Adobe Captivate is an elearning authoring and course design tool (or LCMS). It supports mobile HTML5 content. Captivate’s users are commonly midsized businesses to enterprises. Adobe Captivate includes some prebuilt assets as well as customizable workflows.
It's simply easier to use and has more features than the one in the list. Added to that, the license price of ActivePresenter is so much more affordable than others on the market.
Adobe Captivate outshines all of these other tools -Camtasia, Snagit, Powtoons, After Effects, PowerPoint - when it comes to software demonstrations, simulations and/or training videos that contain software demonstrations ( hybrid video containing software demonstrations). But …
1 common platform for reporting & tracking of
completion for mandatory trainings. Ability to create own training and mandatory trainings are available & accessible for all
employees + contractors
SWAT (internal LCMS) - more flexible but not common to many and difficult to keep up to date Adobe Connect - great for webinars and online classes with live instructor.
At the time Storyline seemed easier to use, but I was already committed to a project and investing time in learning Captivate for it. I also felt some loyalty to Adobe because I had received free Creative Cloud courses through the Adobe Education Exchange.
Adobe Captivate easily outputs to HTML5 and give you a programming timeline. Lectora does not have a timeline which is a disadvantage when trying to program animations or any other time based interactions. Lectora does have programming capabilities, but at times is difficult to …
I use Camtasia for video editing, however, we have Premier Pro and are now learning to use it. Camtasia and Snagit we use for smaller projects. For bigger projects, we use them all.
Can't touch Authorware. Too bad Adobe killed it. I'd love it if Authorware could be resurrected, modernized and export to HTML5. THat would be the ultimate tool. Animate can do a lot more but it takes a lot more time to build.
Adobe Captivate has more availability and content to be able to change around. Again, I like Adobe Captivate more because of all the content that is available and the pre-made options.
While Captivate has some awesome niche features for some circumstances, currently it cannot beat the ease of use with Storyline. Whether it's content, variables, quizes, etc. things are just "easier" in Storyline. Even something as simple as triggering an event when the …
Captivate is more difficult to figure out. However, once you get passed the learning curve it offers more variety and options than Camtasia. It allows for interactions, simulations, and the likes.
ActivePresenter is designed for professional trainers, educators or teachers. So, it's best to use it for educational purposes like creating training videos, eLearning lessons, interactive training videos. You can also use it as a tool for content creation like making tutorial videos for YouTube or other social video sharing platforms. Making online courses for local training or selling online is also a great fit of ActivePresenter.
Adobe Captivate is well suited for software training. Even though we do not use the software simulation recording feature, we simulate the environment with screenshots and then roundtrip into Photoshop to make edits to a screenshot For example, they added 3 new fields and it affects 25 different slides in the course. I dummy up the 3 new fields in Photoshop, copy the layers with the new fields, flatten and save the screenshot and it's instantly updated in Abode Captivate. I then locate the next slide that needs the same new fields added and round trip into Photoshop and then I just select Paste in Place and flatten and save. The alignment is perfect and the screenshots never leave Adobe Captivate. I had a course that I had to do this to with about 25 slides and it was easy peasy.
Easy learning curve. Captivate makes it easy for a new user to pick it up and understand where to begin. Adobe, in general, does this very well and Captivate is no exception. When you begin using Captivate, many of the tasks to create a video come naturally as things are laid out in a way that makes sense.
Embedding with LMS (Learning Management Systems). Adobe has made it very easy to deploy your produced video to any of the popular LMS's available. Captivate also gives you a very easy way of including a SCORM score for any quizzes that must be passed at the end of the video in order to proceed to the next video.
Capturing Audio has never been easier. With Captivate you can easily add voice-over audio that you can record directly inside of Captivate, or import a pre-recorded audio clip. You can import sounds from other sources for effects in the video and Captivate already includes all of the commonly used sounds for mouse-clicks, error sounds, etc.
Templates. There seem to be "themes," but Adobe Captivate has a terrible time saving any sort of object preferences which makes it really difficult when a set of courses need to follow branding guidelines. I have to create a basic course and set up all my colors and whatnot and start every course using that.
Ease of use. It is like pulling teeth sometimes to get Adobe Captivate to do things. You may be able to get it to do it, but it'll be like a dozen or more steps which make creating courses incredibly tedious.
A bigger focus on software simulation. Adobe Captivate isn't designed for simulation, I get that, and I am happy it does as much as it does. However, it could be better to capture actions and things within a program. For instance, click and drag options and hot-key combinations.
We have hundreds of courses that were created in Adobe Captivate. It will take us a while to convert to Articulate. We'll need a license for another year and/or until Adobe comes out with a true update to the software.
It's easy to use like MS PowerPoint . The UI looks similar to what I've been using for over decades. I am an old man, and I can use it to create so many different types of content. Great one! No excuse buying the software.
Adobe Captivate does take some getting used to. There are features that are much more convoluted than they need to be, but overall it is a great product with a some excellent features. Being in a pretty small market, Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline dominate the space. They are not the same software, but allow for eLearning authoring. Each has their benefit and their downside, but, for me, Adobe Captivate edges out Storyline.
It is difficult to get in touch with Adobe Captivate support. With a seemingly limited number of resources, mostly outsourced, getting in contact with someone to help troubleshoot an issue is challenging. Typically wait times are long, and the desired path to resolution is to use an existing knowledge base or a self-help guide. It is certainly not a user-friendly experience.
I'm only aware of the problems Adobe Captivate had with SumTotal LMS and Upside LMS, requiring extensive contact with both internal and external support staff to fix the problems. We had no problems at all with Articulate.
It's simply easier to use and has more features than the one in the list. Added to that, the license price of ActivePresenter is so much more affordable than others on the market.
While Captivate has some awesome niche features for some circumstances, currently it cannot beat the ease of use with Storyline. Whether it's content, variables, quizes, etc. things are just "easier" in Storyline. Even something as simple as triggering an event when the timeline reaches a certain point. We continue to keep Captivate and Storyline because we're hoping it Captivate will continue building its integration with other Adobe apps and become our and the industry standard.
Adobe Captivate has allowed our instructors to engage students in ways we never have before.
Instructors who have used Adobe Captivate in our organization have reported higher levels of engagement with their courses and their students, theoretically leading to improved assessment of student performance.
