Studio 360 for PowerPoint, or formerly Articulate Studio, was a PowerPoint plugin used to develop elearning course content. It has been discontinued and is no longer receiving support.
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Thinkific
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Thinkific Plus is a scalable learning platform that’s designed to be easy to use for teams and customers. Thinkific Plus offers enterprise-grade features that scale with the needs of enterprises, and the service includes a people seriously dedicated to helping users to reach their goals.
Small to medium companies on a tight budget cannot go wrong. Articulate Studio enables smaller companies to produce compliant professional looking training courses without breaking the bank. Additionally, the product is quite intuitive to learn and use. I myself had never used a product such as this but was able to produce course work with quizzes that impressed senior management.
Thinkific is well-suited if you want to host an online course and have a variety of materials, such as videos, PDFs, and assignments. A plus is that you can host a community linked to your course, making it easy to give feedback.
Easy learning curve. Just some button clicks for recording narration, syncing animations, and adding annotations.
They made some fairly recent improvements to how you sync animations and add annotations. With the timeline, you can manually move the timing around. Much better than the earlier task of having to just re-do it from the beginning and hope you get the timing right.
If you're using Studio in the Articulate 360 subscription, you can easily review the course before it publishes.
The included Quizmaker program is just great. Simple to use, but you can make a varied mix of questions, and the customization options are great.
You can add background music in slides, which is pretty great in certain situations.
Enables course creators to deliver high quality courses very fast
Offers unlimited hosting for videos included in the subscription price
Provides an easy to use administration interface that's powerful and accessible
Easy to scale subscription tiers on B2C plans, cost effective highly scaleable B2B plans (Thinkific Plus) ideal for companies who want to start a customer education program
Amazing support and account management team - great mindset and people in the teams.
It's icing on the cake. It provides a lot of usability with its quiz-maker and presenter. The presenter can sometimes feel like an unnecessary add on. If it didn't come apart of a package, I don't think we would have purchased it outright.
I would add some more blocks for page design to have more options as to what I can do, like a proper gallery where you can open and close images.
I would expand the text options within specific blocks, like being able to hit enter inside a text box and having my paragraphs separated if I wanted to.
Adding new integrations would be awesome, so you don't have to pass through Zapier. Maybe a ClickFunnels integration?
We will continue to use Thinkific for our company pieces of training. Until we are able to create our own in house portal, this is an excellent source to have a learning management software tool that is easy to use and easy to implement without much technical training to administer
This is very useable software even for novice eLearning authoring users. People with some PowerPoint experience should be fine with this software and even Excel!
Under Site Builder, when trying to add a new section, so many templates appear; however, preview is not shown, which makes it super difficult and time consuming to identify a template that suits the purpose. Customization of certification designs is a bit difficult too. There are limitations to the type of quiz questions I can create - for example, there's no option to have fill in the blank questions.
I've never had any issues with accessing Thinkific but I can see when it has been a problem for others. When I get updates on when they are doing maintenance to their platform I tend to make sure that is not the day I plan to be working on my school so as not to get frustrated
When it comes to the performance of Thinkific for me I find that it's good but could be better. I tend to think that the larger the files and videos you upload on your courses may add to the impact of it's uploading (not sure if that's actually true or not). But overall the performance of Thinkific via my tablet and desktop is very good when I have a fast speed broadband speed
If Articulate, as a company, would require their "community" "support" staff to open tickets on behalf of customers, then I would say that their support would deserve a 10. It's a huge gap between Articulate's management of their support compared to other companies; "support" staff are supposed to open tickets for you if they see the need, but Articulate's "community" "support" staff are prohibited from doing so. Instead, they will tell you that you should open a ticket when it should be their job!! This is just disrespectful of the reality of software support.
I rate Thinkific a ten because of its excellent customer service, ease of use, high-quality product, fair price with excellent ROI, and because they keep making improvements. Using Thinkific solved the problems of piecing together our course with various WordPress plugins, iframes, and payment processing software. It's easy to create a course website for people who can't write code.
The implementation period took time like it would in earning and using any new tool. It was more about being organised, having better time management processes in place and having people you were able to reach out to if you were every able stuck. The other key ting with the implementation period was giving yourself a realistic time scale to get the job completed.
Several Adobe products combine to do the work of just Articulate Storyline, which is part of Articulate Studio. The comparison is not really one that is easy to make but if you needed to do something with these Adobe products, all of them can be done with just Storyline. The beauty of Articulate Studio is that there are parts of the suite for which there is no match in Adobe such as Review 360 and Content Library 360.
I think Thinkific is way better than Udemy. The Udemy platform was not user friendly, they require you submitting for approval before you can even upload a course and have so many restrictions. They never even approved my course, nor did they email me as to why. The support is not there like it is for Thinkific. Also, with Udemy, it feels like you are competing with so many people because they are given other options in comparison to you vs on Thinkific, it truly is your own. You do your own marketing and when people come to your landing page, it is all they see. They can't venture off of it to go to the next person who is on Thinkific. I love Thinkific and tell everyone to get on it. People say to me they want to know my ROI before they decide to invest in it. They want to know that it actually works.
The opportunities to scale your online course business with Thinkific is endless. They provide a great range of plans with features, integrations and support to suit the needs of any business as different levels. The key here is knowing where to start with the budget you have and then knowing when it's time to scale up and the tools and resources it will require.
Prior to using this software, we were using a combination of other software, four in total, to accomplish the same task. Investing in Articulate Studio has saved us an annual cost of +$1,900 just in the software alone. Our ROI is less than 8 months as a result of the savings and time consumption saved by using one software and training on one software only.
Having a lower impact on computer resources, Articulate Studio allowed us to install it on more users workstations that were not able to support other software. This reduced cost significantly by not requiring "mega computers" to run the software we previously used. Since Articulate Studio runs so smoothly, we can purchase standard workstations and it runs great on them.
Having new employees join the team and training them on producing training courses has never been easier. They only require 3 days of training in Articulate Studio vs. two weeks we needed previously to train on 3 different software to accomplish the same tasks.
pre thinkific vs post thinkific launch for sales training, our sales reps are getting their first solo sale on average 0.6 days faster. Before it was 5.7 days on average to sell by themselves, now it is 5.1 days on average accross 1500 sales reps that have completed the training since launching the training in May 2024
