Adobe Captivate vs Articulate: What to Use in 2024

If you are seeking a highly functional tool for producing excellent educational content, this Adobe Captivate vs Articulate comparison will come in handy. Both of these eLearning software are great options, but their toolkit differs considerably.

Adobe Captivate is an authoring platform developed to provide L&D leaders with overall control in the quest of creating interesting and up-to-date educational materials. Offering both ready-made content and an excellent set of features to generate new lessons, the program can become your reliable partner in building your eLearning resource.

As for Articulate, this is an intuitive platform for learning in the workplace. Tons of prebuilt courses, lessons, and templates make this service a win-win option for those who are making strides as a creator. Intuitive review tools, as well as live and on-demand online training options, allow Articulate to excel at competitors.

What is Adobe Captivate?

adobe captivate logo

Adobe Activate is a smart course creator that offers a comprehensive toolkit for generating both simple training tasks and complex lessons with interactive elements to encourage students. With it, you can embrace the future by building impressive VR projects, as well as producing interactive pro-level videos by capturing the webcam and on-screen content.

Users often choose this online learning platform to generate mobile courses, but its toolkit is vast enough for making the output content look perfect on any device and screen size.

Geolocation support is another highlight of Adobe Activate, and educators also appreciate its special variable for building stunning mobile-ready courses in minutes.

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  • adobe captivate interface
  • adobe captivate interface

    Adobe Captivate: Pros and Cons

    Quick Start Projects feature. This feature enables users to develop their courses instantly by choosing from a range of pre-built layout slides that can be downloaded in one fell swoop. Benefit from the off-the-shelf materials that include samples of introduction, objective, scenarios, menu, interaction, quiz, etc., to build any course in minutes.

    Can convert PPT content. Thanks to seamless integration with presentation software, Captivate can produce interesting and mobile-friendly videos based on PPT slides.

    By simultaneously recording PPT using a webcam video, adding a voiceover, and interactions like drag and drop, clicking, and revealing as overlays at any point of video playback, you can easily make your educational clip interactive to drive up learner engagement.

    Rich collection of assets. Comparing Adobe Captivate vs Articulate, I found out that both tools come with collections of handy assets, but the library of the Adobe product is more extensive. It offers ready-to-use themes, games, scenarios, audio, video, buttons, characters, pics, and interactions to jazz up your eLearning projects.

    Ability to upgrade image. Another advantage of Adobe Captivate is that it is fitted with a highly functional photo editor, with which upgrading your images is a no-brainer.

    Crop pics, add filters, shadows, and overlays, and tinker with brightness, contrast, blur, and much more to create an immersive learning experience. As Captivate is rather a professional tool, its editor is more powerful if compared to Articulate.

    Easy-to-navigate VR walkthrough. The ability to import 360° pics or videos is an exciting enhancement. Tag the objects in the scenes using text captions and walk through the VR environment. Besides, you can easily jump from one scene to another by clicking a navigation hotspot.

    Record all screen actions. Captivate has the functionality of screen recording software for creating a simulation demo by capturing all the activities that happen on your screen, including various system sounds. Moreover, the program will create ‘try it’ and ‘test me’ automatically.

    JavaScript support. If you are tech-savvy and eager to add more complex interactions for your slides, objects, images, and activities to your courses, use JavaScript coding. This feature allows naming the program a winner in Adobe Captivate vs Articulate battle.

    Not all the options are intuitive. Unfortunately, you need to perform some research and read instructions to learn how to use and implement some of Adobe Captivate features. Additionally, cutting-edge techniques are difficult to understand, so you’ll need a developer to perform some tasks.

    Not everyone can afford it. If you are not a professional educator and just want to try to author a course, the price of Adobe Captivate can be absolutely unaffordable.

    What is Articulate?

    articulate logo

    Articulate 360, which offers a suite of instructional design software, has an extensive toolkit with all the creator tools and resources you need to design stunning eLearning courses.

    The package includes Storyline 360, Rise 360, Content Library 360, Review 360, and Articulate 360 ​​Training for developing virtually any type of educational content. Additionally, the community of Articulate professional creators is the largest in the world.

    Storyline 350 offers an intuitive performance, so users can design even complex courses without having any programming skills. Projects developed in Rise 360 can be seamlessly played across devices, whereas Review 360 comes with an easy web application for gathering and sharing feedback on all Articulate 360 courses.

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    • articulate interface
    • articulate interface

      Articulate: Pros and Cons

      Excellent course templates. Articulate comes with a collection of ready-to-use templates, with which creating an eLearning project is a fast and intuitive procedure. All the elements like slide templates, design, and color themes are developed by professional eLearning designers and allow you to achieve a cohesive look for your course interface.

      Learning characters. Offering the functionality of character creation software, Articulate enables users to add both photographic and illustrated characters, expressions, and poses to make the educational content more informative. There are a variety of fields and professions to demonstrate to students how content refers to them.

      Collection of royalty-free assets. As I’ve already mentioned, both tools of this Adobe Captivate vs Articulate comparison boast rich collections of assets. The service catalog includes multiple photos, icons, videos, illustrations, and vector graphics, which can be added in just a few clicks. But if compared to the Adobe product, Articulate’s library is not so diverse.

      Interactive elements and quiz maker. With Articulate, you can take advantage of interactive sorting, labeled graphics, process, timeline, and accordion blocks. Furthermore, it comes with an embedded quiz maker, for checking students’ knowledge with various task types including multiple choice, multiple response, fill-in-the-blank, and matching quizzes.

      Author once for all devices. Articulate’s Rise 360 leverages the latest web technologies to adapt your content to different screen sizes ensuring inherently responsive eLearning. By the way, Captivate can boast such a possibility as well.

      Options for effective collaboration. As an online collaboration software, Articulate can help you monitor and manage the resolved comments to your project, as well as show stakeholders the most recent version to boost collaboration.

      Does not support Mac OS. Mac owners will be disappointed to find out that Articulate is only compatible with the Windows platform. But it should be also mentioned that some Adobe Captivate options are also only available for Windows users.

      Updates are not regular. Poor support and inconsistent updates are the major downsides of the program, which make it an outsider in the Adobe Captivate vs Articulate battle. New features appear in Articulate’s toolkit rarely, whereas some basic functions are still in development.

      Adobe Captivate vs Articulate: Pricing

      adobe captivate vs articulate prices

      Adobe Captivate offers four pricing packages and allows users to test its functionality for 30 days without paying a dime. An Individual subscription provides you with constant access to all the program’s features for just $33.99. Besides, with an effective subscription, you can install all the upgrades without paying any extra costs.

      The main goodies offered by Team subscription are intuitive and secure management capabilities, flexible terms, and discounts that increase as you purchase additional options. An Enterprise subscription is an ideal solution for large enterprises that need the tool for virtually any employee. Although the prices for these packages are not revealed on the website, you can contact Adobe representatives to learn the cost of each option.

      To find out how much the company charges for an Educational subscription, you should also address the developer’s company. It is great that eligible educational institutions can acquire Adobe Captivate licenses at a discount for students and educators.

      Unlike the Adobe product, the pricing policy of Articulate is clearer. The cost of a Personal plan is $1,099 per year and $549 for academic purposes. Team plan that comes with collaboration, administration, and management options, costs $1,399, for academic – $699 annually.

      Who Wins?

      Adobe Captivate is designed to create virtually any eLearning project including responsive courses, software simulations, interactive videos, and multi-module branched courses. If you are an instructional designer, training specialist, or teacher, Adobe product is what you need to design high-quality educative materials.

      Articulate simplifies an online course-building routine letting users design stunning projects in minutes. It becomes possible thanks to a comprehensive collection of multiple templates on various themes. Intuitive performance and an array of ready-to-use assets are what make this software an optimal solution for aspiring course authors.

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