Articulate 360 vs. MadCap Xyleme

I've been using Articulate for about 13 years and it has continually improved over the years. I appreciate all of the updates/changes that have occurred. For me, Articulate products are super easy to learn and use. The more you use them the better you become. When I began my current job the training modules were in Lectora, which I found to be extremely archaic and cumbersome. I was able to get Articulate and transferred all 56 modules over to Storyline because it is so much easier to use. I recently moved all of my modules over to Rise and use Storyline to create the module scenarios. It works like a charm. I cannot imagine using a different application to do what I do.

Incentivized

Well-suited:

1. Building and keeping up to date modular content (blocks).
2. Maintaining and updating large content library where meaning team members might be working on the same content but using the content in different context (e.g. learning and internal comms).
3. Creating learning content by new/recently onboarded team members.
4. Create simple learning courses with some level of interactively, medium interactivity (tabs, image maps, slider reveal images), create different types of knowledge checks/assessments from multiple choice to drag and drop activities); embed videos and other HTML elements .
5. Integrate with LMS, apply SCORM rules etc
6. Better to use in combination with other media creation tools like Vyond, Storyline. Some things can get tricky (compatibility).

Less appropriate: 1. If you need to build highly interactive learning experience 2. When you don't have a team member you can dedicate specifically to customize templates in Xyleme for your organizational needs (looks, functionality etc.) or and to train team members on this software. You'd need someone on your team to collaborate with Xyleme closely to customize functions for your organization's needs. 3. When #2 and you want a modern/in trend looking output and not willing to compromise on what it looks and feels.

Incentivized

• So Articulate does very well with usability, so it's a very easy product to use. I've had to onboard an employee who was able to learn the program within a month, I think was amazing, and they were able to create the first course within five months of working at the company. So if that's not a testament to how easy it is to use, I don't know what is.

Incentivized

• content reuse (linked content modules). Update content block in one place and it updates in all the other places where this block is used (linked)
• easy to train on and onboard new team members
• flexibility of output templates
• web-based tool - easy to develop directly from browser

Incentivized

• I'd love to have Rise have a little more engaging interactivity blocks available. It'd be nice to have more of those just ready to choose from with them rather than us having to create them. Yeah, that's always the challenge with Rise is just making the course more engaging to the learner and more, whereas Storyline does that easily, but with Rise it takes a little more thinking on our end.

Incentivized

• several features advertised as device agnostic or mobile friendly do not work properly on mobile
• finicky in many ways, sometimes you need to tinker with details for to long to make things work properly
• many UI solutions/elements that are not intuitive at all (even using the tool almost every day you need to make effort to remember how things are done)

Incentivized

I haven't seen any other platform for developing learning materials that is as comprehensive or as reliable as Articulate has proven to be for our use. Because our group has a number of PowerPoint power users, the PowerPoint integration with Articulate is particularly beneficial.

Incentivized

I rate Articulate 360's usability at a 10 because. First, the UI is easy to understand. I don't spend precious time searching for the right tool. The UI is laid out beautifully and simple. If there is hidden features, I have not needed them or looked for them. In my opinion, anyone used to working with software will have no trouble using Articulate.

Incentivized

I love how when there is any downtime that the user can still access the tool

Incentivized

Pages load fast, the videos play normally, and I haven't seen any delays in the system

Incentivized

I rate the overall support for Articulate 360 ​​with a 9. On the one hand because of the smooth and accurate support from Articulate's support team (usually within 24 hours) and on the other because of the commitment / use of a community (e-learning Heroes) where I have all kinds of insights from other helpful users.

The instructors don't know how to use it.

Incentivized

The online training options given by the online tutorials, forums, and "E-Learning Heroes" community are simply awesome. Examples galore, easy to understand descriptions including step-by-step guides, images, occasionally videos, and the "Articulate Insiders" sub-community give you more materials to learn about Storyline than you are likely to be able to read.

Outside of having to dedicate a powerful enough PC for the installation and having to update Flash in our browsers there really isn't much pain involved in using Articulate. For the most part this is an easy to implement and roll-out product. The installation occurs quickly and smoothly with no additional steps needed.

Articulate is vastly superior to Microsoft Powerpoint in many ways. Obviously, for computer-based training, Articulate is in a category of its own, but even for facilitated training, the different features like variables, layers, and states give it an edge over PowerPoint. The recent addition of the morph function to articulate really eliminated the last function in which PowerPoint was superior.

Incentivized

Easy to use. Cheap. It has a lot of features.

• More accessible course creation. We actually built our business strategy training, which is kind of unique for our line of business that we even have this arm. The strategy is to essentially maximize Rise, maximize Storyline, and its ability to quickly customize slide by slide and voiceover to build a base library of content that kind of goes along within 80 20, what most of our users use as a process. Then approach new customers and be able to turn around content relatively quickly because we can go side by side and make updates as needed, whether that's quickly to screenshots, adding their policy points, just altering a couple of layers and we can create custom content. So I guess risk mitigation, but really it's our primary strategy.

Incentivized

• train and onboard new learning developers on the team quickly and get them started to create courses
• ROI - don't have access to this information

Incentivized