Captivate Or Articulate?

November 4, 2009

By markdorosz

This question has all the school yard intellect of “Yanks or Mets?”, “”Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston?” Yes friends, it time to pick your side.  Is Captivate the “King of Cool” or is Articulate the “Most Awesome Author”?  Other, more sensible articles will come back with balanced reasoning suchs as “well, it depends on what you need”.   But what if you were stranded on a desert island and only had one tool to educate the island’s inhabitants with?  (Assuming, this desert island has a mature IT infrastructure and fully functioning LMS….)

After a month of kicking both of these respectable authoring platforms around, and a fair amount of peeking under the hood, our team has landed firmly in the Articulate camp.  (I just noted Adobe’s share price drop 3% as I write these words, who would have thought?). Let’s explore our reasoning.

Like everyone, we think we’re special and our needs are totally unique.  So here is what we were looking for from the dueling development tools:

Produce Content Rapidly – this sounds blindingly obvious but the less custom hacks and tweaked timelines needed to get our training out the door, the better

Consistently Pretty – we believe our courseware should look professional and polished with the minimum of fuss; we live in 2009 and people expect Apple and Armani

Handle Video – our development process is founded on combining rapid authoring with low cost video production, robust video capabilities are a must

Stable – the less searching of message boards, to explain weird behaviors at 2 am in the morning, the better

Publish Real Courseware – we need our authoring platform to produce finished courseware as opposed to stand alone interactions or system demonstrations

 

Producing Content Rapidly

Initially we were amazed by Captivate’s timeline approach.  We had graphics fading in and audio synched to the max.  “Wow!” we all thought, this is amazing!  On the flip side, Articulate with its static, PowerPoint driven engine was….well, dull.  However, by the end of the first week we realized

   i) we didn’t really need all this flexibility; in fact it was just slowing us down

   ii) if we did need it, Flash would be a far quicker tool for achieving this level of customization

Captivate was in many ways a superior offering but in the end it suffered the fate of a “Jack of All Trades”, too cumbersome to be a true rapid authoring tool and too limited to beat Flash.  We felt Articulate struck the right balance between power and unencumbered rapid authoring.  Go Articulate!

 

Consistently Pretty

If you have a graphic designer on staff, Captivate definitely offers much more potential for producing a visually polished end product compared to Articulate.  This isn’t surprising when you consider that Captivate comes from the same venerable stable as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.    Our biggest gripe with Articulate was the ugliness of the interactions generated by the Engage add-on.  They look decidedly 90’s and the fixed gaudy palettes make adhering to a corporate color scheme an exercise in futility. 

In summary,  it feels like Captivate was built by a group of Flash designers who were asked to come up with a training product while Articulate is definitely the fruit of educational experts.  So yes, we despise Articulate’s fixed Graphical User Interface but we’ll forgive you just this once, as after all, we’re in the business of producing rapid eLearning.

 

Handle Video

After 6 hours on the phone with Adobe’s technical support in India and numerous customer replies generated by their automatic mail server, I can confirm Captivate 4 is unstable when handling more than 5 minutes of FLV video. 

The issue arises from Captivate’s load approach: every video loads nicely in the background to give the user a seamless experience.  Great, I hear you say!  Indeed – if it actually worked.  The approach is flawed as regardless of the learner’s navigation through the course, every video clip is loaded in sequence (video 1 followed by 2,3,4 etc…).  So, if I resume the course as a returning learner on slide 19, I will be greeted by a blank screen until the videos for slides 1-18 have all downloaded.  Ouch!  No “please wait” prompts or changes to the video loading sequence, just a blank screen of frustration.  Secondly, with all the video loaded into the memory at once, we frequently run into synching issues such as the video stuttering or ending prematurely.  For courses with more than 5 minutes of video, Captivate is just not up to the job. 

Articulate takes a more basic approach by only loading videos as the learner needs them.  This results in a slight pause at the beginning of each video as it starts to stream but with sensible compression, it shouldn’t be more than 1 or two seconds on a DSL connection.  Articulate’s approach is far more stable as it allows the learner to skip to any screen.  It also saves bandwidth by only downloading video footage as it’s needed.  Captivate was definitely more ambitious in this area, but Articulate clearly demonstrates the value of doing the simple things well.

 

Stable

Captivate’s customer service is designed to limit the number of trouble tickets that they receive; Articulate positive encourages users to find holes in their product.  The explains why Articulate is far more stable than Captivate.  The Adobe forums are chock full of work arounds for dealing with Captivate’s idiosyncrasies. Don’t get me wrong, I love idiosyncrasies in movie characters, but when it comes to eLearning authoring tools, I’m less enamored.  The most startling and well documented issue is Captiavte’s routinely fuzzy fonts.  Articulate, we love you – you do what you promise on the tin and your user support forums are a pleasure to read.

 

Publishing Courseware

So let’s get this straight – there are many folks out there who only use Captivate to generate systems demonstration and they’re probably very happy with Adobe’s product; we’re not one of them.  We need a full blown, thank you Mam, eLearning authoring super computer and this is where Articulate really shines.  The control provided by Articulate for determining user navigation, LMS reporting, book marking and adding resource sections are all far superior to those offered Captivate.  Articulate is  field tested and ready for action.

 

In summary, designing with Captivate is a lot like dating a musician:  its cool to hang out but too unstable to be long term relationship material.  Articulate, on the other hand, is a date that you can have fun with and confidently introduce to your co-workers, sans drama.  Now, where did I put my Yankees hat?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.