I  much prefer having it all right there under one "roof". Also the ability to create your own interactions and add voiceover is SO much better in Storyline!

There are only a couple things that I like better about Studio, and I hope the Storyline people are working on including these in their next update:

(1) Players! Studio has many different "players" that can be customized for your specific project and Storyline does not. If I want my player to look like a TV set, I should have that option and I don't. :(

(2) Motion paths! Since Studio works off of regular PowerPoint, there are lots of motion paths available for animations and Storyline only has a few.

Overall, those things are so minor in comparison to the many many things that Storyline does that Studio does not. If you are trying to decide between the two, I feel like it's a no-brainer!

Natalia Mueller

Hi Terry-

Welcome to the Heroes Forum! I think the key phrase in your post is "grow into". Studio is definitely a great rapid development tool. If you are doing anything with PowerPoint now, it would be a super easy transition. BUT if you want a tool that you can start right away creating basic courses in but still have the ability to learn more and more about the vast functionality and turn linear courses into highly interactive learning experiences, Storyline is definitely the tool. It's intuitive enough (along with tons of free tutorials, built in templates and community resources) that you can start developing with it right away and with a very limited learning curve. You don't have to learn all the extensive functionality to use it. That can come over time. I just love working with it - clearly.  

Again, a warm welcome to you! I hope we see you here again. Let us know if you are looking for any particular resources. We have a few grizzled veterans around this community that are nearing wizard status.

~Natalia

Nancy Woinoski

Hi Terry, Articulate Studio is a form-based application which plugs into PowerPoint. This means a couple of things:

1. Because it is form-based it is very easy to use as a lot of the design decisions are predefined for you.  But this also means you have less flexibility to change the design when you want to do something a little different.

2. Because it is a PowerPoint plugin you need to have PowerPoint in order to use it and the better you know and understand the capabilities of PowerPoint, the better your course content will be. Gina mentioned motion paths as a feature of Studio that she really likes. This is actually a feature of PowerPoint that Studio supports. 

One thing  I love about Studio is how crisp the text appears once you publish. I also really like how you can use a lot of the PowerPoint animation options to animate your course content and sync it to audio. 

Storyline, on the other hand, is not a PowerPoint plugin and is much more flexible than Studio which means that you have much more control over how you are going to present your content. It supports variables and JavaScript which allows you to do a lot of things in Storyline that you cannot do in Studio. It also means there is a steeper learning curve.

I have both tools and will continue to have both ( I know this is not a realistic option for most people) but I'll pick the tool I use for development based on what I have to create. Sometimes Studio is the way to go and sometimes Storyline is the way to go.

Steve McAneney

Hi. I'm a newbie to e-learning too, and bought Presenter first (well, my employer did), and then 'graduated' to Storyline.

If you want to pump out e-learnings, want a shallow learning curve, and love the pzazz available in powerpoint (there are amazing things you can do with animations, and the 3D objects you can build in PPT are neat) then Presenter Studio is the one for you. 

However, I wanted to build software simulations, so I changed to Storyline. I have lost the some of the animations from PPT, but to be honest, you couldn't use all of them in Presenter, and it was a pain in the whatever to keep track of the ones you could and couldn't use. I don't miss them at all.

The learning curve, I think, is the same for both taking into account the huge amount of tutorials available.So, for me the deciding factor was the ability to record software simulations. The additional functionality (variables are great!) is definitely something you can 'grow into', while with Presenter essentially what you see is what you get. 

Hope this helps.

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