criteria for rise vs. storyline?

Hey bdkloepple​! I love this conversation and I assume people's answers are going to vary depending on their skills, preferences, and use cases—I think this will be an interesting thread for me to watch as someone who works at Articulate :) 

I think your point about the tradeoff between speed and customizability is basically correct—and the framework shared before from chatgpt is pretty good. 

What I would add about how I personally think about the difference between these two tools is that Storyline is essentially an open development environment whereas Rise is a development environment with guardrails. Because of this, Rise courses tend to end up looking more similar to one another, whereas I could build everything from an Escape Room to a Music Video with Storyline :) 

What I haven't seen anyone mention yet is that these tools are not an either/or, but meant to compliment each other—I often see creators creating everything they easily can in Rise, and then dropping in a few slides created on Storyline where they needed more customizability to create, say, a section with a software simulation. Similar to how if I wanted to build a website, I might start with a site-builder or even with AI, and then go on to make tweaks to the existing framework with custom code. I think learning both tools & how and when to use them together is often your best bet!