Captivate versus Articulate

Being new to this field, I find it very interesting that there is something of a “browser war” in e-learning software.  The dominate software in this field are Captivate and Storyline.  Each has it’s advantages and disadvantages.  I have looked at both software packages and come up with my own assessment of each software.

I started with Captivate.  It was the software designated to be used for our class activities for IDTE 533.  It has some great features and at the beginning I was very happy and excited about using it.  During the semester, we were asked to do an assignment in another course.  This assignment was to turn ”static instruction” into “interactive instruction”.   I decided to use Captivate to do the assignment.  My rationale was that Captivate was built for interactivity and it had a feature to convert PowerPoint slides.  Unfortunately, it did not work as well as I hoped.  Captivate did not give me the ability to change or edit the slides after download.  

This is where Articulate can do a better job.  Articulate has a better import feature for PowerPoint slides than does Captivate.  Since I have been teaching for many years and have thousands of PowerPoint slides, Articulate may work better for my purposes.