Storyline or Captivate

Hey there, 

Thanks for posting your question in our community.

I'm not personally familiar with the IBM tool you mentioned, but with Articulate 360 you will get everything you need to create e-learning, including the authoring tool (Articulate storyline can be installed directly on your desktops, as per your requirement), assets like photos and characters you can use in your courses, a review tool you can use to do your review process, and more.

You can definitely create and insert your own media into your Storyline courses easily including videos, software simulations, audio clips, narration, and more... if that's something you need to do :) 

I strongly advise you give the free Articulate 360 trial a go so you can see for yourself how it works and how easy it to use! You can find out more and download a free trial here.

Thanks for your reply Nicole, it sounds just the tool, I will give the trial a go when our IT dept can install it.

So I have no experience of Kenexa (never even heard of it) but Storyline and Captivate are both great tools in their own right.

I've spent the last few years using Storyline 2 and in recent months have gone back to Captivate (v9), as its the tool the company uses for its content authoring.

If you want a simple tool to use that doesn't have a very steep learning curve then I would definitely recommend Storyline (I haven't used v3 yet).  However, if you want a system that offers a little more flexibility in terms of the control you have on content (i.e. advanced actions, variables, etc) then Captivate is the tool you should use.

I was always an advocate of Captivate until I used Storyline and for a project I have just been working on I would have loved to have had Storyline as it would have made my development so much easier (and quicker), but, I wouldn't have been able to do some of the more complex interactions I wanted in Storyline, so there are pros and cons to both.

Storyline = easy to use with a low learning curve, but lacks more of the advanced interactions and customisations

Captivate (based on v9, I haven't used the new one) = bit more complex to use with quite a steep learning curve, but can be a lot more powerful for the more advanced stuff.

Hey there David!

Thanks for popping into the discussion to provide your feedback :) 

I am very curious to know why you feel Captivate allows more flexibility in terms of the control you have over your own content. WithStoryline its possible to create variables and advanced interactivity, as well as just about any type of interaction and customization.

As a former user of Captivate myself for many years, and as someone who has used both tools extensively, I just can't really think of why Captivate would be better for more complex stuff, and can't think of a whole lot of things you can create with Captivate that you can't build with SL. In fact, I'd venture to say that more complex interactions and advanced conditional actions are easier to create in SL than in any other tool. I would love to know more about why you feel this way, or if you can point out an example of the type of interaction you feel is quicker/easier to create with Captivate than with Storyline. :)

Thanks in advance :) 

Thank you both for your invaluable comments - I am just waiting for our I.T. dept to come to terms with me asking to install a trial version of software, until then I am looking forward to having SL to "play" with.

I know this topic is a few months old now but I've only just noticed I never replied to Nicole.

So I may have been a little unfair on Storyline with the complex interactions comment.  What I meant was that Captivate has more flexibility when it comes to variables and therefore you can do more complex actions that you can't do in SL (or you could do but it would be a lot more work using things like JS).  Yes in Storyline you can create your own variables, which is great, however you can't access many of the in-built variables that Captivate does.

For example, in my latest project using Captivate I wanted to display the current time on screen.  In Captivate there is a system variable that stores this, whereas in Storyline I probably would have had to find and insert some JavaScript to do the same job.

Captivate also allows me to interact with other system variables like quiz scores, elapsed time, etc which when I first moved to Storyline was quite infuriating.  I haven't used SL3 or 360 so I don't know whether you can do this now.  My SL skills are a little rusty now as I haven't used it in a little over a year.

If I was to choose between the 2 I would hands down pick Storyline every time as its just so much easier and quicker to use.  Articulate just need to give us access to the system variables and then it would beat Captivate in most areas (in my opinion).