Articulate 360

“Powerful Learning Management Platform”

Comments: Articulate 360 is an E-learning system that gives course developers all the essentials tools to create courses that increase engagement for their target audience. They have a huge collection of images that make the courses look very creative.

Pros:

The platform is easy to use and it’s a great overall authoring solution.

Cons:

It seem to have minor bugs and crashes frequently.

Worth the investment

Comments: I got several free trials with Articulate before I decided to purchase it. All of the free trials give you access to the full functionality of the software and by the second time I had run through it I knew that it was absolutely worth the price. It’s like hiring a person with impeccable design skills to build your course for you, except you have to actually put in the work but the ease of the process and beautiful outcome is worth every penny.

Pros:

This state of the art software will inspire you to build better courses! The thing I love about Articulate 360 is that it provides you with a beautiful user interface that will inspire your course creation. So many other course creation tools are clunky and slow. Articulate 360 is the exact opposite of that. It’s fast it’s super smooth in all of his operations, and because of that I find myself constantly inspired to create new content.

Cons:

The worst thing about this software is that it cost over $1000 and they don’t have a payment plan or a monthly option.

Great software but needs some serious updating

Comments: I have been an Articulate StoryLine user since it came out in about 2013. It took a while, but once I learned how to use it, I was able to create hundreds of amazing e-course modules and interactive games. It became one of my favorite software development tools allowing me to do things I never dreamed possible and really impressed (and expanded) my clients. Support was okay. But I never really had to submit a support ticket. Articulate has the best community and I was usually able to get the help I needed from moderators or other community members. However, I can relate to Chris' frustration. For example, StoryLine has the capability to execute javascript which greatly expands what you can do with it. But the stock answer when you have a javascript question is ... "Sorry, we don't provide support for javascript; perhaps someone in the community can help you out." Fortunately for me, there was always someone well versed with javascript that was willing to share their code. Recently, it is becoming apparent that StoryLine has some major shortcomings, and that Articulate has been slow in adding new features and enhancements in response to client requests. These include such things as a) inability to use with high-res monitors; b) no capability to e-mail results to admin or user; c) no feature to have background audio across all slides (see Chris' review); d) no capability to publish only HTML5 output; e) poor quality of HTML5 published output that does NOT work well on many mobile devices; f) no responsive design capability; g) no capability to send results to a database; h) very slow player response on timeline when synchronizing animations and no true scrubber; and several other issues. In Nov. 2016, Articulate released 360 which bundled all of their current programs into one annual subscription (which is way too expensive for us to even consider). StoryLine 2 as a stand-alone product is still available and Articulate claims that StoryLine 3 will be available sometime in 2017. However, whether SL3 will address the major shortcomings of us and others, remains unknown. Therefore, to meet our needs for course development in an ever changing technological environment, we are currently exploring alternative e-learning software development tools. Our leading candidate is Captivate 9. It appears to have all the features missing in StoryLine (and much more). Also, it appears that CP9 is a much better value.

Best Authoring Tool Around!

Comments: Wonderful! I love this product and have been using it for almost 5 years. Great for collaboration, building engaging content, and creating professional looking eLearning products.

Pros:

Articulate is fairly easy to use for the basic tasks but also offers unlimited opportunity for creating custom eLearning assets.

Cons:

Sometimes, files get “corrupted “ for no reason and you have to troubleshoot with the support team to figure out why. (Although, their support team is always super helpful and knowledgeable!)

Rapid development with high quality

Comments: Couldn't work without it. I use it daily. I've introduced it to several organisations I've worked for and it has allowed each to step up the quality of elearning experience provided. The review system cuts down on admin around receiving feedback from subject matter experts.

Pros:

The learning curve on the software is very shallow. You can get p and running with it very quickly. However, the depth of advanced features means you can really make some powerful interactions and resources without being a 'coder'.

Cons:

As the software is very easy to use many people believe it will make them a great eLearning developer. It will, but that will come with experience.