Snagit or Camtasia... or both?

Jun 26, 2013

This forum was the first place I thought of to ask this question. You who contribute to these forums are seriously my hero's...

I know a lot of you use either Snagit or Camtasia, perhaps both. I mostly use Storyline but we also utilize Articulate Presenter as well. With that in mind I need your expertise:

  • Which do you use (Snagit/Camtasia/both)?
  • Which do you recommend and why?

FYI: I create both classroom and virtual training for new products as well as technical (system) training.

Thank you in advance for your help, I greatly appreciate it!

Jennifer Hughes 

11 Replies
Adam Mac

Hi Jennifer,

I think the real question is, for what purpose do you intend to use the software?

While SnagIt 11 does allow you to capture your screen as an image or video, it lacks editing capabilities for video.

Camtasia on the other hand, lacks editing capabilities for images.

These products are designed to compliment each other, not replace functionalities. Even though I have Photoshop, I end up using SnagIt to touch up most of my images. I also enjoy being able to accurately determine screen dimensions using SnagIt. For video creation and editing however, SnagIt simply can't compare.

Jennifer Hughes

Thanks for the info "a mac"!

To be honest, until I know more about each I don't know what all I'd use them for. I can imagine though that I'd be able to now use Camtasia to create our own training video shorts for things like service training, scenarios based training, etc. I can also imagine we'd use Snagit for capturing screen shots of certain applications we train on, editing photo's for presentations (creating characters with parts from other pictures) and general photo touch-ups.

Your explanation of how these products are to compliment, not replace helps tremendously! Thanks again!

Natalia Mueller

Hi Jennifer,

I second a mac. Both are great tools but one does not replace the other. It's apples and oranges.

SnagIt is very inexpensive and a standard in my toolkit. While it has capabilities beyond sceenshots and basic editing, that's mainly what I use it for and it does those things very well.

Camtasia is a solid recording tool, great for creating screencasts and it includes video editing functions. It doesn't do anything crazy fancy, but I never needed it to. You can also use the published recordings in Storyline if you find yourself working with both. I never had the challenges Madeline mentioned. 

@Madeline, what LMS do you work with?

Madeline Goepp

Natalia - I work with Litmos.  

I'm by no means a Camtasia expert and have only used it a hand full of times.  There may be a way to export videos without the codec, but if you use Camtasia, I would research and test it first.  If it imports into Articulate with the codec, awesome!  

I just know that I have come across to many codec issues with Camtasia to be a fan (both with Litmos and in other situations).  I guess from what I've seen it has left a bad taste in my mouth.

Skip Hagan

Both SnagIt and Camtasia are Techsmith products. I wouldn't be without them. As "a mac" pointed out, they are separate tools for different purposes.

I keep SnagIt in my startup sequence so that it is always sitting there, just waiting for me to hit the "Print Screen" key. It allows me to save all, or a selected portion, of the screen. Mine is setup to automatically launch the SnagIt Editor, which offers many features that allow me to make whatever edits I choose, before I actually save the file to my library. It also handles the issue of transparency for the image background and the ability to save in many useful formats.

SnagIt is especially nice for zooming in on a fine resolution pdf file that has a graphic element that I want to focus on some small segment of. I zoom in on the pdf until the part I want fills the screen. Then, grab what I need with SnagIt, and whittle away in the editor. I get REALLY good detail captures like this.

Camtasia is a good tool to throw a nice video together. It has a lot of video and audio editing features that can get you into production mode very quickly. Depending on how sophisticated you want to be, you can accomplish quite a lot. Admittedly, there are some limitations. Fortunately, this tool meets the vast majority of my needs without a huge budget or learning curve.

Having said all that, I consider these as PART of my tool kit which complements Articulate and Storyline. Along with PowerPoint, these are the five tools that I have found meet the vast majority of my needs.

OBTW: I develop training materials for power plant operators and provide plant simulator training. These tools are essential to my business. (They're also terrific fun to use....)

Steve Flowers

You might want to give this one a spin as well. http://www.screen-o-matic.com/ is the technology behind Articulate's Screenr (if it's not, I'd be flabbergasted) and it's super affordable for what it provides. I really love Snag-it for screen captures and really wouldn't be without it. Camtasia is fantastic as well but for my needs, something like screen-o-matic does the trick for less dough.

Steve

Vasily Ingogly

I use both: Snagit for screen caps ... usually one-off screen caps to be sent to a client/user, and Camtasia for videos. I also use Blue Mango ScreenSteps for static tutorials and user guides and highly recommend it.

Haven't run into any codec problems yet. There are a lot of threads out on the interwebs that discuss Camtasia and codecs. I sometimes use the video re-compressor Stomp on OS X  to post-process videos ... haven't run into a video it can't read yet.

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