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.
$33.99
per month
Articulate 360
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Articulate 360 is an e-learning platform for creating workplace training. Users can build engaging courses with AI-enhanced authoring, simplify collaboration, and quickly share content. A subscription includes robust onboarding resources and access to a community of 1.5M pros.
$1,124
per year
Pricing
Adobe Captivate
Articulate 360
Editions & Modules
Subscription
$33.99
per month
Student & Teacher Edition
$399
one-time fee
Upgrade
$499
one-time fee
Pereptual License
1,299
one-time fee
Articulate 360 Standard - Academic - Teams Plan
$1,124
per year
Articulate 360 Standard - Personal Plan
$1,199
per year
Articulate 360 AI - Personal Plan
$1,449
per year
Articulate 360 Standard - Teams Plan
$1,499
per year
Articulate 360 AI - Teams Plan
$1,749
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Captivate
Articulate 360
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
If you’re new to Articulate 360, you can try it out free of charge for 30 days. After the trial period is over, you can subscribe to one of our packages.
Articulate 360 is available on the Articulate website and through Articulate Authorized Resellers.
Adobe Captivate and Articulate 360 are both Corporate Learning Management Systems with a focus on eLearning content authoring. They are both most commonly used by large businesses and enterprises but have some users across company sizes.
Adobe Captivate focuses on providing more advanced eLearning authoring tools, including support for VR, improved accessibility, and interactive content. Its goal is to facilitate highly engaging and interactive content for creators with the proper experience. In contrast, Articulate 360 provides sub-applications designed to support all levels of creator experience and expertise. This can make Articulate ideal for larger groups with creators across the skill spectrum.
Features
Adobe Captivate and Articulate 360 differentiate by their ideal skill level, with features tailored to each target audience.
Adobe Captivate excels at providing knowledgeable creators with the widest range of content creation capabilities. In particular, Captivate prioritizes supporting interactive content, including branching content paths within courses. This focus allows creators to make highly engaging content for end-learners. It also offers strong reporting capabilities within courses.
Articulate 360 differentiates by making content creation more accessible to a wider range of creators and users. Its sup-applications, such as Storyline and Rise, provide options to serve creators at various skill levels. Rise in particular serves less experienced creators and has a much lower learning curve. Articulate also emphasizes its accessibility across mobile devices and for disabled folks.
Limitations
Adobe Captivate and Articulate 360’s respective specializations also come with some limitations worth considering.
Adobe Captivate’s advanced capabilities come with a steep learning curve. Many reviewers argue that the platform is intimidating for beginners and takes time to learn how to make the most of the tool. This curve often means that Captivate is not ideal for rapid eLearning development. Captivate is also priced separately from the rest of the Adobe suite, which limits the cost benefits of bundling some Adobe products.
In contrast, Articulate 360 may lack some of the more advanced features that Captivate offers. Additionally, collaboration for creator teams within the platform is still limited and difficult to use according to many reviewers. Updates to the product have also been known to create new errors in preexisting courses, so users should be conscious of possible change management that may be necessary. The pricing can also be high if the organization is not making courses at volume.
Pricing
Adobe Captivate offers 3 pricing systems for new buyers. Users can subscribe to Captivate for $33.99/month, or purchase a perpetual license for $1,299. Students or teachers can purchase Captivate for $399 instead. Adobe also offers a free 30-day trial.
Articulate 360 is priced differently for companies, freelancers, and academics. For companies, the Teams Plan costs $1,299/user/year, with additional collaboration and support features available. The Personal Plan costs $999/user/year. For academics, the Person Plan costs $499/user/year and the Teams Plan costs $649/user/year.
Features
Adobe Captivate
Articulate 360
Learning Management
Comparison of Learning Management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Captivate
9.1
Ratings
7% above category average
Articulate 360
-
Ratings
Course authoring
8.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Course catalog or library
9.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Player/Portal
8.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Learning content
9.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Progress tracking & certifications
9.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Learning reporting & analytics
9.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Social learning
10.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Gamification
8.00 Ratings
00 Ratings
eLearning Content
Comparison of eLearning Content features of Product A and Product B
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.
Articulate provides for simple, custom interactive training modules. There isn't much wrong with this software that I have found. Using Rise 360 for quick turnaround or fully customized training with Storyline 360. Articulate has made the possibilities limited only to my imagination. Their simple and well-thought-out toolbars make starting from scratch a breeze.
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.
It just seems to be very intuitive for instructional designers, especially nowadays from what I'm seeing with the new AI. But it's very intuitive. It's better than any other tool authoring tool that I've tried. I think it's just really outstanding in the industry and that's evidenced by every year. Demo Fest, like 95% of the best examples are all done in Articulate products.
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.
The most hiccups that I've recently experienced are honestly involved with AI and just my trying to learn AI and figure out how we can maximize that for our business case. The AI voiceover is what I'm specifically curious about and trying to learn more. So in regards to the AI, there's still some shuffling needs to be done. SSML that needs to be added for it to read correctly. There is a very large amount of voices and dialects, which I think is beneficial. It was also a little overwhelming in trying to play around with it and find that right part. So just continuing to look through the community and find the guidance that I need to essentially make the audio, make the voiceover work better and read the words correctly. For example, one of my most popular courses that I sell is Record Your Time and it kept reading, it records your time, and I could not figure out how to make those words. We've submitted a ticket, you guys have been very helpful, but we can't really figure out how to make those little nuances work with the complex English language.
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 goes without saying that Artculate's products are the easiest to use and offer a great deal of functions with flexibility. Once an eLearning author uses the product it becomes tempting to not use other methods, but one would be wise not to limit him or herself to a single learning authoring platform. On the other hand, if given a single choice of a tool for rapid eLearning development, Articulate's Storyline would be a top choice.
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.
Overall, Articulate is fairly easy to use and intuitive. They have excellent training materials in the training videos on the website, as well as good technical support. Someone with limited expertise doing content creation would be able to immediately pick up functions and get started in the software. I was able to create my first course within an hour or so of opening it up.
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 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 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.
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 is pretty straight forward and easy to implement is you are already creating eLearning. If you have old courses created in other versions of Articulate I recommend you update them to the new version even though it is not necessary (especially From Storyline3 to 360) but if you don't you may find difficulty opening and keeping things straight
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.
For me, since I had used Articulate prior to using Lectora, I found Lectora to be very archaic. It was cumbersome to create triggers, and I had issues getting my scenarios to play correctly. My company switched to Articulate after my request, and I was able to recreate all of our modules into Storyline. Now I am able to manage our scenarios with efficiency and ease. Articulate products are intuitive and very easy to understand
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.
Definitely more accessible course creation. How we're able to add accessibility features into our trainings is unparalleled with captioning, with voice overing, with alternate texts for images. There's so many ways that it creates our trainings to be more accessible for our audience.
